Hell’s Half Acre (episode #1468)

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.

What do you call a baby shower for the father-to-be?

I know now because I received, we received a thousand emails about it.

We sure did.

We had this conversation a couple of weeks ago with Sherude from Austin,

Who wanted to know what you call it when it’s guys getting together to support the father-to-be.

And we had a couple things that we threw out, dad-schler party, which some people use.

But our listeners, the emailers, had a ton of ideas.

The emailers and the callers.

We heard from Tiffany Maddox in Dallas who suggested Huggies and Chuggies.

You know, the thing is, a lot of these, I cannot tell you how many of these involved beer.

Right.

There was Huggies and Chuggies, beer shower, diaper kegger, beer for diapers.

And the guy who called with that suggestion said that it’s a great thing because the guys don’t have to think about what to buy for the father-to-be.

The father-to-be provides the drinks, and the guys just bring diapers.

You don’t have to shop.

You don’t have to really make decisions.

You just bring a bunch of diapers.

But why is that a problem for men to go shopping for babies?

It’s a stereotype, right?

Yeah, okay.

But there were lots more.

Sam Boucher suggested baby boot camp, which I kind of like.

Oh, wow, yeah.

And Joni said that she hosted a baby cue that worked out really well.

That sounds frightening.

It does sound a little frightening to me, but she said it was really popular.

And there was Mustache Bash and Baby Fat Tuesday.

The Baby Fat Tuesday or Baby Fat Tuesday?

Exactly.

Okay.

It’s like Fat Tuesday is the last party before Lent, and this is the last party before your baby arrives.

Right.

Baby Fat Tuesday.

Okay.

I like that.

And I’ll share some more of these later in the show, but I did want to end with Linda Woods from Spokane who wrote,

I wanted to add that I heard once that the very first recorded man shower was when the three kings brought gifts to baby Jesus.

There we go.

Gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

I don’t think there was beer involved.

No.

Gold would go over very well at a baby shower.

You’re looking at the bills and you’re looking at the things you need and you’re like, yeah.

Oh, my gosh.

More gold.

More diapers.

Well, this is a show about language.

Call us with your ideas about a baby shower for men or anything to do with slang or new words or something you came across in your reading.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

And talk to us on Twitter @wayword.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Dave, and I’m calling from Noblesville, Indiana.

Welcome, Dave. What’s going on?

Well, I have a question about a phrase called the real McCoy.

I work as a locomotive engineer for Amtrak, and my route takes me between Indianapolis and Chicago.

And about every two or three miles next to the track, there’s a signal, which are basically traffic lights for trains.

And my conductors in the train with the passengers can’t see them, so I need to communicate where the signal is located and what it’s telling me to do to them so that they’re on the same page with me.

So we passed a little town called McCoysburg, Indiana, and there’s a signal there.

So I called the signal out one day to my conductor in the back of the train, and he replied, you know, clear signal, at the real McCoysburg.

And I’ve heard the real McCoy before, and I don’t know where it came from, and I thought you and Grant would be the people to ask.

Yes, we are the people to ask.

Researching the etymology of this is a real pet project for a lot of people that I know.

Like the members of the American Dialect Society email list spend, I don’t even know how much time,

Finding earlier and earlier and earlier uses of this term in print to try to figure out its derivation.

And I can tell you what the group of them have come up with so far is that it comes from the 1850s.

156 specifically is the date of the first use in print of a company called G. McKay and Company that made whiskey.

And they had the slogan, a droppy or the real McKay.

And it’s M-C-K-A-Y.

And it doesn’t matter very much that it’s spelled differently than I’m saying McKay because it easily becomes McCoy because McCoy is also a common name.

And so the slogan for this whiskey company became widely used to talk about something as being genuine.

And that’s it.

And it’s stuck with us now for however, 150 years or however long it’s been.

There is a slight hint in one of the first 1856 uses.

There’s like three uses in print we can find from 1856 that it may have been a preexisting term.

But so far, nobody has found any variation of the phrase earlier than that.

Okay.

Yeah.

Oh, that is so neat.

Yeah, whiskey company slogan, and here we are saying it, and we don’t even know.

It’s bugged me, and I know I’ve heard it before, and I thought, well, I know it means something authentic, but it’s really neat to know the origination of it.

And so just to be clear, it’s not an American company.

I believe they were in Scotland.

Robert Louis Stevenson, the writer, uses in 1833, and it just starts to pop up again and again.

And you can slowly through history see the spelling change until it kind of finally fixes on McCoy,

M, lowercase c, capital C-O-Y, the real McCoy.

Okay.

And by the way, if you ever want to call again and talk about train language, we are all ears for that.

Definitely.

Oh, well, the railroad has a rich tapestry of unique language, and there are all kinds of things.

One I thought I’d share with you.

Instead of going out to dinner or to a meal, railroaders go to beans.

Love it.

Oh, nice.

Going to beans.

Love it.

And another word for an engineer is a hogger.

So I’m not sure where that came from, but that’s a couple of things for you.

These are great.

I love these.

I wonder if that has to do with the locomotive itself.

Is that called a hog?

I’m not sure.

I mean, I know we called it, it was originally called the iron horse.

And when we go off duty, we don’t clock out.

