High Jinks (episode #1619)

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

And I’m Martha Barnette.

Yael messaged us from Israel with a great slang term, and it translates as a kit bag question.

Now, in Israel, a kit bag is a soldier’s duffel bag, and it contains lots of supplies.

So imagine a troop in basic training, and they’ve just been told to run laps or do some other kind of challenging drill.

And one of the soldiers asks, are we supposed to be carrying our kit bags while doing that?

And the officer, of course, replies, you know what?

Yeah, yeah, carry your kit bags.

So a kit bag question is the kind of question that carries a consequence you might otherwise have avoided.

Oh, yes.

And you all know those kind of people.

And they get consequences when the officer is not around later from their peers.

Maybe they get their dessert yanked from them in the mess hall or something worse.

Yeah, well, yeah, Al says that this has been carried over from the military into everyday situations.

So it’s sort of like, you know, class is about to dismiss and the kid pipes up.

Do we have homework today?

Oh, yeah.

Weren’t you going to give us a quiz?

Oh, that’s the worst kit bag question.

And I think that makes a lot of sense that it would migrate from the military to everyday culture because military service is mandatory in Israel.

Right, right.

Yeah.

So Kitbeg question is the English translation of the original Hebrew.

Right.

Sheilat Kitbeg.

Yael contacted us via WhatsApp from Israel, and you can reach us via WhatsApp, too.

You can find that number on our contact page at waywordradio.org.

We would love to hear from you.

Hi there.

You have A Way with Words.

Hello, good morning.

Hello.

This is Rodrigo Ortega.

Where are you calling from?

Tucson, Arizona.

What’s on your mind today?

You know, when I first came to the States about 30-some years ago,

I decided that I wanted to fit in.

So I left Mexico, came to Denver, Colorado,

And I looked for a book to help me use slang

Because I wanted to be like a cool guy.

I was 22 years at the time.

And I started using the slang.

Believe it or not, there was a book for slang.

And I didn’t check the date on the book.

So I’m walking around, going to the bar, finding a cute girl and telling her, gee whiz, you’re beautiful.

I never noticed that the book was written in 1945.

So all my slang was a little out of date.

So I found myself, well, actually everybody looked at me and I thought it was my accent.

And it turned out that it was the slang I was using because it was never appropriate.

I used all kinds of multiple slangs until somebody says, where are you getting these words from?

I got this full book and they said, have you checked the date?

I’m like, oh, I felt like I was traveling back in time, like back to the future, you know?

So I’m curious where that gig wheeze came from.

I’m just imagining some women might be charmed by that, by a man using old-fashioned slang.

Yeah, you’re the cat’s pajamas.

Well, it kind of worked, but maybe not the way I intended.

Yeah.

Yeah, G-Wiz is old, though.

It’s much older than that.

I was wondering if your slang dictionary was from the 1860s, because that’s how old G-Wiz is.

Oh, my God.

You know, and then I said, where did I come from that one?

You know, and they were unusual books.

It happened that my father in Mexico had an extensive library, and I found that in the library in my home, and that’s where I took it from.

But I never thought that, you know, slides kind of change with times.

Oh, yeah, it changes every generation, or more often than that even.

There are a whole bunch of terms like gee whiz that begin with gee, but gee whiz itself probably is a shortening of an older one, gee whittaker, which has got a lot of forms, including gee willigans.

And that is probably a form of using Jerusalem as a very mild swear word or mild imprecation or by Jerusalem.

And all of these are what are known as minced oaths, which we’ve talked about on the show before.

And minced oaths are about swearing but not swearing.

You don’t want to say something truly offensive.

So you find a way to get that urge to swear out of your system without actually swearing.

So you try not to take the, you know, God’s name or Jesus’ name in vain.

So you say something else that’s similar but isn’t that.

So, gee whiz sounds a little like the beginning of Jesus.

You know, it sounds a little bit like the G in God.

Oh, okay.

Well, that kind of makes sense.

So, what do you say now when you see a beautiful woman, Rodrigo?

I say, hello, honey, I’m home.

Hello, honey, I’m home.

If I say anything else, I’ll be trouble.

Well done.

Well done.

Yes, you’ll appreciate that.

Give our best to the beautiful woman at home, and thank you so much for calling.

I appreciate you guys. Love your show. Thanks for having me. Bye.

All right, take care of yourself.

Thanks, Rodrigo.

You’re probably thinking right now, gee whiz, I should call Martin Grant.

And gee golly, you should. 877-929-9673.

And if you’re not in the United States, that number works in Canada.

It’s toll-free there, too.

And if you’re somewhere else outside of North America, including Mexico, gee, have we got lots of ways to reach us.

