Hell for Leather (episode #1453)

You’re listening to A Way with Words, a show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. I’m having more fun lately with a 1909 volume called Passing English of the Victorian Era by J. Redding Ware.

Ooh, intriguing.

The thing that caught my eye was there was a dictionary entry there that included musical notation.

Oh, interesting.

Like, you know, a treble clef and a staff and notes.

It’s this little time capsule of a particular expression that was used in those days.

And the expression is, please, mother, open the door.

Why?

Well, the definition is expressed admiration of a passing girl, always said in a high monotone except door, which is uttered in a minor falling third.

And they actually write out the music for it, which is why I can sing to you what men would say when young women walked past.

So we’re talking about a fairly sophisticated kind of catcalling, right?

A minor thurs, yes.

These aren’t crude people, you know, on this corner.

These are men in bowlers, right?

Right, maybe tipping their hats or something and saying, please, mother, open the door.

I thought that was the coolest thing in this dictionary with these yellowed pages.

So it basically means mothers let your daughters out.

I want to go on a date with her or something like that?

I think that’s what it is.

So it’s just this tantalizing little keyhole view of, you know, flirtation.

That’s super cool.

I love that.

I know.

Isn’t that great?

Well, I love the idea that now we can go back to some of the earliest recordings and have that similar feeling where we have recordings that are 100 years old.

Yes.

And audio and video.

Yeah.

And so at some point in our future, somebody will look at our stuff and hear our voices and say, that’s how it was.

Isn’t that cool?

That’s how they were.

Yeah.

The world was different.

I’m going to share some more of those terms from the Victorian.

Outstanding.

I’m looking forward to it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And we’ll put a link on our website to the dictionary.

Great.

Because it’s really cool.

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Talk to us on Twitter @wayword.

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Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi.

My name is Micah Davidson.

I’m calling from San Diego, California.

I’m 13.

I wanted to know why people call toast, toast, instead of toasted bread, like the process that they use to make toast.

Why do they have to call it that?

That’s a good question, Micah.

That’s a wonderful question.

What do you think? What’s your guess?

People find it easier to call food how they make it so that people know what it is more easily.

Yeah, that’s part of it.

When we speak, we look for shortcuts.

And so lots of times when we have a long phrase, we will shorten it down to something much briefer, just so the sentences come out faster.

The words are issued much more quickly.

Here’s a little example of how this works with this particular combination.

Let’s say that toasted bread was the original form.

But now let’s think about jelly beans for a second.

If you and I are sorting our jelly beans and you want all the green jelly beans, eventually we’ll start to call them the greens.

I’m like, okay, here are some more greens for you.

I’m going to push all the reds and yellows over here.

And what we’ve started to do is take that adjective green, just drop the jelly bean, and we all agree that the adjective now behaves like a noun.

Here are all the greens for you.

And we do a ton of other stuff.

Pickles are a really great example.

It’s just a coincidence these are all food, by the way.

Pickles, we’ve done the same thing.

Pickled cucumbers just briefly called pickles.

So how do you feel about the answer there?

I feel like I got what I thought I would probably be.

I mean, it’s just one of those questions in my head.

I’m like, why do people do this?

I mean, like, why?

Why?

I always like to ask why.

Yeah, it’s a great, that is the best question for life, isn’t it?

You are one of us.

Thank you.

Thanks, Bud, for your call.

Really appreciate it.

Thanks, Micah.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Okay.

It’s really common, actually, in English for adjectives become nouns.

One of the longest standing examples that I can think of is when we talk about the meek shall inherit the earth.

The word meek is an adjective that because we’ve added the article the in front of it now behaves like a noun.

And this happens all the time in English.

It’s so incredibly common.

The land of the free and the home of the brave.

That’s right.

And it doesn’t really get people’s goat like, say, nouning verbs or verbing nouns does.

That’s a really good point.

You’re absolutely right.

But when we turn adjectives into nouns, it just feels natural.

It is a normal, completely ordinary part of the morphological structure of morphological behavior of English.

Yeah.

Well, I loved Micah’s question, which made me think of tuna fish.

Why do we say tuna?

You know, I mean, tuna bird.

It’s not.

I mean, why do we say it?

I don’t know.

It’s a fish.

We know it’s fish.

I don’t know.

Language just makes no sense whatsoever.

My favorite, though, of all the adjectives, terms, and nouns, though, is the category of demonyms.

And these are the words that we call people from another country.

English. It’s an English farmer.

The English.

And there’s a food one for that one too.

A Danish.

It used to be a Danish pastry. We dropped the pastry and now it’s just a Danish.

Which doesn’t really come from Denmark.

It’s Viener abroad. It comes from Vienna.

Somebody should get this language into shape.

Somebody should.

Help us out. Call us.

877-929-9673.

I was reading a book by Judy King called Living at Lake Chapala, and it’s about the expat community in southern Mexico.

And it’s got a lot of Mexican proverbs in there that I really liked, and one in particular that I wanted to share with you is, cada cabeza es un mundo.

Each head is a world?

Each head is a world.

