Hog on Ice (episode #1544)

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. We got an email from Rasul. He lives in Iran, and he’s been listening to us there in the city of Mashhad for several years for help in learning English. And he wanted to ask a question about the expression fat chance. He writes, the word fat implies a sense of abundance, and biblically speaking, I’ve heard that fat people were considered blessed in the past. But what has happened to this idiom that when we say fat chance, we mean no chance?

Oh, yes. That’s a very good question. It is a really good question. When you say fat chance, you don’t really mean that something is likely, right?

Right. You can’t stare English directly in the eyes. It’s like looking too closely at the sun. You have to shield yourself from it.

Yeah. We have other things like that in English. We say big deal. We don’t mean big deal. And there’s something in the tone that you, the way you signal that big deal, I mean, small deal or no deal.

Right, because you could say, this is a really big deal. I need you to pay attention to it. And that sounds like you meant it.

Yeah. If I say smart move, you know that I didn’t mean smart move. You know I meant dumb move, right?

Yeah. And so some of it’s tonal that if you’re only reading these expressions, you won’t pick it up probably unless the context is very good. If you’re hearing it on a podcast, you probably will get some of it. Face to face, you’d probably get a lot of it.

Right. Pick up the irony or the sarcasm, right? There’s an inversion that happens with a lot of casual or colloquial language.

That’s a good point. The intent is more about context and not about the words themselves.

Exactly. Good point. So, Rasul, thank you for that question. We welcome questions no matter where you are in the world. You can send us email to words@waywordradio.org. And you can go to our contact page on our website, waywordradio.org/contact. There are a bunch of ways that you can reach out to us no matter where you are.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Kathy Birch, and I’m calling from the Rocket City, Huntsville, Alabama.

Oh, we love Huntsville. We had a good time there.

Oh, awesome. Yeah. I called in about a saying that my dad used to say, and he was kind of a, you know, long, tall Texan, you know, full of tall tales and colorful language. And I can’t remember a lot of the things, but the one that I was always curious about was whenever we had guests over, when it was time for them to leave, everybody would stand up and start saying goodbye. And my dad would say, don’t leave now. We’re fixing to open up a keg of nails. And I always wondered about that. Like, I didn’t know that nails ever came in kegs and what would be so great about opening one of those kegs. It didn’t make people want to stick around? Did they stick around? Do a little white carpentry? Something like that?

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I always wondered if it was maybe like an Amish thing, you know, where they would all get together and build a barn or something. But he was from Texas.

That’s not a bad guess, but it’s a different direction. A keg of nails looks a lot like a keg of alcohol.

Yes. And so the suggestion is, when you say, stick around, we’re going to open a keg of nails, is that you’re actually going to get out another keg of beer or keg of liquor.

Oh, my gosh. Yeah. Well, that would be the reason that he said it, I would say. This expression goes back to at least the 1860s. You can find it just throughout all the places. I had a heck of a fun time digging this one out of old newspapers. In the old newspapers, they often talk about also cutting into melon, like a watermelon or some other kind of melon, and opening a keg of nails. You’ll find it in newspaper ads, for example. They’ll lure customers in. Well, what they’ll say is, I love this, come by and have a lemonade. And they’ll also say, we’ll open a keg of nails. And so both of these, when they’re in a newspaper ad, are euphemisms for come by and have a drink of alcohol. Because they couldn’t say, come by and get schnozzled. They couldn’t say really, come by and have a whiskey with us. So what they said was, come by to our hardware store, take a look at our lumber and tools, and have some whiskey. So come by and have a lemonade, wink, wink. Come by and we’ll open a keg of nails, wink, wink. And so you’ll often find this mentioned again and again and again when people want to say we’re going to have some alcohol. It’s just a kind of way of saying we’re going to have a drink during these times and places where alcohol was just a little more disreputable than it is now.

Okay. Kathy, does that sound like your dad?

It does. It absolutely does. This is a question that we have, for some reason, we have never talked about on the show before. This is the first time we’ve answered it, Kathy, so thank you.

Oh, fantastic. Well, thanks for taking it from me.

Yeah, my pleasure. Take care now. And next time you open a keg of nails, give us a call.

I sure will. Bye-bye.

Thanks, Kathy.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Yes, this is Nancy Farrow from Dallas, Texas.

Hello, Nancy. Welcome to the show. When I was teaching preschool, which was a very long time ago, one of my little students didn’t come to school, and her mother taught there also. And I said, Marcia, what is wrong? Why isn’t Jill coming? And she said, I don’t know. She’s afraid to come. And I said, oh, gosh. So it went on for a couple of days, and then finally, Jill said that I kept saying there was going to be a mean time because we were getting ready for a big program. And I would say, yeah, we’re going to do this and this. But in the meantime, so Jill was afraid there was going to be a mean time.

A time to be mean?

She thought there was a time that everyone was going to be mean.

Exactly. To avoid the mean time.