You can find them all on our website at waywordradio.org/contact.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Erica calling from Traverse City, Michigan.

Hello, Erica. Welcome to the show.

Hi, Erica.

Hi, thank you.

So, I have a license plate, a vanity plate that I made hijinks.

My definition of hijinks is a lot of fun.

I also work at a library, so it’s outside the library a lot, and I get a lot of questions once patrons realize that that’s my car.

And most of them ask me why I’m saying hi to jinx, or they’ll come in and say, hi, jinx.

Or they’ll say, like, hi, jinx, you owe me a pop.

And I don’t know.

It’s a weird thing, the different, I don’t know what people think it means, I guess.

So your license plate says hijinks.

How do you spell it?

H-I-J-I-N-K-S.

Okay, gotcha.

For you, it means lots of fun.

Lots of fun.

Lots of fun.

Yeah.

Well, it sounds like lots of fun.

And you work in a library.

Are you a librarian?

Technically, no, but yes.

Okay, gotcha.

But you work in a library, so bravo to you.

I do.

Some of our favorite people work in libraries.

I work at Circulation.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Gotcha.

So I see lots of people come in and out.

And it’s a small library, so everybody kind of gets to know the librarians that are there.

So let’s recap here.

You spent money and took time and thought to put a word on your license plate that you don’t know what it means.

And now you’re questioning yourself.

You have doubts.

After raising all this ruckus in your library, you’re wondering what you got yourself into.

I think I know what it means.

I think it means a lot of fun.

I have four kids.

So I have a kind of a larger car.

And when they were littler, you know, we would go out and have hijinks, like a lot of fun.

Yeah, you’re pretty much on the money.

I mean, it means boisterous horsing around or wild antics.

It sounds like you get into some of those.

Right.

And it’s a wonderful word that is spelled the way you spell it.

Sometimes it’s got a little hyphen in there or it’s spelled as two words, H-I-G-H-J-I-N-K-S.

And the word actually goes back to, maybe you’ll appreciate this, it goes back to the late 17th century where it referred to drinking games,

Usually really wild drinking games that often involved dice.

You know, you would fill up a mug and somebody yells hijinks,

And then you roll the dice and whoever has the number that comes up has to take a drink.

And there are lots of variations about it.

If you forget to yell hijinks, for example, you might have to pay up.

Or if you refuse a drink, you might have to pay up.

And as you can imagine, these games would get increasingly loud and increasingly boisterous.

And hijinks may be related to a Scottish word, jink, which means to turn quickly or move nimbly to one side or to dodge somebody like on the sidewalk.

And it also came to mean a trick in the high in hijinks may have to do with an old word that means to call in a loud voice.

So you’re sort of summoning people to activity.

OK.

Erica, do you get reactions when you’re on the road, too?

That’s what I’m wondering.

There was one, I’m trying to think of a synonym to hijinks.

There was a person following me and I stopped at a rest stop and they followed me in and they had sort of a synonym on their license plate.

We said we should probably go on vacation together, but I can’t remember exactly what the synonym was.

Maybe roomies.

But Martha, those drinking games changed by the 1800s, right?

They became more like a dare game where you kind of dared people to do a prank or a stunt.

And if they didn’t, they had to take a drink.

They might have to become a particular character, like act it out or recite these verses of a particular kind.

Yeah, yeah.

They just got increasingly active.

They had to recite what are called fessinine verses.

That is, that is scurrilous or obscene.

And if they messed them up, set them out of order or with mistakes, then they had to take a drink.

So it’s sort of a drinking game.

Well, that’s good.

I’m glad I associated my children with it.

Yeah, yeah.

Sounds like good parenting.

Yeah, it covers a lot of activities.

But Erica, thank you so much for bringing your hijinks to our show.

As if we don’t have enough, we appreciate it.

Right.

Well, thank you for being interested.

I’ll get back to what I was doing.

But thanks so much.

Bye-bye.

Yes.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Yep.

Bye.

Fescenine.

Isn’t that a great word, Martha?

I love the word Fescenine.

It’s a toponym, isn’t it?

Yeah.

It’s F-E-S-C-E-N-N-I-N-E.

It’s Latin from the town of Fescenium, which was an ancient town in Etruria, Italy, which was known for its ribald songs and verses.

There’s these kind of offensive songs and verses about the famous people and activities of the day.

Fessinine.

That’s a great word.

Fessinine.

Well, get up to hijinks with us.

Call us, 877-929-9673.

Or you can contact us by email, words@waywordradio.org.

More about language and how we use it as A Way with Words continues.

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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 that handsome fellow, our quiz guide, John Janeski in New York.

Hi, John.

Hi, Grant.

