Heads Up! It’s a Meteor

Even though you’re listening to this on podcast and not on the air, you can still call our toll-free number 877-929-9673. And you can still send us email to words@waywordradio.org.

And you can still find us online at waywordradio.org.

You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. In an earlier episode, we talked about those so-called smartphones that can sometimes correct your text incorrectly.

Like the poor woman who was left breathless by a text message from her father that read, your mom and I are going to divorce this month.

And a few seconds later, she got one from him that said, I wrote Disney and this phone changed it.

We’re going to Disney. Love that.

And quite a few of you wrote in to share your own auto corrections.

Ann Palomara wrote to say, my roommate’s name is Brooke. An old phone commonly changed her name to Arnold.

Arnold. Arnold. Why?

Arnold. I’m looking at the keyboard going, huh? Poor Brooke. And Teresa Cook from Rowlett, Texas wrote, our daughter’s name is Sydney, S-Y-D-N-E-Y. I shortened her name to Sid, only to see that the auto correction changes it to STD. Not good. Not good.

No, I emailed somebody once and I wanted to say, oh, you’re my best friend in a joking way. And I became breast friend. Nice, nice.

She didn’t mind, but it wasn’t what I meant to say.

Well, speaking of, one more from Heidi in the Dallas area. She left us a voicemail. She said that she often signs her texts, blessings and hugs, but she’s learned to be extra careful because otherwise her messages end with blessings and jugs.

Hey, a loaf of bread, a smartphone, and thou, you know, what more do you need?

That’s the kind of jug I was thinking of. What were you thinking of, Grant?

I was thinking moonshine, yes. Right, okay.

Well, this is the show about words and how we use them. If you want to talk about any aspect of language, call us 877-929-9673, or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

And don’t forget about our Facebook page. You can find us there under the name Wayword Radio.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi there, Martha.

Hi, Grant. Hey, what’s up? This is Kurt Basham from Grand Rapids. I was calling about a funny phrase that I’ve heard from time to time.

Yeah. And the phrase varies a little bit, depending on who’s saying it, but the basic gist of it, the most common version is something like, well, shut my mouth and call me Shirley.

Okay.

And it’s said best, I think, with kind of a southern accent, you know.

Martha, if you want to give that a whirl.

If I want to give it a whirl.

Like Flo from Mills Diner, right?

Yeah.

Will shut my mouth and call me Shirley.

How’s that?

Perfect.

Is this from television or movies? Where are you hearing this scene?

Yeah, I don’t think I’ve ever heard anybody in real life actually say it.

It’s maybe a little too colorful for that, but I have heard it in TV and movies from time to time.

The colorful, usually a southern character, when somebody says something kind of surprising to him, that’s what he would say, or some variation of it.

I Googled around and I found some other variations on it, too.

Yeah?

Yeah, let’s hear them.

Well, strip my gears and call me shiftless.

Strip my gears and call me shiftless.

Feed me nails and call me rusty.

And I think my favorite is, well, love me tender and call me Elvis.

Oh, yeah.

Nice.

Very good.

And so your question is, is where these come from or you just want to call and share some funny stuff?

A little of both.

I’d love to, you know, if some listeners out there have some other great ones, I’d love to hear them.

But I was curious about the origin of it.

They’re all really interesting.

You found the shiftless one.

The earliest use I found for that is, you know, strip my gears and call me shiftless is from the 1940s.

And this whole kind of construction, well, do X to me and then call me Y, dates to the 1940s.

Oh, yeah?

Yeah, the lexicographer Eric Partridge in his catchphrase’s dictionary suggested that it came from Phil Harris, who was Jack Benny’s band leader.

And they would often write really colorful language for him for the show, tame stuff by modern standards, but just wacky with all kinds of invented slang and new words and one-offs and jives and jokes.

And he was a ladies’ man and he was a player and a playboy and that was the character that they created for him.

Phil Harris was one of the great characters of old-time radio, and still you’ll find Phil Harris in modern movies, only not by that name.

It’s the same kind of guy, that same stereotype.

In any case, he had one, well, cut off my legs and call me shorty.

He used variations on this all the time.

There’s some suggestion by Eric Partridge, again, he was a British slang lexicographer, who suggests that it mixed a little bit with another catchphrase, well, shut my mouth, which is an expression of surprise.

If somebody says something like, we’re getting a divorce, you’re like, well, shut my mouth.

And it’s related to the modern shut up, right?

We’ve talked about that on the program before.

And so Phil Harris was on a national radio show.

He was known throughout the country.

Everybody knew who Phil Harris was.

I mean, who would you compare him to today?

I don’t know.

I mean, even more common than Jay Leno’s band leader, right?

Well, would it be like Ed McMahon?

Yeah, it’d be more like Doc Severinsen.

Yeah, it’d be more like Doc Severinsen.

Everybody knew who Phil Harris was.

And pretty much most of the country, if they didn’t listen to him, they at least heard his one-liners the next day at the office or at school.

Would he say things like, put juice in my glass and call me Phil?

I don’t know about that, but that’s a pretty good one.

Thank you.

So it caught on really quickly, early 1940s, 1940, 1941.

They start popping up in song titles.

They show up in a list of sub-deb slang in boys’ life.

Sub-debs were a name for debutantes, like young debutante girls.

Sub-deb? You mean they haven’t made their debut yet?

Yeah, exactly.