That makes perfect sense. It’s perfectly logical, right? If you didn’t know what in the meantime meant, that’s a great parsing of that phrase.

I know. I wonder how she figured it out or who explained it to her.

I don’t know. And I don’t know what Marcia said. It was so long ago. Her mom doesn’t live here anymore. I did text Jill to tell her I was going to do this. And she was pretty tickled because she has her own children now. And she said they’re going to be excited to hear it. And I guess what she didn’t understand was that mean in that sense means occupying a middle place. It comes from a Latin word that has to do with the middle. In fact, it’s related to words like middle, that kind of mean. So mean is related to the French mohame, right?

Right. Meaning middle.

Yeah, all those words. Meantime, meanwhile.

Oh, poor little Jill. I’m glad she figured it out. Great. Well, Nancy, you’ve got to call us again sometime. Maybe you’ll remember some other story like that.

All right. Thank you so much.

Take care of yourself.

All right. Bye-bye, Nancy.

Bye.

Oh, we love those childhood misunderstandings. And those stories from your past about language. Give us a call, 877-929-9673, or send it to us an email, words@waywordradio.org.

Grant, you remember our conversation about medieval book curses?

Yeah.

When medieval scribes would sometimes actually put curses in the books.

To stop people from stealing the books.

Yeah, yeah. Well, that prompted a wonderful email from Justin Furman. He’s a professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He does glassblowing on the side, and he sent a copy of a page from the great glassblowing classic, Beginning Glassblowing, by Edward Schmidt, which includes a curse, because it was a handwritten book early on. And the curse goes, may all your glass check. That means may all your glass crack. May you suffer from inexplicable minor burns and cuts.

And may all of your creative juices dry up like the Mojave Desert.

Should you copy or reproduce this book in any fashion without the written consent of the author.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

Check.

So check to crack.

Yeah.

Isn’t that interesting?

Yeah.

And I also didn’t realize that glass blowers are called gaffers.

Gaffers.

Yeah.

So if you’re a gaffer and you photocopy that book, you’re probably going to be dropping glass on the floor.

I wonder why they’re called gaffers.

A gaffer in other fields is someone who has things on the end of a long stick.

I wonder if it’s because they have their blob of glass on the end of a stick when they put it into the kiln.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

This is Maria Altamirano.

I’m here in San Antonio, Texas.

Well, excellent. What can we do for you?

Me and my boyfriend go fishing quite often.

He mentioned the word jetty, like, oh, we’re going to go over to the jetties.

And I actually grew up in Denver, Colorado.

So it was a word I never heard before.

And when we went over, you know, it was a lot of rocks that kind of go out like a pier.

And the word just didn’t make sense to me.

Like, you know, the root, the suffix.

I’m like, jetty, why would that be called a jetty?

And so I was like, oh, I’ll call you guys.

You touched on the origin of the word jetty, which has to do with projecting out or something that’s sticking out.

It goes all the way back to a Latin word that has to do with throwing.

And that jetty comes from a Latin word that gave us a whole bunch of different words involving throwing.

Like eject, which is to throw something out.

Interject, which is to throw something in between.

Project, like a jetty is projecting out into the ocean.

That’s something that is kind of thrown out.

Even jettison, you know, or jetson when you’re throwing something overboard.

They all go back.

And tour jeté in ballet is a thrown term.

And so it involves all these words that have to do with throwing.

And so a jetty is something that’s sort of thrown out there into the ocean.

Jetty, yeah.

I could see that.

Yeah.

And actually jetty is also an old word that is used for like part of a building that’s projecting out.

Like over the sidewalk or something like that.

It has to do with projecting.

Awesome. Well, you guys answered my question.

Thank you.

Take care.

It’s so satisfying to have a word that we can do the etymological history to.

And actually take it back.

So often we can’t do that.

We hit these breaks or these pauses or these holes, but we can do that.

Yeah, and then you start seeing all these connections going back to the Latin.

So connected to, you said, ballet and architecture.

Adjective. Adjective is a word that’s thrown up against a noun.

How cool is that?

The J-E-C-T in the middle of the word, right?

Yeah.

877-929-9673 or email us words@waywordradio.org or talk to us on Twitter @wayword.

I just learned the word inkle, I-N-K-L-E.

It’s a kind of strip of colorful linen that’s woven on a really, really small, simple loom, and then it’s used for trimmings on shirts or dresses, that kind of thing.

Inkle.

And the reason that I came across that was because I was looking up the expression thick as thieves.

And it turns out that another way that you can say that people are really close is to say thick as inkle weavers.

Because the looms are so small and you could cram a lot of people into a room.

Because ankle weavers are going to be close together because the looms are so small.

So this is like the word ankle with an I, not the part of the body.

Yeah, ankle.

Like the ink, like I-N-K-L-E.

Yeah, we don’t know the origin of the word ankle itself.