Hi, Martha.

How are you?

Hey, John.

Looking good.

What’s up?

Thank you very much.

I’ll wager someday someone with way too much time in their hands, probably me, will compile all the quizzes I’ve created, and they’ll find that each of them falls into one of only about half a dozen different types.

Now, the following quiz is what I call a synonymic puzzle, synonyms.

I’ve taken a compound word that is a word composed of two or more smaller words like sunflower, and I’ve replaced each of the two constituent words with a synonym and then used it in a sentence.

For example, if I use sunflower, the result could be something like, while pretty, the bouquet was dominated by a rather large star blossom.

And we’ve got star for sun and blossom for flower.

So a star blossom is a sunflower.

Got it?

Yeah.

Beautiful.

Good.

Thanks.

Now, I think it’ll be pretty obvious what the transformed compound word is in each sentence, and you can use textual clues to figure out the answer.

Note that these are closed compound words.

They do not use a space or a hyphen.

Okay?

Here we go.

During my run for state senate, I made sure to put my face on a check plank facing my opponent’s headquarters.

Check plank?

Check plank.

So that would be a billboard.

A billboard, yes.

Check for bill and plank for board.

Very good.

These wireless headphones are not working.

I think there’s something wrong with the sad canine.

The sad canine.

The dog something.

These wireless, the Bluetooth.

Bluetooth, yes.

What is the matter with the Bluetooth here?

That was tricky.

Some of these are a little tricky with the way the synonyms have been chosen.

Okay.

I will always love you if you are also a fan of my favorite Kevin Costner film, The Carcass Defender.

Oh, Whitney.

She was a gem.

Yeah.

The Bodyguard.

Bodyguard is right.

I’ve never told you about my three siblings.

My sister is a teacher.

My one brother is a pyre pugilist, and my other brother is in law enforcement.

Oh, my sister, by the way, went to Montclair University on a Fluffy Orb scholarship.

Yay, Title IX.

Fluffy Orb?

Fluffy Orb.

Fluffy Orb.

So she played on a team with eight other teammates, I guess, huh?

Yeah, she certainly did.

Yeah, on the field.

Softball.

Softball, that’s right.

Fluffy Orb softball.

Very good.

Summer, summer fruits, it wouldn’t be summer without cantaloupe, nectar condensate, or plums.

Nectar condensate?

Oh, honeydew.

Honeydew.

Honeydew, yes, very good.

It was May of 1983 when we all saw the dance move called the Satellite Stroll for the first time.

Before that, it was called the Backslide.

Moonwalk.

The moonwalk.

Moonwalk is right.

This one now is a double.

Two words, okay?

Don’t post your gross photos on Visage Tome.

I don’t want to see your weird digit Brad.

Brad.

Visage Tome.

Visage Tome is up to Facebook.

And what’s the last one?

I don’t want to see your weird digit Brad.

Brad.

Finger?

Yeah.

Finger Brad?

Finger nail.

Finger nail.

Yeah, fingernail.

A Brad is another word for a nail.

Very good.

Okay.

All right.

Those are my compound synonyms.

They sure are.

Deep dive into the mind of John Chaneski once a week on A Way with Words.

Wow.

Unfortunately.

Give our best to the family, and we’ll talk to you next week.

Thank you, guys.

You too.

Talk to you then.

Bye-bye.

We love talking with you about language as well, so call us, 877-929-9673, or send your stories to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Leah from Atlanta, Georgia.

Hey, Leah, welcome to the show. What can we do for you?

Well, I’m glad to be here. I listen a lot.

And I am here because, and so is my friend Aaron, because we were talking a little while ago, and he gave me a saying that apparently his mother had said to him that I’d never heard before, which was, if you don’t chance your arm, you’ll never break your neck.

And I said, what?

And we talked about that for a while.

And he told me that it’s kind of, as in his understanding, kind of a nothing ventured, nothing gained.

But I had certainly never heard this saying before.

And I really don’t know why you would want to chance your arm to break your neck at all.

I agree with you.

Yeah.

Did your friend have any other explanation for it?

Well, would you like to talk with him and find out from him what he knows?

Sure.

Let me pass you to Erin.

Hello, this is Erin.

Hi, Erin.

So this is an expression your mother used?

Yes, yes.

She’s used it, gosh, for decades as far as I can go back.

And she’s never been able to explain to me, you know, I would frequently ask her, why would I want to break my neck?

Gotcha. And you’re not American, I hear?

No, I’m originally born in Wales.

The rest of the family is Irish, and we spent some time there in Ireland.

Hence the strange hodgepodge of an accent you’re getting.

Zia, what’s interesting about this expression, the earliest use of it that I know of in print is actually from Ireland.