I thought that was a really beautiful way of expressing the idea that, you know, you may perceive the world a certain way, but other people don’t have your life experience.

And what’s funny is I think we all know that.

It’s pretty much a truism, and yet we have to remind ourselves that other people aren’t us.

Or sometimes life reminds us.

Life reminds us.

That’s true.

What struck me about that proverb is just how sometimes you can think that you and somebody else are on the same page, and you find out that you’re dramatically separate.

And particularly when you realize later, oh, they were just being agreeable, they weren’t agreeing.

Yeah.

That’s a different thing.

Yeah, it’s always a good—

Cada cabeza es un mundo.

Es un mundo, is a world.

Each head is a world.

That’s very beautiful.

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Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Mark Stimmer from Long Beach, California.

Hey, Mark. How are you doing?

Good. How are you?

All right. What’s up?

Okay. So a friend of mine races cars here in Southern California, and I support him as crew at the races.

We were trying to come up with a team name the other day, and they’re from Britain, my friend and his wife.

And she used the expression hell for leather, which we thought was a great name for a racing team.

But I was wondering where it kind of came from.

Hell for leather. So hell for leather means…

Yeah, what does it mean to you, Mark?

Okay, so she defined it to me as kind of a reckless abandonment of everything but the pursuit of speed.

Oh, nice!

I like that.

That woman should write dictionaries. That’s outstanding.

That is really, really good.

So you’re wondering where it came from.

And it’s kind of a puzzle.

I mean, I know the traditional explanation has to do with horses and saddles and being on a horse and giving the leather hell, either rubbing the saddle or using the reins to speed a horse along.

So I’m on the saddle, and because I’m bouncing up and down, the leather is getting the heck punched out of it by my body, and I’m kicking the horse maybe with my leather boots or whatever.

Yeah, yeah, or the reins.

You know, you’re slapping the horse to get the horse to go faster with that kind of reckless abandonment that you’re talking about.

But I’m not sure I buy that. I mean, one of the earliest references, one of the earliest uses of that expression is by Rudyard Kipling in the 19th century.

But even before that, if you look in some of the dialect dictionaries, you’ll find hell falero, F-A-L-E-E-R-O, and hell falattery, F-A-L-A-D-E-R-L-Y.

And which makes me think that maybe leather just or the for leather came later.

So the original ones were some kind of nonsense that maybe were just interpreted into regular English words.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there are lots of variations of this.

And the thing that’s consistent again and again and again is the hell.

But you see hell for leather, hell for election even, which is a weird one that you see sometimes in the United States.

And then it gets combined sometimes with hell bent.

So you’ll see things like hell bent for election, which is a whole other.

Right. That came in much later.

Yeah. Yeah. So I’m not convinced about leather being the original.

What do you think, Grant?

Yeah, I think you’re right. There’s some doubt here on the origins of this.

And there have been proposals that it comes from a corruption of all for the lather.

Again, going back to horses that are in a lather because they’ve been running full out for too long.

More likely, we’re just looking at hell here as an emphatic, a mild form of cursing, a mild oath.

Particularly back in the mid-1800s, from whence this term springs, it certainly would have been much more severe to use the word hell.

But it’s always been an emphatic.

It’s always had this real force that adds some kind of severity or power to whatever else you’re saying.

Yeah, and then made even more forceful by whatever follows it.

Right, yeah.

How’s that sound, Mark?

It sounds good.

Sounds like it still works for a racing team name.

It’s a great team name, and I can see that on the back of some cool leather jackets.

Yeah, exactly.

Is that going to happen?

Maybe.

I don’t know.

Maybe.

Probably not leather because they don’t use that so much anymore, but maybe Nomex.

Okay, sure, yeah.

But you’ve got to have flames in there somewhere, right?

Absolutely.

Yeah, we’ll have to get a graphic designer on that.

That’d be nice.

Send us a picture when it goes live, all right?

All right, will do.

Take care, Mark.

Thanks, Mark.

Appreciate the call.

Bye-bye.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Hell for leather.

It really makes no sense.

Well, yeah, idioms don’t, right?

Right.

You take them for what they are.

They’re kind of like family.

We don’t judge the idioms too harshly.

Uncle hell for leather.

We love him anyway.

877-929-9673.

On our Facebook group, Stanley Anderson posted a lot of sentences that had a common theme.

Let’s see if you can guess them.

Okay.

Here’s one of them.

Amazingly few discotheques provide jukeboxes.

Here’s another one.

The job requires extra pluck and zeal from every young wage earner.

Figured out the commonality yet?

Yeah, so these are sentences that have every letter of the alphabet in the mouth.

Yes, they’re pangrams.

What are they called?

Panagrams.

Pangrams or pangrams.

Pangrams.

We promptly judged antique ivory buckles for the next prize.

That’s great.

I know.

And they make sense or some sense.

That’s what I like about them.

Which is what’s clever.

It’s not just a bunch of a pile of words.

That’s right.

It’s not the quick brown fox.

It’s amazing.

You know, I mean, really, Grant, amazingly few discotheques provide jukeboxes.

They should.

They should.

So you get to choose your own tunes.

Like in the old days, yes.