But an ankle weaver is somebody who makes those little woven strips.

If you look up an ankle on Google, you’ll know what I’m talking about.

You’ve seen them before.

877-929-9673.

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 miraculous man, our quiz guy, John Chaneski.

Hi, John.

Hey, Grant. Hi, Martha.

Hello.

Hello.

What’s happening?

It’s time for the quiz.

We all know that the point of language is to make yourself clearly understood.

However, those of us with a particularly cheeky bent oftentimes enjoy using circuitous or obfuscating language for our own amusement.

To that end, I’m going to use this quiz to encourage the use of words that have an archaic tag in the dictionary.

Now, I’ll give you a word, and the first thing we’ll do is determine if either or both of you already know what it means.

And then I’ll use it in a sentence that will give some clue to its meaning, and then finally we’ll figure out what it means.

Oh, boy.

Here’s an example.

Accouchment.

Three times in the past decade, the Duchess of Cambridge has experienced accouchment.

Does that sound right to you, Grant?

I think so, yeah.

It does, because what does it mean?

I think it means to be laid up pregnant.

Yes, exactly.

From the French meaning to put to bed.

Now, we’re not saying she’s only slept three times in 10 years.

What it means is childbirth.

It’s the process of giving birth, right?

Now, let’s try some more.

First one is Bridewell.

Have either of you heard of Bridewell?

It’s vaguely familiar, but I think as a name, not as a word.

Okay.

Well, here’s my sentence.

I told my kids if they continue their heinous behavior, I’d send them off to a bride well.

Oh, yeah.

Prison or something?

Is it a reform school?

A reform school for petty offenders.

It’s a toponym.

Apparently, there was one of these institutions by St. Brideswell in London.

Very good.

Right.

Darby’s.

Do either of you know what a Darby is?

Yes.

Sure.

Both of you.

Good.

Now, here’s my sentence.

Before you move the accused to his new cell, you best slap the Darby’s on him.

And what does it mean?

Handcuffs.

Handcuffs, right.

Now, apparently the source of this is Father Darby’s Bonds, which is a rigid agreement between a usurer and a client.

But, of course, now it’s in actual physical handcuffs.

But it’s never been used in the United States, though.

Not in the United States, no.

Unless, like I said, unless I get it to catch on, just to make people’s lives more interesting.

Here’s the next one.

Glim.

Spell it.

G-L-I-M, glim.

I have a couple ideas just because it tends to be popular with the people who write fantasy fiction.

Yes, that sounds like you’re on the right track.

Here’s my sample sentence.

Spending the night in an abandoned castle.

I’ll need a glim or two if I want to read my ghost stories.

Like a candle or something?

Yes, Martha?

A candle or something?

A candle, yes, a word for a candle.

Now, of course, we know words that have glim in them as glimpse and glimmer, but remember, this is archaic.

So candle is now glim.

Nice.

Finally, sanative.

I’m much better now thanks to a sanative week at a resort in the Greek islands.

So a curative, a restorative week.

Yes, sanative means healthy.

I think this quiz is quite healthy for all of us, quite sanative indeed.

I’ll talk to you guys next week.

Thanks, bud.

Thanks.

Take care.

Well, we talk about all kinds of words on this show, and we’d love to talk with you about the ones you’re curious about.

So call us, 877-929-9673, or send your questions and stories about language to words@waywordradio.org.

Hi there. You have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is David Jambra.

Hi, David.

Calling from Livingston, Montana.

Livingston, Montana. Well, welcome to the show, David. How can we help you?

I was listening to a radio show a long time back.

It was Frank Sinatra.

He was playing a detective.

And he said it was from 1954.

He said the phrase, sweet and groovy, like a nine-cent movie.

And I didn’t realize that word had been in use in the early 50s.

And I was very curious what the earliest usage of the word groovy, you know, what year that was kind of.

What kind of context was he saying that in?

He played a character that was, you know, kind of a hep cat, you know.

So it was sweet and groovy like a nine cent movie?

Correct.

Okay. And it was positive, overall positive.

Oh, yeah.

Actually, groovy had already been around as a slang term, meaning generally positive or cool or with it or hip, for a couple decades already.

By 1937, it had come up from jazz as a positive term.

In jazz, groovy meant that you were able to swing, that you could really play.

You had chops.

You had your bones.

You knew how to find an improvisational groove and just really play hard and cool.

And that you could put down some kind of music that other musicians could get into with you and that they could groove on to.

And you could do it for a really long time.

And that was what groovy was.

And then that was borrowed out of jazz into the regular slang vernacular.

But do you want to hear something even cooler than that, even groovier than that?

Sure.

David, before there was the slang groovy that meant cool, groovy used to mean boring.

That’s interesting.

Yeah, get stuck in a groove.

Yeah, exactly.

Okay, like in a rut.

Yeah, exactly.

As early as the 1880s, to be groovy meant exactly that, to be stuck in a groove or to be stuck in a rut.