We tie up.

So maybe that has something to do with the iron horse.

That’s outstanding.

Dude, David, I’m telling you, you’ve got to send me an email with a bunch more of this stuff,

And we’ll get you back on the show, all right?

Okay, yeah, you betcha.

Really appreciate it.

Take care.

Thanks for your call.

All right, thanks so much.

Have a great day.

It was good talking to you.

You too.

Bye-bye.

You too.

Bye-bye.

Okay, bye-bye.

I want to go take his train.

That’s nice.

Yeah.

Go to Beans to go have a bite.

Let’s go to Beans.

Go to Beans.

Sounds like something surfers would say.

Going to beans, dude.

We know in your workplace, there’s some stuff that you say that you’re used to,

But everybody else looks at you funny when you say it at home or somewhere else.

We want that stuff.

What’s the jargon or the slang of your workplace?

877-929-9673.

Or email us, words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Cindy Linscott-Newhouse,

And I live in Santa Rosa Beach, Florida, but I’m a Michigan native, as you can probably tell.

Welcome to the show.

Thank you. Thanks for having me on.

Yeah, sure. What’s on your mind?

Oh, what’s on my mind are some of these funny things that my girlfriend’s mother used to say when we were kids.

And we would just be out all day on our bikes going on big adventures.

When we’d come home, her mother would say to us, where have you been?

I’ve been looking all over Hell’s Half Acre for you.

All over Hell’s Half Acre for you.

And what did that mean?

Yeah, were you in trouble?

I think I felt like that was a negative thing, but I don’t think I was ever there.

Why did she look all over Hell’s Half Acre?

I was never there.

No wonder she didn’t find us.

Right, right.

So they went to a lot of trouble and you weren’t there.

It’s got a long history.

My parents always used creation.

They would talk about driving all over creation, which is short for God’s creation.

Oh, okay.

But Hell’s Half Acre has a long history of, say, about 150 years of referring to a small patch of land.

Not exactly a half an acre of an indeterminate size, maybe even indeterminate location.

Sometimes it just meant a backwater, a bit of rubbish, a terrible place that you didn’t want to go.

You know, one-horse town, that sort of thing.

It’s also sometimes called Devil’s Half Acre.

And then during the wars, depending which war you’re talking about,

It could refer to the land between two opposing armies that was under dispute,

Kind of the D.O.C. Or the no-man’s land,

The place you didn’t want to go because you’re going to get bullets from both sides.

Wow.

Yeah.

Well, I always knew I was in trouble, but I didn’t think I was going to take a bullet.

Right.

So in their mind, Hell’s Half Acre was everywhere.

Right? Yeah. Yeah, so basically

An undesirable place.

Yeah, for the most part, it’s something with a bad reputation.

Yeah. Was that the closest she came

To cursing? Yeah.

I don’t think I ever heard her do any more

Than that. Hell’s half acre.

Cindy, thank you so much for calling.

Well, it was my pleasure.

I’m glad you answered that little rule for me.

Thank you. Take care now.

Anytime. Okay. Bye-bye. Thank you.

Bye. All right. Bye-bye.

We have a lot of terms for little towns.

Hell’s half acre is sometimes used for the place

You didn’t want to go, right?

Someplace out in the boonies.

Yeah.

Podunk.

Grease spot in the road.

Podunk is a classic.

God forsaken place.

Ghost town.

One horse town.

East Jesus is another one.

Oh, yeah.

Send your questions and stories about language to words@waywordradio.org

And find us on Facebook and Twitter.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hey, this is Andrea Simpson from Cortland, Alabama.

Hi, Andrea.

Welcome to the show.

Hello, Andrea.

I have a phrase that I have read my entire life.

I was a big fan of Agatha Christie and Evelyn Waugh and lots of other Brit things written in the 20s.

And they were always saying of people that someone was hairy at the heel, and it was not a compliment.

It meant that they were kind of a poser, that they were trying to pretend to be something they weren’t.

But it’s such a weird thing.

I mean, you know, hairy at his heel, what on earth could that even mean?

So my guess on that, my best guess, being a horsewoman, I love to ride.

You know, Portland is tiny.

There are 500 people, so if you don’t do something outside, you’re very bored.

And I love to ride.

And I finally thought, that must mean like a horse that has a little bit of a draft horse in it, a cart horse.

You know, like the Clyde sales on the Budweiser ads, they have all those real hair around their heel.

And so a horse that you’re trying to pass off as a thoroughbred, a racehorse, they don’t have hair at their heel.

But if he has a little bit of hair down there, it means he has some draft in him.

And that was my best guess.

But I don’t know that that’s true.

That’s just what I guessed.

And so I was seeing if y’all could figure out if that’s true or not.

Well, that’s exactly it.

You nailed it.

Yes, you nailed it.

Oh, I did?

Yeah, hairy at the heel or variations that are hairy in the fetlocks or hairy round the heels or just hairy healed is sort of a snooty, upper class way of saying that someone doesn’t have the correct breeding.

I mean, it’s sort of the same.

Yes, ill bred.

Because exactly as you said, thoroughbred horses don’t have those hairy heels, which are regarded as undesirable in some circles because they collect dirt and moisture, I guess.