But you slip the DJ a couple bucks.

He’ll play your song, right?

That is a 40-letter pangram.

You can send your pangrams to us @wayword or talk to our Facebook group where there are a lot of people just like you having a conversation about language.

This show is about family, history, and culture all wrapped up in language.

Stay with us.

You’re listening to A Way with Words.

To this show about language and how we use it.

I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett, and we’re joined by our quiz guide, John Chaneski.

Hi, John.

Hi, Martha and Grant.

So good to see you again.

How are you?

I have a nice little quiz for you.

You know what?

I got it in my head to write a movie for the three of us.

Wow.

Yeah.

Road trip.

Road trip.

Let’s do it.

It’s heavily based on a film I saw with my kids.

I’m not working for scale again.

Well, it’s funny you should mention working for scale.

It’s called Finding Wordy.

It’s about a couple of word experts who journey around the ocean looking for just the right word. In the process, they, of course, or we, of course, come across anagrams and all sorts of other interesting things. For example, the movie starts with our protagonists remembering a nine-letter word for a scene that takes place in the past. That’s a…

Flashback?

Yeah, flashback. That’s just a simple… That’s just the first word we found lying around.

Flashback. Now, you don’t need to have seen the inspiration for this movie. And I think we should, in the process make some changes to avoid copyright infringement. So let’s read the script. Here we go.

Well, now we open on our home, which is within a sea animal named for a flower. Now, all I can recall is that its name actually means daughter of the wind. Anemone. A sea anemone. Very good.

Then we call on the assistance of a hard-shelled reptile named Crash. Yeah, that’s it. He’s not a tortoise, not a turtle, but a specific kind of turtle that’s semi-aquatic and lives in brackish or swampy water. It still starts with a T. I can’t remember. What is it? Terrapin. Terrapin. That’s it. Now I remember. I remember it said terrapin. Then we end up sequestered from other travelers and finding a word that comes from the Venetian dialect form of an Italian phrase that means 40 days. Quarantined.

Yes, quarantined. Do you know the Italian, by the way? Sounds like quarantined.

It’s quarantagionni. Exactly.

Quarantagionni.

During the Black Death, Venice was instrumental in measures to prevent the spread of the plague.

Then we remember, finally we remember a warning. A warning about a certain flow of water we’re supposed to be wearing. Not the undertow, that’s the other movie. It’s strong and localized narrow currents that occur at certain locations along the coast.

Not the undertow.

It’s different.

What is it?

Not the riptide?

It is.

It’s technically rip current.

Very good.

Yeah.

Yes.

Now, in the original movie, the protagonist is a blue tang, but in our movie, let’s see.

Oh, I see.

We get assistance from a big, friendly, fictional creature that’s tang plus another letter rearranged.

A rang-a-tang?

No.

A giant gnat?

Oh, no.

What?

The word giant is all I need.

Yes, very good.

Oh, a giant.

Okay.

Yeah, a big, friendly, giant.

Well, no, that’s another movie, too.

We can’t go there either.

Okay.

Let’s get back to our script.

It seems we’re getting a little verbose, long-winded, prolix, lengthy, protracted, loquacious, rambling, paraphrastic, or…

Did you say garrulous?

Protracted?

Go back to the beginning.

What were we looking for?

We’re looking for a fish.

Oh, finding wordy.

Finding wordy.

Oh, wordy.

Yes.

Wordy, yes.

Congratulations.

You did it.

Martha did it and didn’t know it.

You should see her face.

Just like the famous fish.

A happy ending to our stupid, dumb movie.

Anyway, thank you, guys.

That was great.

I’ll see you at the premiere.

That was the goofiest thing I’ve done in a long time.

I know, I know.

Take care now.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

This is a show about words, language, culture, family, and really bad puns.

Martha loves them.

877-929-9673.

Hit us up on Twitter @wayword.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha. Hi, Grant. This is Rachel from Clipson Park, New York.

Hi, Rachel. Welcome to the show.

Hey, Rachel. What’s going on?

Thanks. Well, I have a question.

This question came up when I was traveling with a friend in Mexico, and we were staying at a youth hostel, and she was going to tell me a story about a conversation she had with another girl in the hostel.

And she said, I was talking to this lady in our room, and I got really confused because she was referring to this other person, and I said, that person is not a lady.

And the problem was, for me, the word lady has a connotation that the person has to be older, like above 40.

And she didn’t feel the same way.

So I thought it was really interesting.

That is.

And you referred to her as a girl just now.

Yeah, a girl.

How old is she?

Or a woman, maybe.

She was like 25.

25, yeah.

Okay.

And so you’re more likely to refer to females in their 20s as girls rather than woman or lady.

Yeah, definitely.

And my friend thought lady was more of a general term and went for any age.

That’s so interesting.

What’s her background?

Where is she from?

She and I are both 22.

Okay.

And she’s from Wisconsin, and I’m from upstate New York.

If she had said something about the woman, what was the sentence again?

I think it was I was talking to the woman or the lady staying in our room.

If she had said I was talking to the woman staying in our room, would that have automatically had an age denominator on it?

For me, that sounds good.

