Honor Bright (episode #1656)

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.

And Grant, I have a couple of uplifting and energizing words for you.

Oh, yes, please.

The words are wiccan and braired.

Where did you meet those accountants?

Oh, that’s right.

I got to do my taxes.

Wiccan and braired.

Yeah, wiccan is a verb, and it refers to the lengthening of days in the spring.

So the days wiccan.

The days wiccan.

They grow longer.

They wax.

Yes, exactly.

And wiccan is a variant of quicken, you know, to come to life.

And that’s been around since the 19th century.

And braird, I guess that would be B-R-A-I-R-D, something like that?

Braird is spelled B-R-E-A-R-D, Braird.

And Braird refers to the first shoots of a plant visible above the earth.

Oh, how lovely.

Isn’t it?

So you would say, I spy the Braird of the seeds we planted last week.

That’s beautiful.

Yes, yes.

Literally or metaphorically.

Oh, so you could say the Braird of our ideas appeared as we began to work hard towards our goals.

Oh, I like that. I like that sort of bubbling to the surface.

Yeah, both of those words, braird and wiccan, I found in a book called A Winter Dictionary. It’s by Paul Anthony Jones. And it’s this lovely browsing book that’s mostly about words involving winter, but it also includes some bright springy ones like that.

And you may remember, Grant, that Jones has also been helping popularize the word respare, which back in the 16th century was used as a noun to mean the return of hope after a period of despair, or as a verb, respare means to have hope again. And for some reason, this word became obsolete, but it sure seems worth reviving.

Yeah, Paul Anthony Jones has great social media presence and a bunch of fun books. We’ll link to at least one of them, maybe more, on our website at waywordradio.org. You can call us or text us to our toll-free number at 877-929-9673.

Hey there, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Rosalind Maxwell. I’m speaking to you from the great city of Montgomery, Alabama.

Well, okay, what’s on your mind today in terms of language, Rosalyn?

Okay. When I would do something that seemed to be very idiotic, my mother would say, you’re acting like a star-nated fool. And I was like, star-nated fool? What is that? Actually, she was saying star-nate. Well, she would pronounce it as star-natal, but I looked it up and it’s star-nated fool.

Okay. Well, I’m curious what kinds of situations you might have gotten yourself into where she said that, where she called you a star-natal fool or a star-natal fool.

Okay, like when I was younger, if I wanted to wear something to church that was inappropriate, she’d say, Ross, you’re acting like a star-natal fool. Go back in there and change.

I’d be like, okay, Mom, but I like it.

She said, I don’t care. You go in there and change.

Star-natal.

The correct spelling is S-T-A-R-N-A-T-E-D, star-nated fool.

Okay, yeah, that sounds right.

That’s right.

We’ve had a few questions about this before.

But you know what’s funny is I don’t find this in any of our reference books. But I do find it in Kiese Lehman’s memoir, Heavy, where his grandmother used the phrase star-nated fool. He’s from Jackson, Mississippi, which is not that far.

And so he writes about being a black man in Jackson. And in the book, he asks her, he says, do you mean stark naked?

No, not that.

No, not stark naked.

Well, that was my thought as well.

You wouldn’t go to church stark naked.

No, that was my question, not literally stark naked.

Thank you, Martha.

You wouldn’t go to church stark naked.

Not literally stark naked, but kind of the same way you call somebody.

Because they would turn you out of the church.

Not literally stark naked, but like the idea like you might call someone a bald-faced liar, meaning like your foolishness is exposed for everyone to see.

Like metaphorically stark naked, you know?

But the question for me would be, where does star-nated come from? Is this a form of another word?

And why is it so rare?

And why does it seem to only be a part of Black English, you know?

You know, I guess because, you know, people in the South, when they were pronounced stuff and they were, I guess, because of their idioms, they would pronounce it rather raggedly.

And so it probably was mispronounced many years, for many years.

My version of what you said is that the South has multiple dialects. They pronounce things according to the rules of those dialects.

And there’s a lot of oral transmission of language, which means that it changes faster according to set rules.

And so it would be easy for an expression like stark naked to turn to star-nated in a short amount of time and sound like stark naked after not too long.

I’m not saying it is stark naked, but I think it’s very interesting that a perceptive writer like Kiese Lehman in his memoir, that he should report that he thought it also might have been stark naked when his grandmother said it.

Because that was my thought as well.

But I’m not saying it is.

It’s just a guess.

But again, metaphorically stark naked, not literally.

Nobody’s going to church stark naked, Rosalind.

Every book that I find it in, sometimes spelled S-T-A-R-N-A-T-E-D, sometimes A-D-E-D, sometimes Starnator, that is A-D-E-R.

They’re by Black authors.

Fiction.

Occasionally I’ll find social media posts.