In the 1930s, there was some folklore gathered from schoolchildren, and one of those school children had this expression in full.

If you don’t chance your arm, you won’t break your neck.

But I think what Leah is missing here is that the break your neck isn’t a literal break your neck.

It’s the idea of to go all out.

This is a rarer idiomatic use of break one’s neck.

It means to make the maximum possible effort to do something.

So the whole expression has this nuanced meaning of if you never try, then you’ll never go all the way.

So that’s what’s missing here is that the first part we all kind of get, chance means to risk.

So if you don’t take a risk is what chance your arm means.

And that expression, that idiomatic expression exists on its own.

Chance your arm is very old, goes back to the 1860s.

But the last part, that’s a rarer idiom that is rarely used today.

Although you might hear somebody say, I risked my neck for you, or I put my neck out for you is a more common way to phrase it.

I did everything I could for you.

So it’s more positive.

Yeah, it’s a positive.

Yeah.

To break one’s neck and put one’s neck out means to take a chance or to go all out.

Right.

No, that totally makes sense.

And given my mother’s age, she was born in the 1930s.

So she would have been hearing that then as a child, probably when she was growing up.

Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely.

And there’s a couple of strange stories about the possible origins of to chance your arm, although they’re all kind of dubious.

But the one that I think bears repeating because it is actually on the website of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin. Supposedly there were two Irish families in the 15th century who were fighting over the very plum position of Lord Deputy in Dublin because there were a lot of perks with that position. They were literally fighting involving weapons, not just words. And one of the families took refuge in the chapter house of St. Patrick’s Cathedral there in Dublin.

And the leader of their opponents was seeking peace.

And so he ordered that a hole be cut in a door.

And he risked losing his arm by putting his hands in his arm through that hole in hopes that it would be taken for a handshake and not cut off.

So people claim, including the cathedral, claim that that is the origins of chance your arm.

However, I doubt this.

It’s a very Dublin thing to do, I have to say.

Yeah, a bit of blather to invent an origin story.

Yes, I think so too.

And the main problem being that there’s 300 years between that event and the first appearance of chance your arm in print.

So that 300 years is a big question mark.

Why did it take so long to appear?

It’s a fun story.

And the door actually exists.

You can actually go to St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin and see the door.

So I don’t doubt the story.

I just doubt that it’s the origin of the phrase.

-huh.

Okay.

That makes a lot of sense.

You can pass it on to Leah and tell her that the part that she was missing was that break your neck means to go all out and to do your utmost.

So it sounds like good advice, actually.

That makes sense.

And certainly it fits in the context of which my mother is usually using it.

So, yeah.

Well, thank you for shining some light on that strange expression.

Yeah, our pleasure.

Take care of yourself.

You both give us a call again sometime, all right?

All right. Lovely. Thanks so much.

Bye now.

All right. Bye-bye.

Thanks, Aaron.

What’s the word or phrase that’s puzzling you?

Call us about it, 877-929-9673.

Toll free in the U.S. and Canada.

Or find out other ways to get in touch with us.

Go to waywordradio.org/contact.

Grant, remember our conversation about the expression, do you live around here or ride a bicycle?

Yes, this is the kind of goofy thing you say to befuddle other people.

Yes.

We’ve been hearing from a lot of listeners about other examples they’ve heard.

Bryn Holt in Helena, Montana, said that around there they say, is it further to Butte or by bus?

Further to Butte or by bus.

And that’s got some assonance and alliteration to it.

It does. It’s very nice. But it still makes me do a double take. You know, what?

What? That’s good. Was it further to the phone or call us? 877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Mike Miller from Madison, Wisconsin. And my wife and I were watching Sandra Bullock as a guest on, I think, Jimmy Fallon, The Tonight Show.

And she was asked what she likes to do.

And she said, oh, you know, I love to go out and walk just before it rains or during the rain or after the rain to, you know, to get a sniff of the petrichor.

And my wife and I looked at each other and went, petrichor, you know, what in the world is that?

And so what happened is she explained what it was, you know, pretty much the scent in the air, very earthy, maybe decomposing leaves or earthworms or whatever.

And she just loved that smell.

And being an old fart, I always have to have a memory trick.

So I kept coming up with the word petrified.

I’d go outside after a rain and I’d go, now what was that word?

It was petra something.

Petrified, yeah, that was it.

Petrichor.

So what is the origin of petrichor?

Oh, wow.

You’ve given us a beautiful description of it, Mike.

It’s one of those words where you think, oh, isn’t it great that there’s a word for that?

For that wonderful smell after a rain or just before a rain.

And the cool thing about it is that not only is there a word for this, but there’s a wonderful story behind it.