I think woman would have been more appropriate.

But she felt the opposite way.

And, Rachel, did you stop down the conversation then and discuss it for a bit?

Yeah, we did.

We both studied linguistics in college, so we were both pretty interested.

Aha, aha.

And so how did that conversation go?

What did you come up with?

Well, she said that for her, that was the polite term,

And she felt kind of the opposite way I did.

So I started polling other people.

I talked with two people who said that they felt the same way as me,

That it was an old term for an older person,

And two people said that they didn’t think so,

And then it went for all ages.

Oh, that’s interesting.

I’m with you.

For me, lady is somebody oldish,

And by that I mean old enough to have a family, a career.

I’m thinking Margaret Thatcher.

Oh, are you?

Yeah.

I’m not thinking Regal or anything.

Although, think about Beyonce and singing to all the single ladies.

Right.

Right.

And that’s interesting, too, because I was talking to my mom about it, and I said when it’s plural, it doesn’t seem to have the same connotation.

That’s right.

Only when it’s a lady or kind of singular.

Now that you mention it.

That’s right.

Yeah.

So it’s very context dependent, right?

It matters who you’re with, what you’re doing, and what you’re talking about.

All those matter a lot.

It also depends upon the context of perspective.

Are you in the company of that person or were you in the company of that person?

It also depends on the plurality.

One, more, many, few.

Interesting.

But there’s another thing here.

I want to go back to the connection between girl in age and woman in age and lady in age.

I do have a woman as an age in my speech.

If I call somebody a woman, it’s likely because they are mature, grown up.

They have all the trappings of adulthood and not just physicalness, but not just genetics,

But or biology, I should say, but what they do with their lives, how they comport themselves,

Those sorts of things.

A woman for me is like the full rounded, you know, has reached all levels of being a human.

Yeah, interesting.

I would switch it. I would say that lady for me is a fully mature kind of woman in adulthood,

Maybe with kids and married, and then that would be lady, and then woman would be just very generic.

But it matters too. I guess one thing I left out of my context was a man talking about women is

Very different than women talking about women. I wonder if a man could have called her a lady

And if it would have felt the same.

Well, and also I’m curious, I mean, you seem comfortable,

And a lot of people in their 20s I know seem comfortable referring to women as girls, which is somewhat offensive to some older women who grew up in the feminist movement.

But, yeah, I have a lot of friends in their 20s for whom that is perfectly comfortable.

But I wonder, do they refer to male people as boys?

What’s your experience with that?

Yeah, I wouldn’t.

Guys, I think, is the better generic term.

Boys seems very, like, kind of sending.

Yeah, isn’t that funny?

I was talking with a young man in his 20s the other day, and he mentioned this girl.

And I know he didn’t mean it offensively, but I’m betting that she wouldn’t call him a boy.

Right.

So girl has kind of crept up to reach well into the 20s.

Boy is kind of reduced down to, what, teens and younger?

Yeah, maybe.

Younger teens, I would say.

I wonder if there is a universal term that wouldn’t have some markers on it for somebody else misinterpreting it.

If there’s one term.

I mean, you’d think that woman would be that.

But I think that woman can be misinterpreted as well.

That woman?

Yeah.

I love that.

I love that woman, right?

Immediately there’s a judgment about that means that she’s the subject of some ridicule or some kind of appropriation.

Yeah.

And ladies, it’s the same thing.

Like a single guy walking up to a group of women saying, hey, ladies, is like high on the creep meter, right?

Totally.

Yeah, you almost want to go to the genderless person if you really want to be without connotation.

Rachel, you opened a can of linguistic worms, as all good linguistic students do.

Yeah, I’m really interested to see what people have to say about this.

Yes, and we are too.

And I’m sure we’ll get a ton of email and phone calls about this.

You can let us know, 877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org or try to squeeze it all into a tweet on Twitter @wayword.

So, hey, Rachel, thank you for starting that conversation.

Thank you so much. This has been fun.

Take care now.

Take care. Bye-bye.

Bye.

Bye.

Here’s a quotation from Mark Twain I’ve been thinking about lately.

The compliment that helps us on our way is not the one that is shut up in the mind, but the one that is spoken out.

I really like that.

And I’ve been thinking about that because of a thing that a lot of my friends are doing on Facebook.

And I don’t know if it’s become viral or if it’s just my pals.

But people have been posting in their status, comment on this thread and I’ll give you a compliment.

And, you know, so people just say, what’s up?

And the person who did the original post gives them a compliment.

And it may seem corny, but these have been the most touching threads on Facebook that I’ve seen in a long time.

And people just eat it up because we all like to hear compliments.

You know, I like that quite a bit.

I really do.

And it helps explain the Mark Twain quote, which I wasn’t quite getting.

But it’s when you think something nice about somebody, you should say it because it’s better if they hear it.

Right.

Right.

Yeah, that’s really good.

Because there is a jokingness, like this perpetual need to be funny and a real disavowal of being earnest on social media.

Right.

Like if you’re earnest, you’re made fun of.

Right.

You’re belittled.

Yep.