And so you’ll find newspaper articles.

Here’s one from the 1920s.

It talks about a groovy as a noun.

It’s a person who doesn’t like anything that requires him to change his habits.

It says he is apt to make it hot for any member of his family who becomes modern, for modern things irritate the groovy.

They interfere with his mental and physical laziness.

The groovy is usually against progress and reform in his community, too.

The groovy is a terrible person, sounds like.

I love how words change all the time.

That’s fascinating.

But then by the 1930s, that old sense of groovy as a boring person or as an adjective meaning boring disappeared and groovy became an adjective meaning cool or with it or hip.

So the jazz musicians took it kind of and flipped it over to make it something really good.

I think it was independently derived.

They both come from the sense of being in the groove, but one is a positive groove and one is a negative groove.

All right.

How about that?

Well, thank you so much.

Yeah, groovy.

Thanks, David.

Thank you.

Bless you.

Now I’m seeing all these psychedelic colors, you know, and the letters for groovy, like, you know.

Oh, from the 1960s.

Distended, yeah, kind of Peter Max or something.

I’m not thinking of that.

You’re not?

No, I’m thinking of Swing Street, New York City, rainy sweat streets, the dark, smoky jazz clubs.

I’m thinking of groovy back when groovy was a new slang word, you know.

You walk down these steps, there’s a bouncer at the door.

Maybe they’ll let you in, maybe they won’t.

You can barely see through the mush of the crowd.

It’s sweaty and smoky, right?

That’s the groovy I’m thinking of.

Okay.

I’m picturing my Simon and Garfunkel album.

We’d love to hear your questions about language, so call us, 877-929-9673.

Claire Moore in San Antonio, Texas writes,

When I was in second grade in the 80s, we would usually stop in the bookstore after a dinner out.

It was a small local place, and we would all wander off to our favorite sections to find something new.

On my way to the kids’ shelves, I was intrigued by the tiny orange and white books on another shelf titled thesaurus.

I immediately thought, dinosaurs!

And cool tiny books, so I went to check them out.

My mom found me 20 minutes later sitting on the floor in the reference section and laughing hysterically.

She was pretty puzzled when she realized I was reading a thesaurus and that I really wanted to buy it.

This is full of words that mean the same thing, and they sound really funny.

Listen to this.

Pulchritudinous.

You know what that means?

Beautiful.

She says, I still have that pocket thesaurus over 30 years later.

It opened a window into the world of language that I happily climbed through and never looked back.

I’m a speech therapist now, sharing language with those who struggle with it, and I dabble in learning other languages as well.

Aww.

She’s a fellow nerd.

She’s one of us.

Oh, yay.

How about that?

And helping other people, too.

Yeah.

I love that little kid seeing thesaurus and thinking, oh, boy, raptors and T-Rex.

Marvelous pulchritudinous.

This is one of her first encounters.

Pulchritudinous dinosaurs.

Thank you for that, Claire.

Thanks, Claire.

And thank you for listening.

Give us a call, 877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Esti Dinor calling from lovely Madison, Wisconsin.

Welcome to the show.

How can we help?

Thank you.

Well, I had a surgery a few weeks ago,

And before the surgery I found myself sitting and thinking about my surgeon and hoping that he is the best and that he would do a great job on me.

And then my mind went to the fact that he is a surgeon, and yet he wasn’t going to surge me or surge on me.

He was going to operate on me, and yet he’s not an operator.

He is a surgeon.

And try as I might, I really couldn’t find connection between these two verbs or two words.

And it makes no sense, really, that the surgeon will be operating.

So my mind, of course, went to you guys, and hopefully you can explain it.

Well, we’d be glad to try.

Surgeon is a really interesting word because it comes to us via French, and it goes all the way back to two Greek words that literally mean just handwork.

Isn’t that interesting?

It’s just simply somebody who does handwork, and it happens to be medical.

And the Greek word for hand is hair, which was borrowed into English in an older word for surgeon that you sometimes see in old books.

And it’s spelled C-H-I-U-R-G-E-O-N.

Through the influence of French, we ended up with the word as surgeon.

And it literally means handwork.

And the E-R in there from the Greek word ergon, which means work, is related to a whole slew of other words in English like ergonomic, which is, you know, what you want when you want your work to be lined up correctly so that you don’t get hurt.

Or synergy, which is energy together, working together.

It’s also related to the word George.

The name George.

The name George, which comes from the Greek word for farmer.

It’s a geo worker, George.

So they all are connected to this word surgeon.

And the word surgeon used to mean just a plain old doctor.

You know, the surgeon general that we have today isn’t necessarily a surgeon.

He doesn’t tell anything.

So why do they operate on you and not surge on you?

Well, that’s interesting.

I mean, that’s from the Latin for work.

But the surgeon is specifically handwork.

So we didn’t backform the verb from the noun, right?

Right.