For years, scientists referred to this smell as argillaceous odor.

And that’s because this smell is particularly noticeable in the presence of soil that has a lot of whitish clay in it.

It’s known as argill, this clay.

How do you spell argill?

Argil is A-R-G-I-L.

Okay.

It comes from a Latin word that means bright.

And so it used to be called argillaceous odor.

But in the early 1960s, a couple of government scientists in Melbourne, Australia, decided that they wanted to try to figure out what made this wonderful odor.

And their names are Isabel Joy Bear and Richard Thomas.

And what Bear and Thomas found is that this intoxicating smell is the result of increased moisture in the air and then the pounding of raindrops on the Earth’s surface.

And what happens is that it causes certain compounds to be released, a yellowish oil that’s secreted by plants and a bacteria-generated substance that’s called geosamin, G-E-O-S-M-I-N.

And they combine in the air to create that smell.

And so Bear and Thomas reported their findings in 1964 in a scientific article called Nature of Argelaceous Odor.

But they pointed out in the article that this smell isn’t just limited to surfaces that have a lot of clay in it.

And so they proposed a more general term, and here’s where your Petra comes in.

The word petrichor, P-E-T-R-I-C-H-O-R, comes from two Greek words. It comes from petra, which means stone, like petrify, and the ichor in petrichor. In ancient Greek mythology, it’s that magical fluid that flows through the veins of the gods. It’s sort of this kind of golden blood. And so they came up with this word. They coined this word, petrichor, to mean essence of stone or something like that.

So these two geochemists came up with this term. And it’s this term that I think, you know, I just feel like when you come up with a term like that, and everybody goes, that’s the term for that wonderful thing. You know, it doesn’t make you feel more connected to other people.

Oh, yeah, I got a good version of it. I finished mowing my friend’s paths. His riding mowers down, so I was doing a number of hours, getting a good workout, pushing it up hills, and just before it rained, you know, the rains came down and there was plenty of petrachor in there.

And I, of course, after I did all that work, I think I felt pretty petrified.

All right. Take care, Mike.

Thanks for the call.

877-929-9673. Or you can tell us an email, words@waywordradio.org.

Hello. You have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Elias from Laramie, Wyoming.

Hi, Elias. Welcome. What’s up?

Well, I had a quick question about a phrase that my grandmother used to say, and I had totally forgotten about it.

We were watching some old home videos, and I heard my mom say it.

And the phrase is tut-tut, which is what we understood it to be was, you know, no-no, but I hadn’t heard it in so long that when I heard it again, it just sounded so goofy, and I was curious where that comes from.

Tut-tut. What was happening in the video?

I was probably two or three years old, and I was in the way of the camera.

And my mom, you know, reached and grabbed my hand and said, tut, tut, which I would assume was just no, no.

Yeah, no, no.

It’s telling you not to do something.

That makes good sense.

Yeah.

Interesting story behind this.

Are you familiar with tsk, tsk?

Yes.

So tsk tsk and tut tut are both versions of the sound that you make on your teeth to express disapproval.

It’s kind of like a… Can you hear that?

Oh, yeah.

So what happened is this is kind of a natural sound for English speakers and speakers of other Western European languages to make to show disapproval or something negative.

And it’s cultural. It’s transmitted culturally.

So it’s not universal to all humans.

There are other sounds that other people make in other parts of the world.

But this is part of Western culture.

And somewhere along the way, that sound was written out into words as tut tut and tsk tsk.

So tut tut and tsk tsk.

But they are both written representations of the same sound.

Tut tut, for example, dates back to the 1500s.

I’m not quite sure how old tsk tsk is,

But it’s similarly old.

But because they were written as words,

They kind of took on their own lives,

And then they became pronounced as words.

So now we have these three different ways

To express some kind of negative idea

That are related to each other,

But are a little different.

And people are kind of surprised to find that tsk tsk

And tsk tsk tsk originally represented

Exactly the same sound,

Because it is really hard to describe that sound with kind of the, you know, the orthographic tools that we have in English.

That original sound contains what are known as dental violor clicks,

Which are not typically part of the English phonemic morphological inventory.

That is a mouthful, which just means we don’t usually make that sound in English.

So tut tut, your grandmother is kind of representing like this centuries of development of this cultural sound in that one video.

So she is just kind of like this bullet point or this data point in a history of a cultural way.

It’s very interesting to me.

That is way too interesting.

I honestly was very curious because, you know, obviously in this world we can Google things, but I thought I’m not even going to have an idea.

So my mind was blown.

So thank you guys.

It wasn’t as much fun.

And frankly, how do you sort through the chaff?

Exactly.