You could tell me better about that.

Well, that is true.

But let me tell you, a draft horse is a lovely horse as well,

Though I have to confess I love the failed racehorse.

And that’s one reason I’m so happy is my failed racehorse was such a good boy this morning.

So I’m very pleased with it and I’m all happy about it.

But a draft horse is a very lovely horse.

People should disparage them.

They have great temperaments and they’re really sweet.

Andrea, thank you so much for your call.

This sounds lovely.

Oh, y’all, I’m so excited to get to talk to y’all, and y’all are so nice.

And thank you for looking up my little phrase and solving a, you know, 30-year question.

It’s our pleasure. Call again sometime, all right?

Thank you very much.

All right, bye-bye.

All right, bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

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

Stick around for more of A Way with Words.

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

I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

And we’re joined by our quiz guy, John Chaneski.

Hi, John.

Hi, Grant.

Hi, Martha.

Hello, John.

What is up?

Today’s quiz is about something we don’t usually talk about, hip-hop music.

Okay.

Oh, cool.

Yes.

Let’s do it.

It’s time.

Yes, it’s been a huge influence for almost 40 years, and it’s a music genre that respects words.

Now, I’m going to recite a passage from a classic hip-hop song,

And I want you to give me the rhyming word or phrase that completes the lyric.

I’ll give you a definition of the missing portion, okay?

For example, from Run DMC’s King of Rock,

I’m the king of rock, there is none higher.

Sucker MCs should call me…

Fire.

No, not fire. Did you say fire?

A liar?

No, a respectful form of address for someone of high standing.

Sire.

Sire, right.

I’m the king of rock.

There is none higher.

Sucker and sea should call me sire.

Now, these are among Rolling Stone’s list of the 50 greatest hip-hop songs of all time.

Check it.

First one is Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, The Message.

Neon, King Kong, standing on my back.

Can’t stop to turn around.

Broke my rigid joint at the back of the pelvis.

It’s five syllables.

Sacroiliac.

Yes, broke my sacroiliac.

Very good.

I was going to say coccyx from the Greek word for cuckoo

Because it’s shaped like a beak, but that doesn’t rhyme.

No, but still, no, it does not rhyme.

Though some of these are near rhymes and not direct rhymes.

Here’s the Sugar Hill Gang Rapper’s Delight, a classic.

Then you throw your hands high in the air.

You rock into the rhythm.

Shake your rear end.

Underwear.

No.

Derriere.

Derriere is correct.

Yeah, shake your derriere.

Here’s run DMC again.

Sucker MCs again.

The rhymes have to make a lot of sense.

You got to know when to start, when the beats begin.

Yes, commence.

Nicely done.

And here’s another.

This one, again, is a near rhyme.

This is Public Enemies Fight the Power.

I’m ready and hyped, plus I’m amped.

Most of my heroes don’t appear on no…

Stamps.

Yes, postage stamps.

Eric B. And Rakim paid in full.

So I start my mission, leave my residence,

Thinking how I can get some…

Presidents.

Dead presidents, yes.

Dead presidents, yeah.

Right.

Cool J. Ladies love Cool James

From Rock the Bells.

You hated Michael and Prince

All the way ever since. If their

Beats were made of mint, then they would have to

Be

Chopped

Finely. Minced.

Yes. Wait, he rhymed

Mince with minced? Mince.

With since. Since, okay.

Sweet. That’s right. You hated Michael

And Prince all the way ever since.

If their beats were made of mint, then they would have

To be mince. Yeah.

Finally, this is Ludacris.

This is not in the top 50, but this is Ludacris anyway from Crybabies.

You punks pucker and pout, bicker and babble.

Now they all lost for words like I beat them in.

Scrabble.

Scrabble, right.

Ludacris, that was fly.

You are my sucker MC, sir.

You are.

Thank you.

And if you don’t know, now you know.

Thanks, John.

Really appreciate it.

Talk to you next week.

Take care, guys.

Bye.

See you then.

877-929-9673.

Hello.

Welcome to A Way with Words.

Hello, this is David calling from Carlsbad, California.

Welcome to the show.

Hi, David.

What’s up?

This might be a little bit of an odd one.

So I’m divorced, and this term ex-wife doesn’t sit well with me.

It kind of feels disrespectful.

And I was wondering if there’s a better word for it.

A better word for ex-wife.

Break that down.

Why does that sound disrespectful?

Maybe it’s the word ex.

Maybe the letter ex.

Like they’ve been X’d out or like it’s not, it doesn’t sound reverent.

And I thought you two might pull up some word that is not commonly, you know, the common vernacular that would resonate better as kind of, you know, someone who, you know, was formerly married to and now good friends.

And everybody is, you know, moving forward in a very, you know, congenial and friendly way.

Right.

Well, you know what?

I completely sympathize with you.

I recently saw my ex of 17 years post something on Facebook and just referred to me.

We’re on very good terms, too.

But she posted something on Facebook and said, my ex.

And I thought, ouch.

It just kind of hurts.

It’s kind of sharp.

Is it too many years of stereotypes of ex-wives, you know, on sitcoms and stand-up comedians and cartoons and that sort of thing?