Sub-debs.

So in boys’ life, you know, it’s the magazine for young boys that a list of slang.

So you see this catch on like almost immediately, and then people start improvising on the construction, right?

We love to do that kind of thing.

Yeah, we do that in English all the time.

These are called snow clones.

We find a structure, and we emulate that structure.

So you mentioned a couple.

Another one that I’ve seen often is butter my butt and call me a biscuit.

So it’s been going strong for 60, 70 years.

And maybe it goes back to this Phil guy.

Phil Harris, yeah, the band leader for Jack Benny on The Jack Benny Show.

Well, rub my belly and call me Buddha.

Nice.

Take care.

Nice.

Thanks for calling, Kurt.

Thanks, Kurt.

Bye-bye.

Nice.

You’ve got some more of these.

Well, do X to me and call me Y.

Give us a call, 877-929-9673, or send the whole lot of them an email to words@waywordradio.org.

While back, we were talking on the show about childhood misunderstandings.

And we got a great email from Kristen Murray Todd, who writes us from Colorado, to tell us about her daughter, Katie.

When Katie was three years old, she and Kristen’s mom had gone to the park and Katie had gotten wet playing in the fountain.

And then when they got back to the car, her mom asked Katie to change into dry clothes while standing by the car.

And Katie replied, I can’t do that. I’ll be exposed to the elephants.

I mean, can you imagine what this poor kid was thinking?

A little stampede if she takes off.

She would be exposed to the elephants.

She was just being thoughtful and, you know, thinking ahead.

Oh, I love that stuff.

Childhood misunderstandings.

Yeah, great.

Share yours, 877-929-9673, or email us, words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, good afternoon.

Hi, who’s this?

Well, my name is Joanne Yurchison, and I’m calling you from Lynchburg, Virginia.

So what can we help you with?

Well, my husband and I, we love doing a program on our iPhones called Words with Friends.

And it’s basically Scrabble, but you get to play with people from all over the world.

How would you like to play with Grant?

I play that. Look me up.

I don’t think I want to play with you, Grant.

No, I lose all the time.

I lose about 20% of the time, so you got a good shot at it.

20%.

Well, you must be playing with some really good people.

Anyway, so the question came up one night.

My husband said, well, what do you call a spelling expert?

And I said, you know, I don’t know.

I don’t know what you’d call someone who’s an expert at spelling.

So that’s where the discussion started.

Well, I call her Martha Barnette.

I was going to say that myself.

Yeah, Martha did quite winningly at a spelling bee the other day.

She was remarkable.

Yeah, it was great.

Oh, congratulations.

Yeah, we were doing a literacy benefit, and Martha just, like, cleaned house.

It was great.

I bet she did.

Well, you know, a few years of Latin help you spell words like imputrescible and nudicidate, which I’d never even heard of.

Exactly.

Yeah, it’s good to have that Latin background.

It sure is.

Well, who’s the expert speller in your home?

I think I’m definitely the better speller.

-huh.

So she is Martha.

What do we call her?

There’s a couple words for that, right?

There are a couple of words.

Okay.

The word for an expert speller is orthographer.

Or orthographist sometimes.

Oh, wow.

You can kind of break the roots down there and see the graph part means to write and the O-R-T-H-O part means.

It means straight or correct, like you go to the orthodontist to correct your teeth.

Exactly, yeah.

That kind of thing.

And we’ll give you a bonus word.

The opposite, a bad speller, is a cacographer.

How do you spell that?

K-A-K-A.

Well, it’s a C.

It’s with Cs.

I know.

I’m being one.

C-A-C-O-G-R-A-P-H-E-R.

Cacographer.

And the root there is the Greek word kakos, which means bad.

Yep.

Like cacophony.

Oh, okay.

Well, that would be my husband.

Very good.

I’ll tell you, if you want to play Words with Friends with me, by all means invite me.

I have a lot of games going, but I’ll give it a shot.

Grant Barrett at gmail.com.

I’d love to take you guys on.

Whoa, Joanne.

All right.

It was great to talk to you today.

Oh, it was fun to talk to you guys.

Thanks for letting me on your show.

Our pleasure.

Give our best to your husband.

I will do.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Families argue about a lot of things, Martha.

You and I are not a family, but we argue a lot.

We’re a virtual family.

We’ll help you unravel the tangles that you’ve made with your loved ones,

If they’re about language and grammar anyway, the rest of it you can just take to the courts or your counselor.

You’re out of luck.

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

Having a four-year-old in my house means that I keep encountering words that are different from what I knew when I was a kid.

For example, you no longer really have a playpen.

You have a play yard.

Oh, I thought you were going to say an activity center or something.

No, but you know, play, yeah, that kind of language is one thing.

But the one that really interests me is bouncy house or bouncy castle.

Some people just call it a jump.

Right?

Did you know that there were a lot of different words for this?

No.

These big inflatable play areas, sometimes they actually look like a castle.

Sometimes they look like a comic book figure.

Right.

Maybe they have a slide.

Maybe you just get in them and there’s netting and you jump around.

Lots of them.

I’m picturing you doing this.

But I call them bouncy houses.

And so I just wanted to throw the word out, the question out to the listeners.

What do you call those gigantic inflatable play areas?

You know, you might find them at a fair or a circus or you might rent them for a big party, right?

Give us a call, 877-929-9673.