Well, thank you guys so much.

I appreciate it.

All right.

Take care of yourself.

Thanks for calling, Lise.

You as well.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

877-929-9673.

A Way with Words is about language seen through family, history, and culture.

Stay tuned for more.

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.

For many of us, religious ritual provides language for the key moments in our lives,

For welcoming babies into the world, for weddings and coming of age,

For how to think about morality and mortality.

But what if you don’t ascribe to any particular religion?

What language do you use to find your way through such things?

Historian and poet Jennifer Michael Hecht suggests that to fill that gap, we turn to poetry.

Poetry, she says, can connect us to one another and to meaning in our lives.

Her new book is called The Wonder Paradox,

Embracing the weirdness of existence and the poetry of our lives.

And it’s an absolutely gorgeous meditation on language we can use to make sense of the world

And to create meaning for ourselves.

Reading this book feels like taking a stroll in a beautiful place with a smart, generous friend,

One who invites you to marvel again and again at the wonder of existence itself.

As a historian, Hecht is deeply familiar with many religious traditions.

In each of 20 chapters, she considers a situation that’s traditionally framed by the language of religion,

And she offers poems that can be helpful for finding language for each of these cases.

She invites us to compile a clutch of favorite poems to create a familiar, dependable liturgy of our own

That we revisit again and again for holidays, events, practices, and emergencies.

And she’s a poet and teacher herself, and one of the delights of this book is that she shares the poems she loves from lots of different cultures and traditions.

And she teaches us about how and why they’re so powerful.

So in this book, we learn about Chinese classical poetry, the gazel form that originated in Arabic poetry, Shakespearean sonnets.

She shares poems from Pablo Neruda and Vislava Shimborska and Joy Harjo.

And she shares a poem from the great Nigerian poet Chinua Achebe that absolutely stopped me in my tracks.

I literally gasped and had to put the book down before I could move on.

And what’s great also is that her own prose itself is very poetic.

Grant, I’ve never read anything quite like this book.

And honestly, I feel that both believers and non-believers are going to find it nourishing and uplifting.

I really recommend it.

I’m so happy that you recommended this book to me, Martha.

I’m looking forward to reading it.

I have browsed it.

Everything you say seems to be true.

As I get older, poetry speaks to me more and more.

And the interplay between poetry and liturgy, poetry and religion is clear because so much

Of the written word of religion is poetry and song and lyric.

And I think there’s a truth to that.

So the book, again, is The Wonder Paradox by Jennifer Michael Hecht.

We’ll link to that on our website, and we’ll link to her website as well.

Martha and I are always fans of finding out what you’re reading

And hearing about the wonderful passages or sentences that spoke to you.

And you can also send us your favorite poets and poems.

You can send those to words@waywordradio.org

Or tell us on the telephone at 1-877-929-9673.

That’s a toll-free number in the United States and Canada.

And if you’re somewhere else in the world, there are a lot of ways to reach us,

Including WhatsApp, you can find all that information on our website at waywordradio.org/contact.

Hi there. You have A Way with Words.

Oh my gosh. Hi. My name is Anna Gaines. I’m from Omaha, Nebraska.

I had a question. Plural possessive.

So if I was saying, like, that’s my dog’s toy, would I do D-O-G-S or would I do D-O-G-S apostrophe S, so dogs is, like, that’s my dog’s toy?

Or would I just say, that’s my dog’s toy?

So you have more than one dog.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So it’s different if you’re speaking than if you’re writing, isn’t it?

Because it’s sometimes hard to understand when you’re speaking whether or not you’re talking about a single animal or multiple animals.

That’s why I had to ask you whether or not you had more than one dog.

I can’t hear whether or not you were just doing a possessive on a singular dog or possessive on a plural dog if you just do D-O-G-S apostrophe to mean possessive for a plural.

So usually when we’re speaking, we say dog’s bed.

I know it’s weird, but it is something we do naturally when we don’t think about it.

Because it’s an easy way to make it clear that we have more than one dog and that they have something, like a toy or a bed.

So it can say the dog’s his bed, the dog’s his toy.

And we do this without even thinking about it.

When we think about it, we say, oh, wait, that’s weird.

Why do we say dog’s his?

Dog’s his?

It’s like two Z sounds in a row.

It’s kind of weird, right?

But it does work.

And that’s why we do that.

Because if I say the dog’s bed, which is two dogs, or the dog’s toy, which is two dogs who have a toy or a bed,

You can’t hear that there’s two dogs there who have those things, right?

So you don’t know.

So it doesn’t work spoken out loud.

So to say dog’s bed or dog’s toy, and it works.

Okay.

If you’re writing, it’s clear, and you can go either way.