And that annoys me because I feel that there should be a little more earnestness in social media, a little more like real life.

Yes.

Like being utterly genuine and not everything doesn’t have to be a joke.

Mm—

Like not trying to do one-upping.

Yeah.

I completely agree with you.

The irony is that these are three of the funniest people I know.

They’re all improvisers, but these are completely serious threads.

I love that.

And they are so touching.

I can’t tell you.

Maybe the improvisation in their lives have something to do with the ability to be honest to other people

And to actually just think of themselves in someone else’s shoes.

What would make her day, right?

What would make her feel good that is true about her that I’ve been holding back?

Right.

I think the key thing is what’s true about them.

It’s not like thinking of something nice to say.

You know, if somebody is your friend on Facebook, you must appreciate something about that.

True.

I agree with that.

And it’s been this wonderful exercise watching them do it and then watching people react.

That’s a really good idea.

Give someone a compliment today.

See what happens.

Yeah.

And you said that so well, Grant.

You have a way of articulating things that just blows my mind.

I am so glad that you were able to find your socks and your shoes today, Martha. Well done.

I have another pair just like this one at home. One pair by the front door, one pair by the back door.

Yeah, with one of each. Yep.

877-929-9673. Or send your compliments to words@waywordradio.org.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name’s Charlie, and I’m from Dallas. I noticed that my girlfriend uses this. She makes a strange vowel sound.

I first noticed it when she said the word email. Now, she says email, not email. She also says toenel. So it’s an E-L-L instead of an A-I-L.

I especially thought it was funny. The other day she was trying to say it was a telltale sign. But she said it’s a telltale sign. Telltale sign. I was wondering where that came from.

-huh. Now, Charlie, you have to tell us where your girlfriend’s from. I bet she’s from Dallas also.

No, I bet she’s from, like, Ohio or something. Let’s hear it.

-huh. Well, no. She is from Azle, Texas, which is almost an hour away from Fort Worth. It’s a semi-rural area.

Okay. Does she say if she goes to McDonald’s and decides to order the Happy Meal, does she say the Happy Mill? Or would she go to McDonald’s?

I might have to test her on that. We don’t go to McDonald’s at all.

That was my question. She’s looking for what she’s got here, what’s called vowel mergers, and these are a standard part of language change across the world. And they’ve been well chronicled in North America.

And the reason Martha and I had a differing opinion on whether or not she’d be from the South or from the Great Lakes region or Midwest is because there are a couple really strong trends in vowel mergers that have really complicated patterns that aren’t altogether completely consistent, but they do generally belong to certain geographic groups.

And that is all to say that one of the things that she’s got going on is a vowel merger where her vowels are moving around. And it’s probably not just her. It’s probably maybe her family, her friends, the people like her.

This is where, because of outside influences, she hears a vowel a certain way and she adjusts all of her other vowels another way. So when one vowel moves, usually from social pressures or hearing it said a lot in a certain way, we naturally reform our other vowels or push them around.

There’s actually a really nice chart they use in sociolinguistics that shows the directions of the vowels. It’s kind of funny, but we are unconsciously all doing this all the time to adjust so that our vowels don’t collide.

I loved the telltale example. I love that telltale sounds like telltale because it is a perfect illustration. She is eventually going to adjust those vowels even further so that doesn’t happen, probably.

Yeah, well, I’ve given her such a hard time about it that when she said telltale, she knew immediately.

Oh, that’s not nice. Don’t give people a hard time for their language.

What? It sounds like a bonding experience.

I know, I know. Right? You’re paying attention. What else does she say like that?

So you said mail. Sounds like mel. M-A-I-L sounds like M-E-L-L. What else?

Well, she says toenail. N-A-I-L. I know that that’s a lot like that. So N-A-I-L sounds like…

She says pen and pin the same way. But that seems different.

Yes, that’s the classic. It is actually called the pen-pin merger. P-E-N sounds like P-I-N for this whole huge segment, which is basically the American South and most of Texas.

It kind of fades away in West Texas. It kind of fades away in the middle of Missouri and Kentucky and Tennessee. It kind of fades away a little bit above the Carolinas. But basically the whole South consistently has this pen-pin merger.

And is that why some people say ink-pin? Ink pen. To distinguish it from another kind of pen. I hear that a lot in the South. But it’s not just the one vowel. So this whole big panorama. And any individual person may not have all the features of this dialect change. But in the aggregate, if you survey enough people, you will consistently see this throughout the American South.

Yeah. Well, I always wondered where it came from because she, her first language is German, Swiss German. And she does have family from the Midwest. I think it’s one of those things that would be impossible to track down exactly.

Oh, that’s interesting.

No, yeah. I bet this comes from her Texas influence and has nothing whatsoever to do with German roots at all.

Okay. There’s probably no chance of that. Anyway, it’s all really interesting.

The phrase that you want to look for to find out more is vowel merger, V-O-W-E-L-M-E-R-G-E-R, vowel merger. And you’ll find a ton of really great stuff. A lot of it is very accessible. We’ll find a ton of newspaper articles where they’ve kind of done a decent job of digesting the sociolinguistic work.

Okay. Thank you very much.