Yeah, we didn’t need to do that.

We already had the operate verb.

Yeah.

So what you’re saying is that the verb operate existed before surgeon became surgeon?

Yeah, well, the operate verb, yeah, it did already exist, and it’s kind of a general purpose verb that kind of just we operate on many things.

We operate machinery.

We operate business.

Yeah.

So it’s just kind of general purpose verb.

Yeah, and they just arose independently of each other.

I mean, an opera is a work by a composer, or your modus operandi, your MO, is your method of working.

So they sort of have the same idea, but they grew up completely independently of each other.

Well, okay.

Thank you for the explanation to the degree that it explains, actually.

Thank you very much, Esty.

Take care now.

It’s a great question.

Bye-bye.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

Hi there. You have A Way with Words.

Oh, thank you.

My name is Steve Resnick.

I live in the town of Sandwich on Cape Cod in Massachusetts.

Well, Steve, we’re really glad you called.

Well, my mom, my Finnish immigrants came to Cape Cod in 1912.

And my mom always said the only Finnish word in the English language was sauna.

The Finns would say it is sauna, you know, like a steam bath.

And I was always curious to see if that was the only Finnish word in the English language.

So your mother’s people were Finnish from Finland.

Yes.

So your question is, is sauna or sauna the only Finnish word adopted into English?

That’s correct.

All right.

So we can kind of puzzle this out by going into the biggest English dictionary, which is the Oxford English Dictionary.

It’s the most complete so far.

It doesn’t have every word, but it’s got a lot of them.

And we can search the etymologies for words derived from Finnish.

And this is going to get us a lot of entries.

It turns out, though, there are only 75 results in that dictionary that mention the word Finnish.

And so we can kind of eyeball those.

Not all those entries are from Finnish.

They just mention the word Finnish.

And using my native speaker’s intuition and my experience as a person who has made dictionaries, I can look at that and I can tell you, I would indeed say that sauna or sauna is, listen, the most common everyday word that is from Finnish that is in English.

Notice that qualifying word, everyday.

So it’s not the only word from Finnish that’s in English.

It’s the most common everyday word that’s in English.

There are a lot of specific cultural names and other things from Finnish, stuff like a Finnish knife and a sledge and a type of rug and a type of granite and an old unit of currency that are sometimes used in English and specialty texts.

But they’re always used in English in association with Finland or Finnish culture.

They’re never used in English without also being associated with Finland.

And so they’re kind of…

But sauna is used on its own in English without any connection at all to Finland or Finnish culture.

And so that, I would say, is a perfect isolated adoption into English.

Okay.

I would say that the other word that I hear most often when I think of Finns is, you know what I’m going to say?

I think so. Say it.

Sisu.

Sisu. That was my number two.

So do you know this word, S-I-S-U, Sisu?

I do not.

Well, that’s a kind of bread, right?

No.

So this was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2018, and it was defined by the editors of the OED as strength of will, courage, and resilience in the face of adversity regarded as qualities and attributes of the Finnish people.

But it’s a distant second behind sauna.

It’s like way down in the word list, like way down.

Like probably not even the top 10,000 words.

Well, thank you very much.

I do listen to you guys quite a bit, and I do enjoy your show.

All right. Thanks, Steve. Take care of yourself.

Thanks for calling, Steve.

Drive safely out there, all right?

Okay. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

I do like that word Sisu, S-I-S-U, that has to do with grit and resilience and determination and all those qualities that you would need if you were in one of those Finnish settlements up there in northern Wisconsin.

Right. Absolutely.

Because you can’t do it without a lot of internal strength, right?

Guts.

Yes.

Internal power.

A lot of pride in that word, right?

Mm—

Call us with your language question, 877-929-9673.

You know, thinking about childhood misunderstandings, Grant, it occurred to me the other day that I had a big light bulb moment.

I’m not sure how old I was, but I might have been in late elementary school or early junior high school when I realized that the State of the Union was talking about the condition of the United States, the State of the Union.

I had thought for the longest time that it was a competition every year.

They were going to announce the State of the Union.

And every year I was thinking, oh, I hope it’s going to be Kentucky.

You’re very state proud.

I was very state proud.

And I guess I, you know, I heard about all this buildup to the State of the Union.

And then I guess I never heard the actual speech.

So I was just hoping that Kentucky, my home state.

All of Congress is gathered.

Right.

And I was just hoping my home state.

President is there.

Yeah.

Your home state’s going to get recognized for the greatness.

It’s due.

It’s time.

Right.

Time for Kentucky to get what is owed.

That’s wonderful.

877-99-9673.

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.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the advice that I would give to young Martha starting out as a writer.

You know, the stuff that I wish that I’d known when I was first learning to try to sell my prose.

And the reason I was thinking about this is because there was a wonderful essay in the Writer magazine by Bonnie Hearn Hill.

She’s a novelist.