For me, I don’t know about you, David, but for me, it’s sort of what you said about the sound of it and just the X crossing somebody out.

And I don’t like saying my X either.

Okay.

What do you say?

You described it perfectly.

Do you just use their name and say?

Yes.

Okay.

That’s what I do is I just use their name and people who know me know the situation and people who don’t.

You know, it’s a question of how much do you want to share with somebody.

David, can you say something like my wife at the time or something like that?

Some other construction that’s just not a name?

Yeah, or the woman I was married to or things like that.

And it’s cumbersome.

Yes, it’s cumbersome.

It’s a phrase instead of a word.

And so I met a woman who uses the word was-bid.

-huh.

But you can’t say it was wife.

No.

Yeah, was-bid.

But do you like was-bid?

It’s a little cutesy.

Yeah, I do.

I do, but it wouldn’t fit for me.

Right.

I’ve got to tell you, David, I don’t have another word for ex-wife that aren’t mean words that people say about their ex-wives.

I don’t have one.

I’ve never had to come up with a term for an ex-wife.

But, you know, at one point you were in love.

I mean, it’s a former partner.

Right.

My old girlfriend is what I used to say.

My old girlfriend.

Yeah, my girlfriend at the time.

The lady I was dating.

So, Grant, I’m thinking when you put the word old, that also has a certain connotation.

Yeah, right.

Right.

But you could say the lady I was dating at the time, the woman I was with, and all these are phrases.

And I was just wondering if there might be one or two words.

And Martha, you described it exactly.

My sentiment’s exactly the ouch.

Yeah.

The search for a single word for things is often an endless road because there’s, although it might be a little less cumbersome,

There’s no guarantee that English has one word for every idea that we can come up with.

And we have to settle for phrases.

Are compounds.

And it’s interesting.

I mean, Grant and I have talked before

About how X is often used in a lot of other languages.

Yeah, that’s right.

Spanish and French, I know,

They just throw X in front of their word

For spouse or husband or wife.

Yeah, Spanish also has Antigua,

Which is related to our word antique.

But it’s kind of the same problem as old girlfriends.

Yeah, right.

My old wife, the previous model.

And you think that maybe those other cultures

Took X from American pop culture?

No, I think they just got it from Latin the same way we did.

So it’s a fairly standard prefix.

So first wife doesn’t work either?

Well, first wife implies there are multiple wives.

Yeah.

Like which one are you on now?

All right.

Well, you know what, David?

This sounds like one of these things that we’re just going to have to throw out to our listeners and crowdsource.

Yeah.

My question for you, David, would you settle for something jokey?

Our listeners tend to come up with portmanteaus and blends that are a little lighthearted.

Or do you want something just straightforward you can use on a day-to-day basis and not really feel guilty about?

Yeah, no, absolutely.

Like, was-been is kind of a little bit jovial.

Yeah.

You know, was-husband.

It’s kind of cute.

Yeah, kind of affectionate.

Because it’s affectionate, it’s silly, it’s whimsical.

And I know that for my guy friends, when they use the word my ex, it’s usually not meant in a friendly, respectful way.

Usually something follows that that I don’t want to repeat on the air.

That’s right.

So we want something warmer for a former wife.

All right.

So what’s a warm term for a former wife?

What’s a nicer way of saying ex-wife?

Let us know, 877-929-9673.

Tell us on Twitter at Wayword, W-A-Y-W-O-R-D, or send your ideas and email to words@waywordradio.org.

And David, we will let you know.

I will listen for suggestions. Thank you.

I look forward to hearing from our listeners on this one.

When we had our discussion before about baby showers for men, Jennifer Acampora was listening to the podcast version of the show.

And she says, I had to press pause during the bit about the dad baby shower and send this email because I found myself shouting at the computer.

It’s a bro bath.

It’s a bro bath.

A dad baby shower has got to be a bro bath.

A bro bath?

Yeah, as opposed to a baby shower.

I have to tell you, too many of these suggestions sound like something that you’ll find as an offering in the back of alternative newspapers.

For a thing you can pay money to have done to you.

Like a man shower.

Yeah.

It does not sound like something I want to do with my friends.

You can do it yourself, but I’m not going to be involved in that.

I don’t know.

I kind of like bro bath.

Bro bath.

But why the word bath?

Just because it’s got the B?

A lot of people suggested baby storm as opposed to a shower because it’s somehow more macho.

Masculine.

But I kind of like bro bath.

Because you wouldn’t do a baby misting for, right?

Baby fog.

877-929-9673.

Hi there.

You have A Way with Words.

Hello.

My name is Kevin.

I’m calling from San Diego, California.

Hi, Kevin.

Welcome to the show.

What’s up?

Here in the San Diego-Tijuana border region, I’ve noticed that there’s what you call Spanglish, right?

And I was wondering if anywhere else in the world with different languages, did that phenomenon occur?

Do you speak Spanglish yourself?

I mean, yes and no.

It’s like when you talk to somebody that’s also kind of a transporter person,

Where they commute back and forth, it’s like it’ll slip up once in a while,

Or you switch either, like, you use grammar in English, but speak Spanish words, or vice versa.

Or just, I mean, it can be a mix of anything.

Yeah, so your question is, does this occur anywhere else in the world?