Yeah, I really appreciate your call. Thanks, Charlie. Have a good one. Bye-bye.

Well, it’s great to talk about dialects from all over the country. We’d love to talk with you about it. So call us, 877-929-9673, or send us an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Here’s a riddle. I exist only when there is light, but direct light kills me. What am I?

A shadow?

I puzzled over that one for five minutes, and I finally clicked through to the answer, but you got it right away. Nice.

How did you know that?

I don’t know. Who knows? I just guessed it. I guess I did. I don’t know what I was thinking.

Okay. 877-929-9673. More conversation about what we say and how we say it. Stay tuned.

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. In 1889, a German engineer named August Horsch founded a car company. And after a while, he had differences of opinion with the board, and he left the company and formed another car company.

And his surname was already in use and trademarked by that company. So what was he going to call his new car?

Oh, I don’t know.

Well, Horsch, I’ll give you a hint. In German, it’s cognate with English hark, so it means listen. The name of this brand is cognate with audience.

Oh, Audi.

Yeah. As in, I’m Audi 5000.

Exactly. I’m Audi. I’m out of here. I’m Audi.

Yeah. A-U-D-I. Yeah. Audience, auditory, audition, audible. All those words go back to a Latin word that means to hear.

And so the name of that car company is actually the Latin version of the guy’s German name. That’s cool. And so I learned that the other day, and I got so excited, of course, about car names that I went and researched some more.

Oh, no. So I have another question for you, Grant.

Oh, no. How long do we have?

I don’t think we have enough time for this.

All right. We have enough time for this one. Okay, what well-known car brand is named for the central deity of Zoroastrianism, the ancient Persian religion?

I don’t know. Something with a P.

No, it starts with an M. Five letters.

Five letters. Well, I’m thinking these are all longer than five, but Mercedes, Maserati. It sounds like Maserati, sort of, only shorter.

Mazda, yes. That car takes its name from Ahura Mazda, who, according to the Mazda website, is the god of wisdom, intelligence, and harmony as a symbol of the origin of both Eastern and Western civilizations and incorporates a desire to achieve world peace and the development of the automobile manufacturing industry.

I don’t really feel like those are the same. World peace on one side, growth of the automobile industry. I’m down with it.

And then the little symbol of the Mazda shows the company stretching its wings as it soars into the future.

Or you could just drive the car.

Yeah, you could just drive the car. So something to think about when you’re driving home.

877-929-9673. Pull over. Give us a call. Send us an email. words@waywordradio.org.

Hello. You have A Way with Words.

This is John Chigi.

Hi, John. Where are you calling us from?

Fort Worth, Texas. Actually, right outside Fort Worth down in Cleburne, Texas.

Cleburne. All right. Well, welcome to the show, John. What can we help you with?

I was looking for some kind of root where the word honky comes from.

I looked on the Internet, and they say what it’s some kind of racial term, but it didn’t give me any idea exactly where that word came from and what it meant.

What brought this to your mind? Why did you wonder about the word honky?

Well, I’ve always been interested in that. In fact, back in the 70s, I was in my 20s, I taught at an all-black high school for about seven years and encountered all kinds of words, and actually I’d heard that word before. And we discussed it in class. We’d have those days where they would ask me questions about white culture, and I would ask them some clarifications on the black culture. There was no white children that ever went to the high school.

Well, let’s look on that one. So honky is a derogatory term for a white person usually used by African Americans, right?

Yes.

Yeah, and it is still considered impolite and not a term that you would throw about and use without taking a risk of getting punched, probably?

Exactly.

The origin is super, super interesting. It actually comes from a word that was used for immigrants from Eastern Europe. And so there’s a variety of forms of it, but honky, honky, honyak, honyaker. And all of these terms start to pop up in the early 1900s when there was a big influx of people coming, particularly in the northern cities where the factories were being created, where there were good industrial jobs. And the term for the Hungarians, which is how it started, any kind of Slavic person or anybody who was even vaguely from that part of Europe, it generically was used for them, even if they had nothing to do whatsoever with Hungary. And then even further generalized to refer to any white person. And honky is still used today. It’s nowhere near as widespread. It doesn’t have the sting that it used to have, but generally it’s avoided.

How did your students use it?

Well, we actually have a little more interesting and fun discussion about it, because we didn’t know anything about all that. And we just kind of took it up as a common sense thing, what they might experience in their neighborhood.

Right.

So one explanation was when the white boys would go to pick up their dates, they would honk their horn, and the date would come out and get in the car. They wouldn’t go up to the door and knock necessarily.

Oh, I see.

They’d go on down the street, and they’d see a good-looking gal. They’d honk the horns, watch them be driving their car. That was one explanation. Then another might be that they experienced this in the neighborhoods when white employers would come through the neighborhood to pick up a maid or a worker or a butler or a musician and would honk the horn for them to come out and get in the car.

Yeah, none of those are the origin of the word. I mean, they’re fun stories, but they’re not true origins of this word. We know this because the word exists before automobiles were widely used in the United States.

Well, John, I want to thank you. I know you said you had some other questions. If you want to include those in an email to us, maybe we’ll get you on the show another time to talk more about this stuff.