Or send your answer to words@waywordradio.org.

Up next on A Way with Words, it’s a quiz and more of your questions about language.

So stay tuned.

You’re listening to A Way with Words.

I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

And we’re joined now by our quiz guy, no, Greg Pliska.

Hello, Greg.

No, actually, I’m John Chaneski dressed as Greg Pliska.

We haven’t heard from you in a while.

What’s going on in your world?

Most recently worked on a new documentary called Flying Monsters 3D,

Which is the first ever made-for-TV 3D movie.

For real?

Really?

Now, are you still in the puzzle business?

I am always in the puzzle business.

And in fact, today’s puzzle I thought of while I was working on the 3D movie because I thought, what, you know, what is that phrase?

3D.

What words and phrases have three of the same letters in a row?

Now, there are a fair number that are legitimate phrases, but I’ve also come up with a few invented ones that I think you’ll enjoy.

In any case, I’ll give you a clue to the phrase and you see if you can come up with the answer.

Okay.

All right.

So, for example, if I said the three members of the Bee Gees, you’re looking for a phrase that describes them that has three of the same letter in a row.

Something Gibb Brothers.

There you go, the Gibb Brothers.

Oh, I see.

So it doesn’t have to be a single word.

Okay.

Right.

And, in fact, I don’t think there are any single words that have got three of the same letter in a row.

They have to at least be hyphenated to work.

Very good.

All right.

Here we go.

One, three, five, seven, and nine as a group.

Odd digits?

There we go.

Yes, very good.

Odd digits.

Right, not odd numbers because then you’d have to go on, but those are the odd digits.

The nobility, the clergy, and the commoners in medieval France.

Medieval France.

Class?

The three estates.

The three estates.

Grant, you got an A in history, didn’t you?

Hello.

How are you doing?

Very nice.

Okay.

Here’s your next one.

Where you’ll find trumpets and trombones?

Brass section.

Brass section.

How are you doing this?

Exactly.

What’s your secret?

Frontal lobe.

Frontal lobe.

I sent him the answers yesterday.

Oh, okay.

Here you go.

Van Gogh’s sunflowers, for example.

Well, it’s a painting.

Right.

You’ve heard that Van Gogh, right?

Yeah.

Sunflowers.

But what kind of painting are we talking about?

Oh, Still Life.

Very good.

Still Life.

Thank you.

Very good.

That was teamwork, too.

Three L’s in a row.

Yeah, nice.

I was stumped.

Okay.

Do battle with as a buccaneer.

Something you would see in Errol Flynn movies all the time.

So something with swords?

Yep.

Swords.

Two people facing off would…

Dual…

Cross swords.

Cross swords.

Very nice.

All right.

Here’s a good one.

Coding for certain breads or pastries.

Frosting, icing.

Glaze.

No.

Yeah.

Glaze.

Yep.

Glaze.

Egg glaze.

No.

You’re looking for a word with two G’s at the end of it.

Oh, egg glaze.

Very good.

Egg glaze.

I was trying to put something after it.

Okay.

Yep.

No, egg glaze.

This is tricky.

Someone who writes iPhone software.

App programmer.

Oh, good.

Yeah, very nice.

Good one.

App programmer.

Where you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

Witness stand.

Oh.

Witness stand.

Very good.

Yes.

I was going to say, am I making this harder than it should be?

The thing is, just find that double letter first and then see what you can make of it, right?

Exactly.

All right.

Here’s a couple that are a little more fanciful.

These next ones get a little bit more silly.

Betting on an ancient Chinese pastime.

Mahjong gambling?

Yes, mahjong gambling.

I wasn’t sure if there were two Gs in mahjong.

You’ve got to put two Gs in mahjong.

How about stuff that seeps out of your RV?

What?

Winnebago ooze.

Winnebago ooze.

Oh, nice.

Got to take that into the shop.

It’s got a lot of Winnebago ooze.

And how about loose-fitting Hawaiian lingerie?

Moo-moo undies?

Yes, exactly.

Moo-moo underwear.

Kind of antithetical to the whole point of the moo-moo.

Yes, I think so.

Anyway, that’s the batch for today.

Oh, wow.

You make me happy with three Ps.

Thanks, Greg.

Very wonderful stuff.

We’ll talk to you again next week.

It’s a pleasure.

It’s good to be back.

If you’ve got a question about wordplay, language, grammar, slang, or anything related to the stuff that comes out of your mouth and not spit.

Or ooze.

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

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Rita O’Connell in Taos, New Mexico.

Welcome to the program, Rita. How can we help you?

Well, I was listening to your show a couple weeks ago and somebody called in with a weird thing their mom used to say.

So I, of course, started racking my brains for my mom’s weird sayings,

And I came up with what I think is a pretty good one that I had never thought to look up.

Oh, great.

And it occurred to me recently when my boyfriend was looking for a pencil or a spool of thread or a hammer

Or any of the various things we keep in the one mysterious drawer in the kitchen,

And I told him to go look in the Fibber McGee drawer.

And what did he say?

He said, what?

He had absolutely never heard it before.

And I had been saying it my whole life and never thought to wonder why.

Very good.

Very interesting.

This is a great question.

Do you know where this comes from?

I don’t.

I don’t.

I thought that you were the perfect people to ask, so I’ve been holding out.

I’ll tell you.

This is something I don’t talk about very much.