And she wrote what’s basically just a list of all the things that she wished that she had known when she started out.

She says, for example, I’m glad I figured out that there is no secret.

Writing is an art and a craft.

We’re born with a certain amount of one, and we can learn everything we need to know about the other.

The best way to learn is on our own work.

And the other one I really like is she says, I wish I’d known that if the story doesn’t take off until page 142, you better start it there.

Those are both so good.

The advice that there is no secret is true for everything, not just writing.

Isn’t it?

Absolutely everything.

Just show up.

I don’t care what you’re trying to do.

There’s no secret.

And so anytime I see ads or say the secret to blah, blah, blah, I’m like, that ad’s junk.

That ad’s junk.

That ad is junk.

Yep, yep.

The more I thought about this, the more I thought that a couple of the things that I wish I’d known were about starting and stopping.

The starting is that I wish I had taught myself to start much earlier than I think I need to.

You mean earlier in the day or earlier in life?

Well, earlier in the process of writing a particular book or paper or article.

Because you need that time to just put it aside and let it sit.

Let it cool off.

Stick it in your drawer and come back the next day.

So further away from the deadline.

Yeah, yeah.

And then come back and look at it after it’s had a chance to cool.

Because I guess I became a pretty good editor.

Because I can look at what I wrote yesterday and think, oh, that’s terrible, that’s terrible, that’s terrible.

And fix it up really nicely.

And that’s one thing that I agree with in this essay, the idea that you should not be editing while you’re writing.

That can just be deadly.

And the other thing about stopping writing, you know, you get to the point where you’re overworking it.

And I literally now force myself to, you know, set an alarm and stop.

Oh, yeah.

Very good.

Because you can just get into it too far.

And there’s a rescue that comes with that alarm going off.

The relief of it.

No.

And you congratulate the alarm.

You banged the alarm.

But you said something a moment ago, which I don’t know if it’s on her list, but it would be on my list.

The ability to look at your own prose as if it’s someone else’s.

Oh, yeah.

That’s a good one, right?

To not feel too strongly about your own writing and to treat yourself fairly.

To be kind of suspicious of your own writing.

You’re like, what was I thinking is the best sentence that you can say about your own writing.

Oh, that’s interesting.

What was I thinking?

What was I thinking?

And that is a real nice expression of not that that’s golden or that’s awesome.

Those are two terrible things to say about your own writing because you’re probably not being fair to yourself.

What was I thinking is probably a better thing to say about everything you put down on paper.

I guess I start asking myself that question when I read my work aloud.

I’ve talked about that before, but I think there is no substitute for reading your work aloud.

And you start tripping over your own words and you think, what was I thinking?

And, you know, and there is a real linguistic explanation for that is because many, if not all people sub vocalize when they read, which is they actually have tiny micro movements of the voice box in their throat when they read.

They actually more or less speak when they read, only they don’t make the sounds.

Well, if you’re into writing and have ambitions of getting published, this is a wonderful, wonderful essay in the current issue of The Writer Magazine by Bonnie Hearn Hill.

And we want to know your tips.

What are the things that keep you going as a writer?

Because we know we have a ton of writers out there.

What are the things that you would pass on to the new writers?

What are the tips that will make them the great novelists of the future?

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Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Robbie in San Antonio, Texas.

Welcome to the show. What can we do for you?

I had a question about a saying that my mom used to say to us kids when we were younger.

She lived in Germany for a long time.

And the saying, I know it’s a German saying, but she used to say it in English to us, and it was, it fell between chairs.

And I guess, you know, it kind of means that two people had like an opportunity to do something, but then both of them didn’t do it.

Anyway, I was wondering how come there isn’t like an American version of that or if that’s just a German specific saying.

Well, there is a very similar expression in English for that.

So you’re saying the one that she uses, it fell between two chairs.

So two people were supposed to do something, but neither one did it, so it didn’t get done, right?

Yeah, exactly. For me and my brother.

Okay, for you and your brother, yeah.

So somebody was supposed to empty the trash, but nobody emptied the trash, right?

Exactly.

Okay, we all know that. We’ve all been there.

So in English, we might say that a person sat or fell between two stools,

Or they sat on two stools rather than on two chairs,

Although sometimes on two chairs.

And it occurs in English as early as the year 1390,

If you can believe that.

Yeah.

And it occurs variations on this,

Either chairs or stools or sitting on two chairs

Or sitting on two stools or falling between two chairs

Or falling between two stools,

Occurs throughout European languages and cultures

As early as the year 60 BC.

It occurs in Latin in the writings of Seneca.

It’s crazy, right, that we can track it back that far.

And often they also talk about falling on your bum,

Falling on your butt.

And the whole idea is that if you can’t make up your mind

Between two things, you’re paralyzed by choice.

And if you’re paralyzed by choice,

You’re just not going to move forward

And you’re just not going to do the thing that you should do.

And you’re often going to end up in a ruinous situation.