All right?

All right.

Fantastic. Thank you. Take care now.

Thanks, John.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673. Email words@waywordradio.org.

We’re talking earlier about foods that are named for what’s done to them, like toast and pickles. And I was thinking that there are also more subtle examples of that. Like, for example, mozzarella, the cheese, gets its name from the Italian word for cut.

Oh, interesting.

Yeah, because it’s cut. But it’s obscured to us because we borrowed the word.

Exactly. Same with feta cheese. It comes from a Greek word that means cut. And schnitzel in German also comes from a word that means in German to cut. We get the word Schneider from that, which is a tailor, somebody who does cutting or Schneider.

That’s super cool.

Yeah. 877-929-9673.

Hello. You have A Way with Words.

Hello. This is Erica Baez. I’m calling from San Antonio, Texas.

Great. What’s on your mind in terms of language?

Well, I have a question about a word that’s commonly used here in San Antonio, and that’s the word sandwich, S-A-N-G-W-I-C-H.

Sandwich for sandwich?

Right, right.

And do you pronounce it that way?

I used to pronounce it that way, but no longer pronounce it that way.

Why not?

Because I read it when I was about third grade. I saw it on the bread loaf, and I saw that it was spelled with a D instead of a G, and so I didn’t pronounce it that way after that.

Sang-wich instead of sandwich.

The word sandwich is kind of messed up anyway. I can think of four pronunciations of this word. We say sand-wich, which is standard. We say sang-wich, which you point out. We say sam-wich, and we say san-wich. Widget at the end instead of which at the end. Sandwich. Sandwich. Oh, yeah, and sandwich without the D. Sandwich.

So why would people say sandwich?

That’s a good question, Eric. Where did you learn sandwich?

I learned sandwich from my parents, actually, and my friends also say it that way. So I’ve also heard my grandparents say sandwich as well. So just kind of here in the community in San Antonio.

There’s a really nice explanation of this word in a piece by Jack Chambers. He wrote a chapter for a book. His chapter is called Sociolinguistics of Immigration. But basically the point is he is talking about this word in particular has a cluster of consonants in it, which are really difficult for some people who aren’t native speakers of English. That’s the NDW. Being together is hard to pronounce if your original inventory of phonemes, that is your original sounds that come with your first language, don’t include those sounds. And so my question for you is, are you part of an immigrant community?

Well, it’s kind of complicated because my family is from Texas. So before Texas was part of the United States, it was a Mexican territory. And so my family has basically stayed here in Texas and it became the United States.

Okay.

Right.

So you have a really long history of this. I know that in the Italian-American communities in New Jersey and New York and even in parts of Canada, this particular pronunciation, sandwich, is kind of seen as an identifier of being a part of the Italian-American community. It’s one of those linguistic traits that they’ve carried on. I also have seen some evidence that it exists in Spanish speakers, and you would not have to be a person who spoke Spanish as a first language in order to inherit, so to speak, that pronunciation from your family and your community.

So I would not be—if there are a lot—and I know in San Antonio there are a ton of people who are bilingual or who have—who come from Spanish-speaking families, and it’s a very, very much a bilingual community overall, isn’t it?

It is, definitely. Absolutely.

I would not be surprised. I mean, you mentioned a lot of people say this sandwich pronunciation. It is just really hard for the NDW to work together if your original language is Italian and Spanish and a couple other languages like that.

Oh, that’s pretty cool.

Yeah, right? That makes sense.

Well, Eric, thanks so much for your question.

Thank you. I really appreciate you taking the time to reach out to me.

Sure thing. Take care now.

Thanks.

Bye-bye.

Bye. Have a good day.

Bye-bye.

And so what we do when we have a word that we want to pronounce but it has sounds in it that aren’t natural to us, we improvise. We come up with something that approximates that. Look at, when you think about, imitate a French-speaking person right now, right? The cat is on the roof, right? Why do we say the instead of the? Because we’re imitating the French people coming up with that voice the, the the, right? They don’t do the the like we do. So they’re improvising. The the sound is roughly close to it. Interesting.

Sounds like a caricature.

Yeah, but I mean it’s a really good example of how we all do that when we speak another language.

Yeah, really interesting.

We’d love to hear about your linguistic heirlooms. Call us, 877-929-9673.

Here’s another slang term from the 1909 book Passing English of the Victorian Era. The term is door knocker. Any idea what a door knocker is?

Somebody goes raising funds from door to door.

I don’t know.

Somebody who’s got a thick head and you bang it against the door to put some sense into them?

Has to do with the head, actually.

A door knocker is a ring-shaped beard formed by the cheeks and chin being shaved, leaving a chain of hair under the chin, and upon each side of the mouth, forming with the mustache something like a door knocker.

Oh, it’s kind of like the chin strap beard.

Yes.

They still actually wear that in New York, only there’s usually no mustache.

It’s just a fringe of hair along the jawline.

Yes, yes, or baristas in coffee shops, yes.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Mary.

I am calling from Dallas, Texas.

Welcome to the show.