But when I was a boy, and this is on topic, believe it or not, Martha knows this story.

I listened to old-time radio.

I was 13 in Missouri in the middle of nowhere.

And at night, you can hear radio from faraway cities.

Like, I was in the middle of Missouri, but I could hear radio from Chicago and New York, you know?

And they would air rebroadcasts of old-time radio shows.

And one of those shows, Rita, was the Fibber McGee and Molly show.

Fibber McGee was, it’s two words.

His first name was Fibber because he often told tall tales.

His last name, McGee, the Irish name.

Fibber McGee was on for 20 years.

It was a hugely successful radio show.

It’s funny.

Here I am talking about old-time radio again.

This is so meta, talking about radio on the radio.

Yeah.

It starred Jim and Mary and Jordan.

So this was a show that I listened to when I was a boy,

And many people who are much older than me also listened to when they were children.

And one of the running gags in the show was that he had a closet filled with junk.

And so it was a chance for the sound effects man just to go crazy.

So Fibber’s wife would say, McGee, can you get me the garden shears?

And he’d go, oh, yeah, I think they’re in the closet right here.

And she’d go, no.

And it’d be too late.

He’d open the door and, like, you’d hear, like, a typewriter clacking and bowling balls falling out and, like, a safe door shutting.

And it sounded like, you know, tons of shoes and marbles and the whole, like, everything was crazy.

And it would be different every time.

He’d just, like, chains clanking and engines starting.

It was just an incredible sound.

And he’d be like, oh, let me just put all this back in here.

And it’d like take him a second to do what took like 30 seconds to unravel.

Yeah.

And it was a running joke.

So people knew as soon as she said, can you get me whatever?

Yeah.

That he was going to go to the closet.

Yeah.

And so, and so interesting.

It never occurred to me that it was a person’s name.

Yeah.

And so the Fibber McGee closet or the Fibber McGee drawer became a thing.

And it’s, it’s ensconced in dictionaries because it’s still got a little bit of currency to it.

You will still occasionally find it in fiction and nonfiction, and newspaper columnists, of course, love it because it’s colorful and it calls back to a different age.

And for me, I think of 79 Wistful Vista, which was their address, because I remember listening to the reruns of that show when I was a kid.

I loved it.

That was so evocative.

What’s in your favorite McGee drawer?

What do you got?

You got a bear trap in there?

Oh, yeah, pretty much.

You name it.

Crate paper, you know, birthday candles.

Oh, yeah, sure.

Anything you could ever think of.

There are a lot of different names for junk drawers.

We called it the work drawer when I was growing up.

Like in the work drawer.

Yeah, and the Colch drawer.

We talked about that on the show.

Colch pile, yeah.

Colch pile.

Yep, in Maine.

So there you go.

Fibber McGee drawer, Fibber McGee closet comes from the old radio show.

Rita, you gave Grant a chance to talk about Fibber McGee.

I’m all teaming.

Thank you so much.

I’m all teaming.

It was my pleasure.

Our pleasure, too.

Thanks for calling, Rita.

Take care.

Best of luck.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

One of the first things Rita said was that her moms are weird.

Yes, they are.

Call us with the weird things that your mom or your dad had to say or your grandparents, 877-929-9673,

Or send the weirdness in email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, how are you doing today?

Super, who’s this?

Hi, this is Dave Rush. I live in Shelbyville, Indiana, but I’m calling from South Bend, Indiana.

Well, oh, you’re on the road? I hope you’re pulled over.

I am.

Okay.

All right, excellent. Well, thanks for calling. How can we help you?

Oh, I just wonder occasionally about things that people say and don’t really think them through.

And one of them is a phrase that I’ve heard quite a bit,

And when they refer to a celebrity having a meteoric rise,

And I’ve always thought, meteors don’t rise, they plummet.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, like that unnamed star who’s in the headlines these days,

And I’m not even going to mention his name.

There’s always one, isn’t there?

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that’s one of those expressions that just make you stop and go.

So why a meteor, right?

Why a meteor?

Because it’s not necessary. You don’t automatically think that’s a sign of success. He’s like a meteor.

Exactly. And if you’ve ever seen a meteor crater, meteoric rise doesn’t make any sense.

You’re right. So this is the kind of thing that you think of when you’re on the road there in that flatland in northern Indiana. Is that it?

Yeah, I have a lot of thinking time.

I thought about a phrase just today where a foul ball gets hit or a wild pitch gets thrown and someone says, heads up.

And I always thought that was the wrong direction.

True, true.

How many black eyes are a result of people shouting that instead of heads down?

Yeah.

I never thought about that.

Oh, man.

I love it.

That’s great.

But we can help you with meteoric rise.

The key here is the word meteoric, right?

Because it can also mean flashing or dazzling like a meteor.

So that’s the idea.

The fact that it appears on the scene suddenly.

Yeah, they burn brightly and they move fast, right?

So that’s what people are looking at.

It’s about somebody who just like suddenly appears and is like catches your eye.

So it’s not necessarily about their trajectory so much as their appearance.

Yeah.

But it still makes you stop and think, doesn’t it?

Yes, indeed.

It’s a meteoric fall.

Yeah, but you know what?

If there’s a meteor heading your way, I don’t think it matters if they say heads up or not.

I think you’re toast.

Yeah.

I never thought of the combination of the two, but you’re right.

All right, Dave.

Well, thanks for calling.