Wow, that’s really interesting.

Yeah.

I was curious because I remember being in school when I was a kid and I would use that saying and people would be like, what are you talking about?

And it seemed to me that it was a family-specific saying and it wasn’t until college that someone heard me say that.

And they’re like, that’s a German saying.

And then kind of figured it out from there.

So it’s interesting.

When we talk about these expressions on the show, Martha and I hear from listeners who also know them.

So we know that they’re out there.

But I guess we kind of need to reassure everyone that these proverbs, aphorisms, sayings are not pervasive.

And there’s no reason that they should be pervasive.

That they are sprinkled throughout English-speaking cultures and societies.

There’s some that are more well-known than others and some less-known than others.

But they’re out there in that they exist, and there’s always going to be some kind of uptake problem, some kind of record scratch moment where you say a thing and other people are like, what?

Yeah.

Well, I think what people are more used to hearing in this country is it fell between the cracks.

If something didn’t get done, it fell between the cracks.

Yeah, well, that’s more what his mother was saying, which is a little different than the two stools problem, right?

Yeah, because that one’s a two-person specific kind of saying there.

So falling between the cracks is about a thing not getting done.

Right.

But falling between two stools is more about a person being indecisive and then not making a decision.

Yeah, it reminds me of somebody sending an email to two people thinking that maybe that will better ensure that they get an answer,

But then they don’t get an answer from either one of them because each thinks the other is going to do it.

Well, I really appreciate it.

I’ll definitely have to share it with her.

Well, Robbie, thanks for sharing it with us.

Yeah, of course.

I love the show.

I love listening every weekend.

Thanks, Robbie.

Take care.

Take care.

All right.

You have a good one.

All righty.

Bye-bye.

Give us a call with your language question, 877-929-9673.

We got an email from Lisa Braun-Glazer here in San Diego, and she says,

My Canasta group is desperate to know if the following is a thing or a fantasy.

Is there an expression, breasting your cards, describing what you do when you hold your cards close,

Or when you’d like your opponent to hold theirs up?

Breasting your cards?

Absolutely.

You’re holding next to your breast, right?

Holding to your chest.

Absolutely.

It’s a thing that you do.

And if you look at guides for new card players,

They often talk about the kind of willy-nilly way that amateur card players just hold their cards as if anyone can see them.

They talk about breasting your cards.

Really?

Yeah, because new card players really don’t have this sense of, oh, here’s a word, proprioception.

They don’t have this real understanding of what their body is doing.

Proprioception.

Proprioception is kind of this sixth sense of where your limbs are.

And so they don’t know where their cards are at all times.

So they talk about breasting your cards and keeping them literally close to your chest.

Or your vest.

Or your breast.

Or your breast.

So that other people can’t see them.

So yeah, breasting your cards is a real thing.

And that’s the term for it.

Interesting.

But the game that you’re playing when you’re breasting your cards, what does Elisa play here?

What is the game that she plays?

Well, I say canasta.

Do you say canasta?

I don’t really play it, so I don’t know.

I don’t know either.

I just know the etymology.

Oh, yeah, because that’s the fun part.

Yeah, because it comes from a Spanish word that means basket.

Right. So thanks for the question, Lisa. Really appreciate it.

Well, what’s the word that you’ve been discussing with your friends?

Send us an email, words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Vince from Norristown, Pennsylvania.

Welcome to the show, Vince. What can we do for you?

Well, I was listening to your show, and I was curious about the word couch versus sofa,

Whether it was a regional thing or not.

I also know my grandmother used the word Davenport.

I don’t know anybody else who’s ever used that word,

But I don’t know where that came from.

Also, I know that there’s, for example, there’s couch potato,

And I also know that couch is sometimes used as a verb,

But I was just curious as to whether it was a regional thing

Or what the origin of those two or three words are.

And you’re in Pennsylvania?

Yes.

And what do you say?

I think it’s interchangeable.

I think generally I would say couch.

This is a super complicated question to answer because we have all these different terms and plus a whole bunch more that you haven’t mentioned.

And it’s only an hour-long show, so I’m going to just kind of skim across the top of this.

I do want to talk about Davenport for a second.

You said it was your grandmother who used Davenport?

My grandmother and maybe my great-aunts, her sisters, they would refer to it as the Davenport.

Yeah, so this is kind of like a couch, basically a couch, although some people do make a distinction.

One thing that immediately leaps out is that our British listeners are going, that’s a couch?

Because in the UK, a Davenport could be a writing desk.

It’s not a couch-like thing at all.

Also, there are other kinds of Davenport, such as a Devon or DivaNet or a Divino, which was a brand name for a time of a kind of Davenport.

So all these different kind of, they’re just different.

The overall message is that couch is winning out throughout North America, Canada, and the United States.

Couch is beating up on the rest of these terms.

Sofa is a strong second, but it’s still second.

Couch over the last three, four decades has kind of come to the fore.