Well, the first thing is, it occurs all over the United States.

It’s this idea of Spanglish, which is usually a Spanish grammar structure with English words on top of it,

Still having a lot of Spanish words with some English ones thrown in.

Exist, obviously, in California, in Texas, in Florida, New York, and other places where Spanish speakers live and work.

Puerto Rico, of course.

What’s interesting to me is that these Spanglishes tend to be a little different.

They adopt different words at different times and in different ways and for different reasons.

Although there are some consistencies like in the construction trades, for example, and in kitchens, in the restaurant business, those tend to have some fairly standard borrowings from English into Spanish that are widely used across the country.

But that is all to say is that it’s really not unusual in the rest of the world to have this happen.

In the rest of the world, there are the language proximity like in Europe and Africa and Asia.

People tend to speak a couple of languages at least just as a matter of where that they live and work.

And it’s only in the United States where this seems really unusual,

Since so many of us are monolingual.

Okay, so like this happens with other languages all over the world?

Yeah, it does.

Although what’s interesting is they tend to learn the languages thoroughly.

So if you live, say, in Denmark, you probably speak Danish and English

And probably some German as well, and you don’t speak them piecemeal.

You learn them in school, you learn them through travel, you learn them from reading and watching media, that sort of thing. So you have them thoroughly, and so you don’t necessarily have to mix them as much.

Kevin, I’m wondering when you’re explaining to people about Spanglish, are there specific examples, favorite examples that you use? No, because for people like me that maybe work from Mexico and then they ended up growing for most of the time in the U.S. and went to school here, they’ll use things like use parking and then instead of saying the correct Spanish work, which is estacionarse, they’ll use parqueando.

-huh, parqueando. Mm— Right. And do you say things like likeyar instead of to like, like if you like something on Facebook in Spanish? I don’t because since I travel to Mexico a lot, like I would get chained. Oh, gotcha. If I started speaking like that. Right. So you’ve got to control that. If you go back to Mexico, you can’t be throwing in all these half Spanish words. No, no. And I go, I commute like at least once or twice a week. So it keeps me on my toes.

Yeah. By the way, there’s a really great book on Spanglish, which I recommend by Ilan Stavans. It’s called Spanglish, The Making of a New American Language. That’s Stavans, S-T-A-V-A-N-S. Oh, okay. Thank you so much. I’ll look it up. Yeah, sure. All right. Thanks, Kevin. Really appreciate it. Thank you. Bye. Bye. Bye-bye.

877-929-9673. Grant, the other day I came across a proverb in Hindi that I really like. It translates as one and one make eleven. And the idea is unity is strength. Isn’t that cool? Oh, right. It’s like the bundle of sticks, right? The bundle of sticks? The old fable about one stick is easily broken, but you bundle them together and they’re hard to break.

I never heard that fable. How did I miss that fable? I think it was a fable. Wasn’t it a fable? I guess it is. A father’s advice to his sons about why they should stick together. No, I never heard that, but I like it a lot. One and one make 11. You’re stronger together than you are alone. Perfect.

877-929-9673. Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hi, this is Courtney. I’m calling in from San Diego. Hey, Courtney, welcome. So my question is about acronyms. When looking into it, I learned that acronyms and initialisms are quite different. Basically that acronyms are the words like RAM or NASA or OPEC are actually spelling themselves out, but that initialisms are the ones that like FBI and CIA that are just pronounced as their letters, which I found interesting that initialisms are not technically acronyms.

And my question for you guys is, when did the period in between the letters seem to go away? And what is there a hard and fast rule for having a period between the letters in either acronyms or initialisms? Oh, that’s a great question. So why, when we write the word NATO, don’t we usually put periods between the letters? And the periods serve to remind us of what has been abbreviated, what has been left out, right? They’re kind of placeholders.

Like when we do contractions, the word can’t, that apostrophe represents all the letters we’ve removed to smush these two other words together. And the word NATO or CBS, when we use periods between the letters, it just says we took the rest of the word out. We’re only using the first letter. Actually, every major style guy that I know says to not use the periods if the acronym or initialism is in all capitals.

So the only cases where, for example, the Chicago Manual of Style says to use the periods is when the last letter is lowercase. For example, when we write aka, meaning also known as, we use the periods. Or if we write Dr. Dr., we would use a period after the R. Now, this is only in North America, mind you, and mostly in the United States of America, because in the UK, they have a long history of not using the periods even after words like Dr. or Mrs., MRS. They just don’t do it.

And even further, if a word is pronounceable, that is, if it’s an actual acronym, they may actually only capitalize the first letter and write it as capital N, lowercase a, lowercase s, lowercase a, NASA. Very interesting and confusing. I haven’t done an exhaustive research into the timing on this, but I really start to see this fully and firmly take hold in the 1970s. The late 1960s, early 1970s, we really start to see these periods disappear.

And if you look across the history of the printed word, typography has often been a moving target. It kind of comes and goes in fads, almost like fashion or the jokes of the day. We move together as a body and we decide kind of by pure group action to do something or to not do something. Of course, we see this happening online as well. And that’s really by the 1970s, you see these periods drop out and they start disappearing from style guides as well.