Thank you.

All right.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

That’s like your gnarly foot theory, Grant.

I just love that expression, that if you look at a word or a phrase too long, it just looks as gnarly as your foot does if you look at your foot for a long time.

You’ve got to take them as they’re given sometimes, right?

Well, yeah, with words and feet.

But the road is lonely, and language is interesting, and things just come to mind.

That’s right.

It’s lonely here, so call us, 877-929-9673.

The Lovelorn Language Line.

Or send that love to words@waywordradio.org.

I go to a lot of professional conferences, usually about language and linguistics and sometimes about journalism and Internet-y types of things.

I bet parties are great.

They action parties for the reason that you go because that’s where the real relationships are formed, right?

The real deals are struck outside of the conference rooms.

And one of the words that I keep coming across that I finally wrote down and kind of did a little digging on is the word discussant.

So you go to a conference and there are people who present and there are presenters and there are people who might moderate a panel.

So there’s moderators and there are panelists as well.

But the discussant is the person after, say, a series of papers on one topic are presented.

Like four papers are all talking about generally the same thing.

The discussant will summarize those papers and give their own opinion of the data or evidence that were presented.

And it’s usually kind of on the fly.

They’re taking notes as those papers are being presented.

They might have seen a preprint or something in advance.

But that’s the discussant.

It’s an interesting word, and I see the need for the role, and therefore I see the need for the word.

And are you live blogging it? I mean, this is interesting.

No, no, but it’s to the crowd who is present, usually.

Yeah, yeah, we’ll have to watch that one.

I’m a big fan of new words. You can send the ones that you’ve found to words@waywordradio.org,

Or call us and tell us about them, 877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Judy Astra from New York.

Hi, Judy.

Hi, Judy. Where in New York are you?

I’m all the way downtown in Manhattan.

How can we help you today, Judy?

Well, I’ve been thinking about the word enamored.

Oh, okay.

Yeah, something new happening in your life?

Sounds like a story.

No, I am enamored of.

Thank you very much.

But I have been seeing the word enamored used with the word with instead of of.

Enamored with.

Yes.

And I looked it up a little bit online, and it seems to be acceptable, but it sounds wrong to me.

And then I thought, well, you say infatuated with, not infatuated of.

Good point.

And I was wondering what the differences could be.

I have some theories.

I know enamorative sounds like it comes from the French.

Exactly.

But I was wondering if you could fill in the gaps for me.

So the question here is kind of the difference between, if there is one, enamored with and enamored of, right?

And which would be considered, well, I guess more correct?

It’s a really good question.

In the United States, our usage differs a little bit from the British.

In the United States, we use both, but enamored of is more common.

And it’s going to cause less comment.

There’s nothing wrong with enamored with.

It’s just not as common, and it kind of stops people for a moment, and you might distract them from what you’re saying.

Exactly what it did to me.

Right, right.

Oh, really?

Exactly.

So enamored of is the better choice.

It’s not necessarily the only choice, but it is the better choice.

And if you think of it and you catch it in your own writing, use enamored of and you’ll be okay.

The British don’t use enamored with.

Not really.

They may be using it a little bit, but nowhere near to the degree that North Americans do.

And I’m wondering, too, I think that I’ve used both enamored of and enamored with, but I might use them differently depending on whether it’s a person or a thing like a painting or an idea.

I’m not really sure.

But I think the of is there because it comes to us from the French, as you said, and there it’s enamored of.

And same thing in Spanish with enamorada de ti.

I’m in love with you.

I’m enamored of you.

Very interesting.

I should note at the risk of confusing people that there is another choice that a few people make,

Which you absolutely should not make, and it should never be enamored by.

And that’s a mistake that people make.

And, again, I bring it up at the risk of people not remembering later whether or not I said you should or should not use by.

But enamored by is not a good choice.

I would not use it ever.

Right.

That almost changes the nature of the word to a verb.

Mm—

Yeah.

So enamored of is the best choice.

Enamored with is okay if you use it and don’t catch yourself.

An infatuated with.

And love is always a good thing, no matter what preposition it comes with.

That is true.

Thank you so much for calling, Judy.

Oh, thank you.

It’s our pleasure.

Bye-bye.

All right.

Bye-bye.

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

Grant, I love this email that we got from Jennifer Andraka in Madison, Wisconsin.

She was writing in reference to a conversation that we had about the expression,

Shut your pie hole.

Yeah.

She and her husband say to their cat when their cat keeps yowling,

Shut your kibble hole.

Does the cat get it?

That she didn’t answer.

Shut your kibble hole.

Well, open your pie hole.

Give us a call, 877-929-9673.

Or type it all on a keyboard, put it in the email to words@waywordradio.org.

Coming up, more conversations to indulge your inner word nerd.

Stick around.

Support for A Way with Words comes from National University,

Where flexible online classes let you earn your degree or credential on your schedule.

Learn more at nu.edu.

And by the fifth edition of the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language.

Ten years in the making with 10,000 new words and senses.

More at ahdictionary.com.

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

And I’m Grant Barrett.

Martha, one of my favorite blogs is about new words.

Could you have guessed?

Oh, imagine that.

Ben Schott keeps Schott’s vocab at the New York Times website, and it is highly entertaining.

Oh, yeah.

It satisfies both the side of me that wants a few jokes every day and the side of me that wants a few new words every day, right?

Right.