Well, I was calling because I had a question.

Ever since my son was born nine years ago, my mother, who’s from England, has called him booby as a term of endearment.

She said she got this name from her grandparents, but I have not heard anyone anywhere use this expression.

And I grew up in Canada with a lot of, you know, English people around.

So I was wondering if you had any insight into this.

Okay.

And does she use it in any particular context?

Like if he’s behaving a certain way or just all the time?

Well, it’s not when he’s misbehaving, for sure.

It’s more like to call him at like, hey, boobie, what’s going on?

So it’s obviously done in a positive manner.

Never used in a negative respect.

Okay. And he’s nine years old now?

Yeah. So she doesn’t really call my daughter it so much.

I don’t know if it’s because he came first, but it was since he was born.

Interesting.

So she said she has her grandparents.

So my mom is almost 70.

She said her grandparents used to call her that.

-huh.

And so she still calls him that at nine years old and he’s cool with that?

Not so much.

It’s in the house now.

We will not do it outside the house.

Got it. Got it.

Booby outside the house is likely to be misunderstood.

Right.

There’s your inside voice and there’s your inside language.

Exactly.

That’s really interesting.

Well, I know that in Britain, booby has long been used as a term for crybaby.

With varying pronunciations, right?

Sometimes more like bubby than booby.

Yeah. Or like a simpleton or something.

And I could see where that might get extended to some kind of affectionate kind of just booby.

Like when he’s crying for, you know, food or a little bit.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Grant and I have talked before about the researchers Iona and Peter Opie, who wrote a book called The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren.

And they write in there that children seem to associate this term with crying and that a booby is a foolish crybaby from possibly boo baby.

Boo baby.

Oh, interesting.

A mocking term.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But I could see how you could, as you suggested, calm a child by saying boo baby and that that might just evolve into a term of affection.

Well, what comes to my mind is the 1988 movie Die Hard.

What?

There’s a scene in there where this kind of unctuous, weasley character by the name of Harry Ellis, played by Hart Bochner.

He’s trying to be like the big man and save the day when the terrorists have taken over the building, right?

And so he tries to negotiate with Hans Gruber, played by Alan Rickman, and he says, Hans, booby, I’m your white knight.

And it’s always struck me as super odd, but this is kind of maybe making me think that that’s the same word.

Oh, that makes me think of the Yiddish.

Well, maybe.

Right.

Maybe like for grandmother or for nana.

Yeah.

That sounds more like that.

Yeah.

I don’t know.

Maybe because he’s German, he was thinking that that’s the way he needed to talk to that guy.

But why would he call him that?

Yeah.

The guy with the guns.

Beats me.

Anyway, for what that’s worth, which is maybe very little.

But Mary, it’s really interesting.

I’m not aware of anybody else in this country among the people I know who use boobie in that way, though, for kids.

Grant, do you know anybody who’s ever referred to their kids as that?

Right.

And so that’s why I found it interesting because I grew up in Canada.

Had obviously English grandparents around all the time and English mother would travel to England.

And then we moved to the U.S. about 10 years ago.

And so in either country, I have not heard the expression.

Very interesting.

Did you ask, though?

Yes, I did ask.

And of course, she pulls out her huge dictionary.

And she thought it came from she was wondering herself because I said that I called in about this word.

And she thinks that it’s a type of bird as well.

So she wondered if it didn’t come from like, it’s like a hungry bird or something.

It’s like, so she wondered if it didn’t come from that because she herself doesn’t know, but she knows the term of endearment that had been passed down.

Yeah.

The blue-footed booby.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There’s no.

She wondered if that had any relevance.

Yeah.

That’s really distant.

That’s highly unlikely.

Yeah.

I agree with Grant on that.

All right.

Well, we’re going to put the word out.

And you know, we have a huge listenership.

And if anybody else uses this, we are sure to get emails and phone calls about it.

All right.

Awesome.

Thank you so much.

Thank you, Mary.

Heidi the booby.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Take care.

This is a show about words, language, family, history, and culture.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

Here’s another entry in that 1909 Dictionary of Victorian Slang Grant.

See if you can guess what it means.

The entry is, introduce shoemaker to tailor.

Can you imagine what that means?

Introduce shoemaker to tailor?

Mm—

Not sure.

What would that mean?

I don’t know.

I don’t know what that means.

Well, what I love about it is that the definition of it is great, too.

It’s evasive metaphor for fundamental kicking.

Introduce shoemaker to tailor.

Kick somebody in the pants.

Yes.

Fundamental kicking.

Fundament in the fundaments.

Yes.

You better behave or I’m going to introduce shoemaker to tailor.

Butt to buns.

Or boot to buns.

Yeah, boot to buns.

Boot to butt.

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Grant and I are out to change the way we listen and think about language, and you’re making it happen.

Thanks also to senior producer Stefanie Levine, director and editor Tim Felten, director Colin Tedeschi, and production assistant Emma Kelman in San Diego.

In New York, we thank quiz guide John Chaneski and that master of keeping it real, Paul Ruist at Argo Studios.

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

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

And I’m Grant Barrett.

So long.

Bye-bye.