The other place that you see these periods, I’m guessing here that you might have a little bit of the illusion, the recency illusion that this period dropping was more recent than it actually is, is that we’re usually taught as kids to use the periods when we’re first taught about these kinds of acronyms and initialisms. And then later we’re taught as older, more educated writers that it’s okay to drop them. Does that make sense? That makes sense.

Because in the very beginning, you need those periods there in order to make it very clear that we’re doing some kind of complicated abbreviating. Cool. Well, Courtney, thank you so much for the call. Really appreciate it. Thank you so much. Take care now. Thanks, Courtney. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye. Call us with your language question, 877-929-9673. Why we say what we say. Stay tuned for more of A Way with Words. You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett. And I’m Martha Barnette.

When someone’s buried, you can go to the cemetery. But what do you call a place where you’ve scattered someone’s ashes? This question came up recently on our Facebook group when John said that he scattered his father’s ashes along a trail and he has a hard time. He stumbles over how exactly to describe that. He can’t really say, I’m going to see my father’s grave or something like that.

Some people on the site suggested something like Memorial Park or Memorial Trail. And that makes a lot of sense to me. Yeah, or final resting place, that kind of thing. But then you wonder if there’s a body out there, not just ashes. Yeah, I mean, it’s kind of hard to talk about, but I think more and more we’re going to need to be able to talk about it.

It’s gotten me to thinking about the fact that I’ve always had this fantasy of being scattered in more than one place. You know, a lot of people want to be scattered in lots of different places. Because you hike high spots throughout Southern California. Yeah, well, and North Carolina. I mean, I have this idea of being scattered in California and North Carolina along a couple of my favorite trails.

And I don’t know. I guess I would want people to go to Martha’s spot. Right. And we had some suggestions that were similar to that, right? Some people talking about their own family stories. Yeah. We had a couple of those. Like Kelly said, we scattered grandmama’s ashes in the ocean near Ocean Isle Beach in North Carolina. We call that place visiting with grandmama spirit, which I kind of like.

And Monica said, my mother-in-law wanted her ashes scattered on a hill on our property. We now refer to that as Joanne’s Hill. And I like that idea. I do too. I like the personal naming the place and you wonder if it will stick, right? Yeah. Yeah. And I also like visiting with somebody’s spirit. You know, but it’s really different when you start thinking about ashes.

I mean, I didn’t go to my mother’s grave site for a year because I thought it would be too traumatizing for me. We were very close, and it was really hard to think about. But I’m so comforted that it’s there. And I like being able to say I’m going to go visit my parents’ grave. But I don’t know about ashes. Ashes feel like they become a part of the environment and the world around us.

Yeah, so how do you differentiate that in a way?

That’s a good question.

If you have a name that you use for a place that you’ve scattered someone’s ashes, let us know.

Let us know how you came up with it and what it is.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Andrew from Madison, Wisconsin.

Welcome, Andrew. What can we do for you?

There was another interviewer on another radio show interviewing Paul Anthony Jones, who had written a book called The Accidental Dictionary, where he was studying how the definitions of words have changed.

And one of the specific things that he brought up, but he didn’t elaborate on that I was curious about, was he talked about how only about 200 or 300 years ago did we start using the term boy and girl to reference children.

Before that time, boy wasn’t really used in that connotation.

It was used as sort of like servant or to refer to like a knave or like a wild person or something.

And then girl was sort of a unisex term, which could mean like a dress or like swaddling clothes.

So what my question was is that if this is true, then movies and books and stuff that referred to children as boy and girl before that time are historically inaccurate.

So I’d like to know how were children referred to in the Middle Ages and before that?

You’ve got a great memory for this stuff. You’ve pretty much laid it out.

So just to summarize, boy didn’t really mean young male child until around the early 1400s.

Before that, it meant a variety of other things having to do with servants or people who helped around or slaves.

And girl, for a long time, and even occasionally now in Ireland, referred to a young person of either gender.

But a girl was also used for other things, slaves and that sort of thing.

And that happened around similar dates, around the 1300s to 1400s, it switched over to be a young female person.

What’s really interesting about this is that this is normal language change, but it always amazes people.

And I’ve seen some people make the misassumption that meant that children weren’t seen as unique or standing alone from their adults before that.

But that’s not true.

We did call them things.

If you look in the Oxford Historical Thesaurus, which is a wonderful, it exactly solves the problem that you’re asking me.

You can look up all the words over time for a young male child and all the words over time for a young female child.

You will see that there were words such as knight, exactly K-N-I-G-H-T, or knave, as you mentioned, page, bird even.

Sometimes they were called man, although it was understood with context what they were referring to.

Knave bairn, which means boy child.

Little man, man child, and then by the early 1400s, boy came along.

Girl was similar.

You’ve heard a lot of these if you’ve read any fantasy fiction, maiden or wench or lass.

All of these terms were widely used and then your other question was are these books and movies and so forth anachronistic if they are set in a time before boy and girl were used to refer to you know boys and girls and I would say that they’re not anachronistic because you write these bits of entertainment in our current vernacular we don’t write them in the language of the period we throw a little bit of color in there but frankly nobody would watch a show that was done completely in Middle English, right?

Yeah, that is a good point.