Now, I know you mentioned some other terms.

We talk about sofa beds.

We don’t talk about couch beds.

That’s true.

But in those idiomatic expressions of the compounds, we don’t kind of count those.

And we’re talking about the standalone words, couch is winning.

And it doesn’t have anything to do with couch potato.

That didn’t make it win.

It’s just a coincidence there.

So is it a north versus south thing?

Is it all across the country?

No.

Davenport, though, Davenport is the only one of these that really had a hugely regional aspect to it.

Davenport was fairly common throughout the United States, although not in the south and not really in the North Atlantic.

But pretty much everywhere else Davenport was used.

But it is really fading.

There are still people who say Davenport before you get angry and want to send me an email or call angrily on your telephone.

The Davenport Society.

But I got to tell you, if you say Davenport for a couch-like piece of furniture, you’re probably over 60.

Probably, or even older than that.

And in Canada, there was always the term Chesterfield, by the way, which is never all that common in the United States.

But that’s faded.

Maybe people who were born before 1945 still use it, but Chesterfield is almost completely gone now.

There is a book I want to recommend to you, and it covers mostly the mid-Atlantic states, but it’s fantastic.

It’s by Alison Burkett. It’s called Language and Material Culture.

It is about the words we use for the things in our homes, the words for the rooms themselves.

We think of ourselves as being in one culture.

We are not one culture.

We have lots of different words.

From state to state, region to region, geography to geography, we talk differently.

And we describe our homes differently.

And what’s the name of that book again?

It’s called Language and Material Culture.

It’s by Allison Burkett, B-U-R-K-E-T-T-E.

Hey, thanks so much for calling.

Oh, you’re very welcome.

Thank you.

Take care.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hey, this is Pam Fuller calling from Denton, Texas.

Hello, Pam. Welcome to the show.

Thanks. I am super excited to talk to you guys.

We’re excited to talk with you. What do you want to talk about?

My mother-in-law is from Southern Illinois, Kentucky area.

And so she has a long list of these interesting sayings that I have heard for many years.

And I’m just curious as to where these things have originated.

And the one that has always piqued my interest the most is that when my oldest daughter was born, my mother-in-law would always say, that girl is as independent as a hog on ice.

And I’ve been very curious about what that means and where in the world it came from.

Independent as a hog on ice.

Yeah, that’s been around mostly in this country since the mid-19th century or so.

And a lot of times when you see the expression independent as a hog on ice, there’s a little bit of implication that they’re so independent, so stubborn, that it’s kind of to their detriment.

Is that the way your mother-in-law used it?

Like maybe they’re a little too independent for their own good.

Maybe so. Maybe so. Could have been, yeah.

But yeah, have you ever seen a hog on ice?

No, but I’m sure it would be quite sight.

Yeah, it’s not a pretty sight because they get stuck out there and they’re just sort of spread eagle.

They’re splayed out on the ice and they can’t move.

It is to their detriment to be that stubborn to go out on the ice.

There’s a book called Jack Shelby, a story of the Indiana backwoods that has a longer version of this expression, which is as independent as a hog on ice.

If he can’t stand up, he can lay down.

But anyway, this person in the book is describing what a hog on ice looks like.

And he says, a hog on ice is the helplessest thing you ever see in all your born days.

He can’t walk and he can’t stand.

His feet ain’t made for it.

So as soon as he finds he’s on ice where he can’t walk and can’t stand up, why?

He just does the other thing.

He lays down and there he’ll lay till a crack of doom, perfectly happy and contented, like, and just as if laying down on ice was the very one thing he was brung up to do.

That’s hilarious.

Yeah, yeah.

It’s great.

It goes on to talk about how this happens a lot outside Cincinnati because the river freezes over and they’re driving hogs to the distilleries across the river.

And they make a cinder path and the hogs walk across that.

But sometimes they just get stuck.

So that suggests that that whole idea of maybe they’re a little too independent for their own good.

So the word independent here isn’t really independent.

It’s independent in quotes, right?

Yeah, and kind of inadvertently independent once they get stuck out there.

So it’s stubbornly independent or inadvertently independent.

Well, I love that.

I appreciate the explanation for sure.

This one in particular had always kind of had the family stumped as to where it came from.

Well, it’s a beauty.

And I appreciate you having me on and giving me that explanation.

Well, thanks so much, Pam.

Take care now.

Y’all too. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Well, we loved Pam’s story of what her mother-in-law said.

What did yours say?

Call us, 877-929-9673.

Thanks to senior producer Stefanie Levine, director Colin Tedeschi, editor Tim Felten, and production assistant Caitlin O’Connell.

You can send us a message, subscribe to the podcast, get the newsletter or catch up on hundreds of past episodes at waywordradio.org.

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

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

We’re coming to you from the Recording Arts Center at Studio West in San Diego, California.

Thanks for listening. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. Until next time, goodbye.

Bye.