Good stuff.

He’s a British fellow, so it also has that, like, foreign bent, which is kind of cool.

That’s nice.

But he also throws contests for the weekend, and there was a contest recently that I really enjoyed,

And I wanted to share it with you and everyone who’s listening if they missed it.

The weekend competition was Get Web Soon.

And the idea was that the readers of the blog were supposed to come up with greeting cards for the modern age.

Oh, nice.

Right?

Or sympathy cards for the modern age, as the case may be.

Get Web Soon.

The one that I loved the most and was also highly rated by other readers was Heartfelt Condolences on the Loss of Your Data.

I would have a stack of those now if that card actually existed, right?

Except my parents wouldn’t understand what that meant.

They’d be like, data?

What data?

Who was that?

That’s terrific.

And there are a few more.

This one is in light of all the new, I guess, revolutions that are happening in the Middle East and North Africa.

Congratulations on the birth of your new democracy.

Oh, let’s hope there’s a big market for that.

And then this one is, this is probably, unfortunately, too common.

Sorry to hear your identity’s been stolen.

Here’s hoping you’ll soon be your old self.

These are fantastic.

Oh, that’s terrible.

Oh, I see one I really like.

Congratulations on your relationship update.

That’s right.

You’ve changed your status message and everyone noticed.

We’ll post a link to Ben Schott’s blog and to this contest in particular.

And if you have some greeting cards for the modern age, send them along.

Words@waywordradio.org or leave them on our voicemail, 877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hey, this is Jason Dickey in Tallahassee, Florida.

Hi, Jason.

How you doing?

Hey, I’m well.

How about y’all?

I’m groovy.

So I’m calling from Tallahassee, Florida.

That’s where I live now.

But I’m from Oak Ridge, Tennessee, which is in the eastern part of the state.

Yeah.

So the culture is, it’s Appalachian.

-huh.

And I’ve grown up probably saying a lot of weird things,

But there’s one in particular that if I’m in Tennessee it’s not weird.

But anywhere else it pauses the conversation and immediately spawns, you know,

Discussion of what the crazy thing that I just said.

And it’s one thing to tell people, oh, yeah, I grew up saying that.

But to, you know, come up with the derivation, I’ve got nothing.

I’ve even looked on the Internet search.

I’ve got you guys are my last hope.

Well, we’ll give it a try.

So the expression, and I’ll need to say it slow, I think,

It’s if I want to ask somebody if something is any good, if it’s worthwhile,

Then I ask, is it any count?

Like you would count one, two, three.

And it’s usually about, a lot of times it’s about food or a restaurant.

You know, a really good recent example was we were in Reno visiting my brother-in-law,

And I’m really into micro-brewed beer, and we’re passing a micro-brewery,

And he says, hey, Jason, here’s one over here that we could go to.

I forgot to mention it.

And I said, oh, yeah, it didn’t count.

And, you know, everybody started laughing.

They didn’t know what I said.

I never found out if the beer was any good.

And, you know, that’s the typical situation where once I say it, I almost cringe.

It’s like, oh, here we go.

Because you have to explain yourself.

Yeah.

They’re not paying attention to what you were really saying.

Yeah, it’s like pressing the pause button in the conversation, right?

That’s it.

Yep.

So what do you think?

It has to do with counting or totaling up.

What’s it worth?

Is it any count?

Does it add up to something worth something?

Sometimes a variant of that is, is it any account?

But, yeah, you do hear it all over the South very strongly.

And it sort of makes me think of, who is it in the cartoons, Yosemite Sam?

You know, you dog-blasted, ornery, no count, nothing, lily-livered.

Are you comparing me to Yosemite Sam?

He was a great gunfighter in his day.

Do you have a mustache?

But, Martha, I thought, is it any account was the older original form?

Yeah, yeah, and count is…

Because when you talk about something, he came to no account or it came to no account, meaning there was no good result, right?

Yeah.

And so it’s related to other uses of summing up, right?

Yeah, yeah.

Just kind of recounting what happened, another form of the word there.

Counting what happened and deciding whether or not it was worth the trouble or you had a profit and so on, right?

Right, right. Summing it up, the total, exactly.

And you are absolutely right, Jason. Not a lot has been written about this. Not at all.

I don’t know of any dictionary, even like the Dictionary of Smoking Mountain English. Does he have an entry for that?

Yeah, yeah, he does. He absolutely does. And I sure heard it in East Tennessee and Western North Carolina growing up when I spent summers there. Absolutely.

And if you Google around a little bit for this, particularly pay attention to Google Books,

You’ll find uses of this that are more than 100 years old from Tennessee and Georgia and Mississippi and Florida.

And it’s strongly Southern.

It is so strongly Southern.

It’s almost like there was a wall put up around this phrase.

If you were to map it, it’s like you put one leg on one side and one leg on the other,

And one leg would be Southern and the other one would be Northern.

Because this is not a phrase you are likely to hear outside of, like, the southernmost south that could ever be south.

Yeah.

Yeah, so you’re right.

I mean, it’s your heritage.

I’d be proud of it.

I love it.

It’s a good saying.

I would encourage others to use it.

Yeah.

Jason, be true.

That’s it.

Just be true to yourself, and you’ll be fine.

Be real.

Be real.

Thanks for calling.

I hope we helped a little bit.

If we come across anything really concrete on this, we’ll be sure to pass it along, all right?