You can say the dog’s toy, D-O-G-S apostrophe, and that works, and that’s fine.

And actually, that’s the more formal way to do it.

If you were writing, say, to somebody important, like principal or mayor, the president, the king, somebody like that, you know, the leader of your church or something.

Anna, I have two dogs, and I think I just say the dog’s toy because they share them.

Yeah, that’s true.

Anna, I want to hear about your dogs.

So tell us your dogs’ names.

So I actually don’t have a dog because I’m allergic, but I have a fish.

His name is Echo.

He’s a betta fish.

And to be honest, sometimes I forget about him because all that he really does is swim around in a 10-gallon tank all day, but that’s fun.

But betta’s going to be beautiful.

Is he beautiful?

Yeah, he’s really pretty.

He’s really, really pretty.

Okay.

Yeah, we’ll give Echo a little extra pinch of food for us, will you?

Yes, yes, I will.

Alright, take care of yourself, Anna. Thank you for calling.

Thank you so much. I love you guys.

Love you back. Call us again sometime, okay?

Alright.

Bye, Anna.

Bye.

Well, you can get your dogs in your laps and use their little paws to dial the telephone.

Have your little cuties dial 1-877-929-9673.

And then you can bark together into the phone your question about language.

My friend Al is a retired submariner who served on the USS Triton.

And in 1960, the Triton made history by completing the first submerged circumnavigation of the globe.

And while Al was telling me about this, he mentioned a cool bit of slang that the crew members used.

If you were stationed at the periscope, you were said to be waltzing Matilda.

And that’s because when you were on periscope duty, you’re standing there with your hands up and you’re stepping around and around and around, almost as if you’re dancing.

Isn’t that gorgeous?

That’s gorgeous.

It’s almost like you’re dancing with the entire submarine.

Yeah.

Yeah, I suppose so.

I also have to wonder if that usage was influenced by the movie On the Beach, which came out the year before, starring Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner and Fred Astaire.

There was a submarine featured prominently in that film, and also this song, Waltzing Matilda, was used to very moving effect.

Oh, yeah, that’s more than likely, right?

But still, that’s an incredible feat to circumnavigate the world underwater.

Al sounds like a fascinating fellow, and everybody’s got a ton of language.

Yeah, I’d love to hear more Navy slang, more slang from our military veterans.

You can give us a call, 877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hey, this is John Love from San Diego.

How are you guys doing?

Doing great.

What’s up, John?

Yeah, hey, I was calling because I had a question about a word that I have frequently used, and my wife kind of teased me a little bit about.

It’s bebopping.

And so I used that recently. I heard it a lot growing up and used it recently.

Just kind of came out naturally. And she just kind of gave me a funny look.

And she’s like, what does that mean?

I was like, oh, just somebody’s bee-bopping around, just kind of meandering me, going about their business or something.

And she just thought I made that up. And I said, no, I heard it all the time in Georgia.

The days went by and my stepmom came to visit from Georgia and she used it in a sentence.

And I was like, aha.

So we all had a good laugh.

And then my stepmom reminded me that she also grew up in Indiana where she heard it often as well.

So we’re just trying to get to the bottom of, you know, where did bebopping come from?

So bebopping means what exactly?

To me, it’s just kind of when somebody’s bebopping around, they’re kind of, like I said, meandering or just without real intense intention, just kind of going about or kind of just bouncing around different places.

So you’re gadding about, you’re aimless.

Yeah, bingo, aimless, that’s a great word, yes.

Okay, yeah, this is, a lot of people are immediately going, does this have something to do with jazz?

And it probably does.

There’s a good chance that this bebopping, and sometimes people just say bopping, is connected to the bopping or bebopping in jazz music.

There’s a mention in Robert Gold’s Jazz Dictionary where he connects it with the idea of this quick in and out that you might do as you move from place to place, maybe as you run errands.

And it’s kind of like the quick in and out that a jazz musician might do when they’re playing the bebop music or singing the kind of scat style that goes with bebop or historically did.

The earliest use I know of it is from a New York City, a black New York City newspaper in 1950.

A gossip column is talking about the actor Dorothy Dandridge says that she’s seen bopping around a nightclub called Bop City.

And you’ll find that it is often put that way, bopping around or bopping out, bopping off, bebopping around.

And occasionally you’ll see diddy bop or diddy bop out, although that later took another meaning to swagger.

But yeah, there’s a really strong sense here that bopping around is kind of this improvised notion of going from place to place without an itinerary.

Just like a jazz musician might play together with other musicians, play bebop music kind of without a plan or without a sheet music in front of them.

Yeah, how cool. That’s really, really interesting that it came all the way from jazz.