You find knave and wench widely used in the reenactment communities.

You say people could do Renaissance fairs and that sort of thing.

Yeah, and knave goes way, way back to Old English.

In Old English, they would call boys knaffa.

Knaffa, yeah, and that’s the old pronunciation of the word, right?

Yeah, yeah, and it’s related to the German word now for boy, knaffa.

But it does blow people’s minds when they hear that the word girl also referred to boys for a long time and occasionally still does in Ireland under certain contexts.

Thank you so much for giving me some more insight into these questions.

Yeah, sure.

And like I said, the best work when you want to do these historical diggings, and this is something I recommend to novelists, is the Oxford Historical Thesaurus.

Many libraries have access to it through the Oxford English Dictionary.

It’s quite amazing to see these words slowly morph, the pronunciations change over time, the spellings change, new words come in, old words push out, words become more specialized or they become broader.

It’s really wonderful.

Thank you.

I collect reference books.

I will look for it.

Yeah, add that one to your collection.

Thanks for calling, Andrew.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Send your language questions to words@waywordradio.org.

Another thought about baby showers for men.

We heard from Patricia Green, who said, a friend’s family had a tradition of having all the men in the family crash the baby shower dressed in women’s clothes.

It was started by her grandfather, and she said that the pictures were hilarious.

I bet, yeah.

Yeah, but that sort of is what we were talking about before.

Just include everybody, right?

Right, right.

Although there’s still the feminine idea of a man in a woman’s clothes, right?

Yeah, well, maybe all the women should dress up as men.

Sure, why not?

Those pictures would be great.

But everybody being there because part of it is just it’s the whole story of remembering who gave you what.

You need two brains for that sometimes, right?

Also, it’s a family thing really, right?

It’s about the little family being started or launching.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I really like the idea now that you mentioned it about the men dressing up as women and the women dressing up as men.

And then what do you call that party?

Now we have another question to throw out.

It’s a baby party.

Baby shower.

I don’t know.

Everyone wants it to be clever, and sometimes I just want it to be plain.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Just baby party.

Just bring diapers, please.

Right, right.

Sign me up.

Amazon subscription.

New box of diapers every week.

Car seat, stroller, bring it.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Oh, this is Scott.

I’m calling from Tampa.

Welcome to the show, Scott.

Hey, Scott.

What’s going on?

A couple of weeks ago, I was talking to my mom, and I heard her use an expression that I had never heard her, or anybody else for that matter, say before.

And it really surprised me, you know, after 34 years of life here, and you think you know a person, you know.

She and my dad, they had invited my 17-year-old nephew to an event, to one of those monster truck rallies, something like that.

And they did not invite his younger sister, my niece.

They didn’t think she would be interested.

But apparently, when she found out that her brother had been invited and she had not, according to my mom, this is the phrase, she got her nose out of joint.

And I was able to pick up the meaning by context.

You know, obviously, she was upset.

And I said, where did that come from?

I’ve never heard you say that before.

Or, oh, it’s something my mom used to always say.

But I’ve never heard my grandmother say it either.

So I was hoping you could tell me a little more about it.

Well, sure.

And so the basic idea was that she was unhappy, right?

Right.

Yeah, and it sort of gives you a visual, doesn’t it, of somebody with their face kind of painfully askew or damaged or something like that?

Yeah, it doesn’t sound terribly pleasant.

And that’s the basic idea.

I’ve seen early versions of this that may make more sense.

Somebody had their nose out of socket, you know, that I’m going to pull on your nose and pull it out of socket.

But, yeah, sort of the same idea.

Well, there’s a couple of things about this.

Some of the older dictionaries, let’s say in the 1800s, suggest that there may be Gaelic roots to this.

There’s a word N-O-S, which I presume is pronounced similar to nose, which means customer habit.

And so there’s this old meaning of this, which kind of fits your circumstance, where let’s say that you were the favorite of someone powerful.

Let’s say that the lord of the town made you his pet and gave you all kinds of money and help and whatever.

But then he had a new pet and a favorite, and you were kind of thrown by the wayside.

You would have your nose out of joint.

Or let’s say that you were dating someone and got replaced.

You got replaced.

You didn’t have your nose out of joint.

So it’s really about falling out of favor with someone.

And so that kind of fits really nicely.

I don’t know if there’s anything to this Gaelic origin, but it’s a really interesting theory.

And I looked it up in a bunch of dictionaries, and sure enough, there’s a word in-O-S in Gaelic.

But again, I’m not sure how it’s pronounced.

And it doesn’t explain the word joints, which might just be a multilingual kind of pun or an add-on there, just to kind of make it fit into English.

But I’m interested, Scott, that you could figure it out from the context.

Yeah. I mean, you know, it made sense.

Yeah, something that you didn’t really want to look at.

So it definitely goes back a little bit in time there.

Oh, 1500s, easily.

Hey, Scott, thanks so much for calling.

Oh, yeah.

Thank you guys for putting some light on that.

Sure, a pleasure.

Sure thing.

Thanks, bud.

Bye-bye.

All right, take care.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

Charlie Pierce from Devon in England wanted to weigh in on the question of a male version of a baby shower.

And he wrote, in the UK, we have a tradition of taking a new dad out for one last hurrah.