Yeah, well, that was interesting.

I really appreciate it.

All right.

It’s our pleasure.

All right.

Thanks, Jason.

See you.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

If something you’ve said has people scratching their heads and you wonder if it has to do with your dialect,

Call us, 877-929-9673.

That’s 877-WAYWORD.

Or you can send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, how are you doing?

Doing well.

Who are you?

This is Debbie Hatherall.

I’m from Alliance, Ohio.

All right.

Alliance, Ohio.

Hi, welcome to the program.

Where is Alliance?

Alliance is in the northeast sector of Ohio.

Okay.

It’s like in between, halfway in between Cleveland and Pittsburgh.

Debbie, how can we help you?

Well, I’ve been in Alliance since 1979, but I grew up in Youngstown, Ohio,

Which is also the northeast section of Ohio, but it’s 45 minutes from where I am now.

And I also lived in Cincinnati for college and in Bowling Green for graduate school.

So as soon as I moved to Alliance, Ohio, I started hearing the word hoot.

So what a hoot.

Oh, I don’t give a hoot, or she’s a hoot, or that’s a hoot.

And I was like, why would I hear it in Alliance, but never anywhere else in Ohio?

So where did it come from?

You know, where did it start?

And how did it get to Alliance?

Why here, and did I just not know about it?

How interesting.

Or maybe you weren’t a hoot and nobody called you one.

That could be.

That could easily be.

Oh, I don’t believe that.

No, you sound like a lot of fun.

It’s a good place to live.

But I have a lot of questions about that one.

There are a couple things at play here.

Let’s break them down simply.

I don’t know of any regional component to hoot.

I don’t know that it’s more common in any form in any part of the country

When compared to any other part.

I was thinking it was more southern.

I’ve made people laugh when I’ve gone to places in the north and used the term hoot.

That’s interesting.

Oh, we had a hoot.

Yeah, it’s possible.

But that would dovetail perfectly with one of the hoots that you’re talking about

Is probably a shortening of hootenanny.

So when you say she’s a hoot, you mean she’s kind of like a party.

She’s a lot of fun.

And hoot is a short for hootenanny, which is a kind of party,

Is pretty standard American English.

And hootenanny can either mean a party or can mean like an impromptu folk, you know, like hoedown, right?

A bunch of people getting together with a fiddle and a tub and just start playing and people start dancing.

You just have like a little party there on the spot, right?

That’s a hootenanny.

The other kind of hoot, I don’t give a hoot.

I think that is the hoot of scorn and derision.

And it comes from a different place altogether in the language.

Hooting at somebody.

Yeah, you hoot as a sign of negativity or a sign of disapproval or dislike.

You know, it’s a hoot of, it’s not a happy hoot.

It’s not a positive hoot, right?

So I don’t give a hoot means I don’t even care enough about what you’re talking about to even express my negative feelings about it.

Okay.

And there’s a lot of caveating and hedging here and all this, but I’m pretty firm about both of those, okay?

Debbie, thank you so much for giving us a ring about hoot.

The call was a hoot.

Well, great.

Thank you very much.

And I thoroughly enjoyed talking with you.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Thank you.

It was an awful lot of fun.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Notice how she didn’t say we were a hoot.

She said it was an awful lot of fun.

That’s okay.

There were no hoots of derision, though.

That’s true, so I won’t take it personally.

If you’ve got a question about language, call us 877-929-9673

And send those regional expressions to words@waywordradio.org.

I was saddened recently to learn of the death of someone who worked a lot with accents and regional dialects.

His name was Sam Schwa, that’s C-H-W-A-T, Sam Schwa.

He was a New York City speech pathologist, and he made a name for himself working with a lot of Hollywood movie stars.

He helped Julia Roberts lose her strong Southern drawl,

And he also helped Shakira learn to do crossover songs in English without such a strong accent.

Very interesting.

Sam Schwad died recently at the age of 57.

He had lymphoma.

And as it happens, I had several phone interviews with Sam earlier this year for a magazine article I was writing about changing one’s speaking style.

And I had really fascinating conversations with him.

If there’s one thing that I will remember about them, Grant, it’s the fact that he was absolutely emphatic that it is possible to make a big change in the way you normally speak if, number one, you’re motivated.

And if, number two, you monitor your own speech and correct yourself every single time you make a mistake.

Right.

And one of the things we talked about, for example, was the habit of inserting way too many likes and ums and errs, those disfluencies, into everyday speech.

And as you well know, I certainly use a lot of those.

So I asked him over the phone what he’d do to help me cut down on the number of ums and you knows in my own casual speech.

And Sam said that if he were working with me, he’d start by making me stop every single time I said one of those.

He said I’d do it just like a metronome every single time.

And the funny thing was that as our conversation continued on the phone, he did just that.

He was relentless, stopping me each time I said, or.

And what was really remarkable to me is that it didn’t take all that long before I was stopping on my own.

I could feel it working.

I could hear it working.

And I’ll never forget that sense of having my fundamental speech pattern changing.

And I remember feeling exhausted by the end of that conversation because I was concentrating so hard.

But it was a satisfying little taste of what can happen if you really focus on the way you’re speaking.

So when I think of Sam Schwa, I’ll think about those invigorating conversations I had with him and that little glimpse of what that process could be like and what work it must be to learn a different dialect for a role.