And we enjoy jazz, so it makes sense how that works. That’s really cool. Thank you, guys.

Yeah, it is, isn’t it? I just love that idea that jazz has given so much to us.

And I love that it’s also dropped these little pearls into the language.

Wow.

Well, that’s awesome.

Well, thank you guys so much.

We were really interested, you know, as the discussions went on with the family.

And the kids were excited to know we’d be talking with you guys.

So thank you guys so much.

We’re delighted you called.

It’s our pleasure.

Call again sometime.

Take care.

Will do.

Bye.

Happy bopping.

Bop bop.

What word is your family talking about?

Call us to talk about it. 877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Jack Roper, Pauly’s Island, South Carolina.

Hi, Jack. Welcome to the show.

Hi, Jack.

Hi, thank you.

What’s on your mind?

In my family, there’s a phrase which I thought was in all families, but I seem to discover it’s not.

When a new month starts, like June 1st, July 1st, we’re supposed to say rabbit for good luck.

And my wife and I remind each other when we wake up, don’t say anything to say rabbit.

And then my children, who are now, you know, middle-aged children, they say that too.

So I got this from my father, who grew up in Spartanburg, South Carolina.

He got it from his father, who’s from Charleston, South Carolina.

Over the years, I’ve got my teacher, and I’ve taught about 5,000 kids, and I teach them this.

And they all regard it as coming basically from Mars.

But then I made it up.

And so I’m wondering, have y’all ever heard of this, say rabbit, when the new month starts?

Oh, we sure have, Jack.

We have, and lots of variants.

Yeah.

I want to know where it comes from.

That’s really wonderful that you’re carrying on this tradition.

It’s a very, very long tradition.

And as Grant said, there are lots of different variants of this.

When I wake up on the first of the month, if I remember to do it, I say, rabbit, rabbit.

That’s the way that I learned it.

And it has to be the first thing you say, because if you say anything before it, it doesn’t count.

Right.

If you say, where are my glasses? Where’s my thyroid pill?

There you go, yeah.

Then you’ve messed it up.

Although, you know, Jack, there are some people who say tibber-tibber at the end of the day if they’ve messed up.

If they forgot to say it, they say tibber-tibber, which is rabbit-rabbit spells backwards.

I like that.

Yeah.

I like that a lot.

I’m going to start doing that.

Yeah, yeah.

If y’all miss it, you can always make it up.

But there are lots of different versions of it.

Some people say white rabbit.

Or white rabbit, white rabbit, white rabbit.

Or bunny, bunny.

Or some people, before they fall asleep, the night before, they say hare, hare, like H-A-R-E, hare, hare.

But in any case, this is a very long tradition.

And you’ll be pleased to know that one person who was really into it was Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

He was known to say rabbits.

Simon Winchester, the guy who wrote the book about the Oxford English Dictionary, The Professor and the Madman, he had a fantastic record.

He recited White Rabbits every morning for 696 consecutive months and counting ever since 1948.

Wow.

He was four years old.

We know that it goes back to, what, Grant, at least the early 1900s.

There was a publication in Britain where one of the parents noted that his children said, Rabbit, rabbit, on the first of every month to, and they would say it up the chimney.

And supposedly that was going to bring them a present or good luck.

So it’s been around for a long time.

And of course, we’ve had traditions involving beliefs about rabbits.

You know, the ancient Celts thought that rabbits could communicate with spirits because they’re able to burrow underground.

And I don’t know, as a kid, you may have carried a rabbit’s foot for good luck.

But Americans got it from the British, is what you’re saying.

Yes, but I know a lot of people who do it, and it’s actually a great way, I think, to stay in touch with some friends that I don’t usually talk to through the month.

But we always reconnect on the first by texting each other, rabbit, rabbit.

That’s very good.

That’s very good, yeah.

So you’re definitely not alone.

Okay, well, that’s reassuring.

Well, I enjoy your show an awful lot, and I’ll remember Tibber, Tibber.

Okay.

Take care of yourself, Jack.

Keep up the good work.

Bye-bye.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Rabbit to the phone and call us toll-free, 1-877-929-9673.

That’s toll-free in the United States and Canada, 24 hours a day.

And no matter where you are in the world, you can find a way to reach us on our website at waywordradio.org/contact.

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Or send your thoughts to words@waywordradio.org.

A Way with Words is an independent production of Wayword, Inc., a nonprofit supported by listeners and organizations who are changing the way the world talks about language.

Special thanks to Michael Breslauer, Josh Eckels, Clare Grotting, Bruce Rogow, Rick Seidenwurm, and Betty Willis.

Thanks for listening. I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett. Until next time, goodbye.

Bye.

Thank you.