And we call it wetting the baby’s head.

I’ve heard of this.

Have you?

Yeah.

Does it involve a trip to the pub and copious amounts of alcohol, like he said?

Yes, it does.

Oh, really? Wetting the baby’s head?

And the expecting father is not supposed to buy any rounds.

He should never get stuck buying a round.

Okay.

But wedding, the baby’s had, it’s a very good tradition, right?

Here we have, after the fact, the cheap cigars.

Is that even done anymore?

I hope not.

Do people actually do that?

Like the yellow?

Yeah, I don’t know.

Well, that’s after the baby’s born, right?

Right, yeah.

I’m just trying to think of those male stereotyped traditions.

The bonding, yeah.

I was so busy after my son was born.

There was no time for anything.

Like for the first week, a week and a half, I did all of the baby’s stuff except for the nursing, you know?

Well, the way Charles is describing it, it’s one less hurrah right before the baby is born.

Yeah.

But still, like, the weeks before you’re expecting the baby, it’s all busy, man.

You are building a nest.

Maybe they have a tradition for expectant fathers where you’re from.

Let us know, 877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is David calling from San Diego.

How are you today?

Hi, David.

Welcome to the show.

Hey, David, what are you thinking about in terms of language?

I have a saying that I’ve been saying since seventh grade when I was in Mr. Plum’s class in junior high.

And that saying is chop, chop, wiki, wiki.

And I’ve never heard it from anybody except for him, but it’s made its way into my vocabulary.

And now that I’ve got kids of my own, I’m coaching kids in soccer, and I want them to hurry up.

I say, chop, chop, wiki, wiki.

And one of the kids asked me the other day, coach, what does that mean?

I thought about it.

I’m like, you know, it means hurry up.

But I don’t know where it comes from.

So let me go ask the experts.

And here we are.

What did they say?

Yeah, that’s an interesting combination, chop, chop, wiki, wiki.

Because are you familiar with chop, chop at all for hurry up?

Yeah, I’ve heard people say chop, chop.

And I kind of assumed it was just, you want to make dinner chop-chop in your chop-chopping dinner.

On the cutting board, huh?

No, chop-chop has been around in the language for a couple hundred years.

Borrowed from Chinese, from Cantonese, where a similar-sounding word means quick or fast.

And, in fact, the same root is in our word chopsticks.

I guess the idea is that you’re using them quickly or nimbly, right? Chopsticks.

And what is that Chinese word?

It sounds like chop-chop.

There’s one, it depends.

It’s hard to Romanize these, but K-U-A-I is a rough approximation of the word.

So it looks like kawaii.

It happens twice.

It’s a reduplication, which means more of the same.

So it’s kind of like kawaii, kawaii, or chop-chop.

But obviously there’s some dialect for things happening there, and I don’t pronounce Chinese at all.

Right, so we don’t know.

Kind of like double happiness.

You do it twice to emphasize it.

Sure, exactly.

So it was borrowed by the British during their time in Asia and brought into British English and then came into American English.

And we’ve kept it ever since.

And the wiki wiki is interesting, too.

That’s a Hawaiian word that means quick.

Same thing, though.

The wiki alone means quick or haste.

And then you double it to mean more of the same.

In fact, there’s a bus that leaves the airport in, I think it’s Honolulu.

That’s the wiki wiki bus.

And we have records of that being part of the Hawaiian language for almost just as long, a couple hundred years.

You can find it in really old dictionaries of missionaries who’ve gone to Hawaii.

So I’m wondering what Mr. Plum, what his background was.

Was he in the military or anything like that?

He was a history teacher.

Oh, so maybe just in his reading, he’s being like a learned man, right?

But why would they go together?

Well, that’s why I was asking about the military, because both of these terms appear again and again in military slang dictionaries.

It is the kind of thing that you might have picked up as part of the lingo of being a soldier if you served, for example, in Hawaii at the base there or if you served overseas in countries where they speak Chinese.

Interesting.

So I wouldn’t be surprised if he, for example, was in the Korean War or if he was in World War II and he just picked it up as a soldier.

And now you’re passing it along to your soccer players.

And do you have any other notations of where they’ve been used together?

Well, no, but the wiki is the same wiki as in Wikipedia.

Right.

Oh.

Yeah.

I guess thinking about it, 30 years ago, there was no Wikipedia.

That’s right.

Yeah, originally it was called the WikiWikiWeb and then later altered to Wikipedia.

Because you could change it quickly.

Yeah.

Cool.

Yeah, right?

Well, wonderful.

Well, thank you, guys.

That’s really fascinating.

Glad to help.

David, thank you so much for your call.

Thank you.

Have a great day.

All right.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

You know the term gay water?

I’ve seen this in South Carolina.

Gay water.

Is this like a rapids or a lot of white froth on it?

Good guess, but it’s more like white lightning.

Oh, makes you gay.

Makes you happy.

Makes you happy.

Yeah, gay water is a term that means moonshine.

Moonshine.

Some kind of illegal…

The old meaning of gay.

Yeah.

The happy meaning of gay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And the alcohol meaning of water.

Put your spirits up.

Right.

Pass me some of that gay water.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

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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.