Or if you’re coming to English as a second or third or fourth language, what kind of work it takes to try to adapt the way you speak.

If you’d like to share your memories of someone who affected you, someone who had something to do with why you’re interested in language, why you’re a thinker, a reader, a writer, someone who is a self-educator, give us a call, 877-929-9673, or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Grant. Hi, Martha.

Hi, who’s this?

This is Brian Barnhorse from San Diego.

Hi, Brian. Welcome to the program.

Hi, Brian.

Thank you. Love your show.

Oh, thanks. What can we do for you?

Well, my wife was sending out an email, and she had me take a look at it.

That was her first mistake, right?

That’s right.

And I looked over her shoulder, and I said, well, you know, honey, it’s really not a myriad of.

It’s just myriad, because myriad means thousands of, and so it would be redundant to say a myriad of.

And she said, well, you might be right.

I think I am.

But nobody knows that.

And so if I say myriad, then everybody’s going to read this and think I made a mistake.

And so my question to you was, am I fighting a losing battle here?

Wow. Well, you know, this is an especially tough one because I don’t know that there is one that’s really preferred over the other.

As far as I know, as far back as you can go, even into ancient Greek, the source of the word, used either way.

Right. It’s a noun or an adjective. And that’s what we’re talking about here, right?

You’re talking about a myriad of is a noun, or if you’re talking about a myriad, you know, myriad automobiles, you mean many automobiles.

That’s an adjective, right?

Right.

And so we’re getting a little bit of confusion because of the parts of speech.

And some people prefer the noun and some people prefer the adjective.

And it sounds, your wife’s kind of right on one hand.

It does sound a little odd if you leave the of off.

It doesn’t, myriad is not quite common enough.

I don’t know.

What do you do, Martha?

I absolutely do both.

You do both.

Okay.

I absolutely do both.

I think I do too, but I don’t know under what circumstances.

The thing is, Brian, all of the style guides and dictionaries talk about this issue,

And none of them have anything conclusive to say that is worth repeating here.

Yeah, so she’s raised a really good question.

Well, should I go along with what I think everybody is doing,

Which may be not really the correct one, but there really isn’t a correct one in this.

You know, you guys are like that old search commercial.

Do you remember that?

Search is a candy mint.

Search is a breath mint.

And then somebody says, stop, you’re both right.

Right.

Exactly.

It’s two, two, two words in one.

There’s a quote that I like to give on this, which actually has in it a quote.

And you might not know this, but David Foster Wallace, the writer, did some usage notes for Oxford University Press when I was working there.

And they’re in the writer’s thesaurus.

And some of them have appeared in the New Oxford American Dictionary.

And he has the note for myriad.

And in it, David Foster Wallace, he wrote,

The truth is that any reader who’s bugged by a myriad of is both persnickety,

Sorry, Brian, and wrong.

Whoa.

Yeah.

Which is worse, persnickety or pedantic?

I don’t know.

I think persnickety is nicer.

But he also points out that Coleridge, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, used it, and he did this.

He used both the noun and the adjective, myriad, myriads of lives teemed forth.

Yeah.

Isn’t that wonderful?

I know less now than I did when I called.

That’s our goal.

If we can’t answer you straight, we’re just going to confuse you.

But my point is that even Coleridge, centuries ago, was tuned in to the fact that there was something interesting going on there with this conflict between the noun and the adjective and myriad.

And you and your wife have re-encountered that conflict.

Not our first.

No, but you’re still married, so that’s something.

My advice, you know, an email is kind of informal.

What if it’s a formal document?

My advice would be to rewrite to avoid the word.

If you’re in doubt, just save it for another day.

Yeah, how about a whole bunch of?

Or lots?

But, you know, if you’re writing something to the condo board,

You know, maybe you want some…

There are myriad leaks in the roof.

Just to make sure that you’re understood

And your letter doesn’t come back with red marks on it.

I’m a lawyer.

I’m supposed to speak in words that people don’t understand.

So you’re to blame.

Okay.

True.

Half my mail is written by people like you.

We love the language.

Yeah.

So there is no clear answer here.

Rewrite to avoid it if you can.

Your wife is okay with her choice.

You are okay with your choice.

Carry on, love one another, and live long and prosper.

Sounds great.

Thanks for calling, Brian.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Yeah, even the ancient Greek version of this was both an adjective and a noun.

And that’s where we get it from ancient Greek.

It comes directly into English and French, and a lot of the European languages have some form of it, right?

Right, right.

Well, the marriage counselors are on the air.

If you’ve got a family dispute about language, give us a call, 877-929-9673, or put the terrible details, all of them, please, in email to words@waywordradio.org.

That’s our show for this week.

Don’t forget, you can leave us a message even when we’re not on the air.

Call us at 877-929-9673 or email us.

The address is words@waywordradio.org.

Stay in touch with us all week on Facebook.

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Stefanie Levine is our senior producer.

Our technical director and editor is Tim Felten.

Tim also chooses our music.

Josette Herdell, Jennifer Powell, and James Ramsey help with production.

A Way with Words is independently produced and distributed by Wayword, Inc., a nonprofit organization.

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

Thanks for listening.

I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

Take care of yourself.

Bye-bye.

Thing off. Oh, if we call the whole thing off, then we must part.

Support for A Way with Words comes from National University, where flexible online classes let you earn your degree or credential on your schedule. Learn more at nu.edu.

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