And when it’s clear who the writer is, they’re almost always Black American English speakers.

So it just seems to belong to one community.

Like Br’Rabbit.

No, I know.

They’re all modern.

They’re all like modern folks.

There’s just, yeah, it’s not historical.

It’s all fairly recent.

What about Aesop’s fables?

Not that old either.

Well, you know, what I like about this word is that even if you don’t know the meaning, you can kind of guess it.

I mean, it’s like a fool, but it is a really, really, really foolish fool.

You know, star-nated.

I mean, to me, it almost sounds like tarnation.

Yeah.

Which is a euphemism for damnation.

I thought it might be a shortened form of consternated, but consternated means like astonished.

And I don’t know, it might be like a form of astonishing fool.

Like it’s amazing how foolish you are.

It’s possible.

Well, Rosalyn, I got to say, you are amazing.

I love your energy and your liveliness.

I love yours, too.

And I am so elated.

Thank you so much.

It was completely our pleasure.

Will you call us again sometime and let us know what’s on your mind with language and so forth?

I would love it.

All right.

I would love it.

All right.

Well, you take care of yourself.

Don’t be a star-natal fool now.

No, no, no.

Rosalind, you take care of yourself now, all right?

Take care.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Jason Meyer from Hickory, North Carolina.

First off, I love the show.

Thank you.

And I love listening to it and hearing all of the background.

And I am originally from the eastern part of the state.

So that’s its own sort of dialect.

And then I have slowly migrated across to the west.

And as I moved to Catawba County, which is kind of in the foothills of North Carolina, I heard a phrase that I had never heard before.

And I know the context because of how it was used for sure.

But I overheard a colleague of mine saying that a man was given down the road.

That’s the phrase, giving a man down the road or giving somebody down the road.

And essentially it was used as they’re chewing them out.

They’re giving them a hard time.

And I just didn’t know, have you guys heard anything like that?

And what is the background behind that?

Do you know more about the circumstances in which the phrase was used?

It was like I was giving somebody a hard time, you know, verbally.

And so the colleague of mine saying, wow, you’re really giving that person down the road.

I see.

So it was like at work or in the office or something.

Yeah, it’s a wonderful phrase, give him down the road or give her down the road.

And as you suggested, Jason, it means to scold somebody or reprimand them or chastise them or, as you said, chew them out, right?

Yeah.

And the implication there is pretty literal. It’s chasing someone away. Make sure they skedaddle. Make sure they get out of there. If you just look at it by itself, it doesn’t make that much sense. You know, it’s sort of like give somebody what for. I mean, what in the world does that mean? You know, but it metaphorically means the same thing.

And this expression has been around for at least a century in southern Appalachia.

There is an old Irish expression to give someone down the banks, which means to sort of knock them into a peat bog, which is sort of icky to be knocked into.

And the same idea holds there, that it’s to scold or reprimand.

And the term give him down the road means, as you said, to give somebody a really hard time.

And I have a question for you, Jason.

Have you noticed any difference in you’re now in western North Carolina, right?

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Have you noticed any difference in the way that people talk about up the road versus down the road there?

Oh, yes, of course.

And many other phrases.

It’s not just, you know, up and down.

It’s also, you know, cutting a light switch on or cutting a light switch off and, you know, phrases like that, too.

Yeah. Yeah. I was wondering if you noticed any difference in meaning between up the road and down the road.

And the reason that I ask is because I used to spend summers there in Alexander County with my father’s side of the family.

And everybody used the term up the road to suggest something that’s closer or sooner or kind of more positive going up the road.

And down the road meant farther. It meant later, farther away. And it wasn’t such a positive thing.

You’re absolutely right. And I’ve definitely heard that. Yeah. Up the road usually has like, you know, that’s somebody you want to go see them.

You know, go up the road a ways and talk to that person versus going down the road. It’s like,

You know, that’s where the junkyard is. Go down there. Yeah. Yeah. And it’s a little farther away. It’s kind of the outskirts of town. So if you’re, if you’re giving somebody down the road.

And, and I guess you should pronounce it like road, right? Yeah, of course. I did try to restrain from, you know, turning on the, the Southern Appalachia. No, no. Why restrain it?

Own it.

Yeah, I love it.

I love it.

Yeah.

Well, Jason, we hope you’ll give us another field report sometime.

As Grant knows, I’m partial to language from that part of the country because it’s so associated with my family.

Well, Alexander is just up the road a piece.

Just up the road.

A piece, yeah.

A piece, sure.

It’s over yonder.

It’s over yonder, right?

Yeah.

Well, that’s different altogether, Martha.

That’s for the next episode.

That’s it.

There we go.

It was a lovely language anyway.

Well, thank you so much for your time, Jason.

We appreciate it.

No, thank you both.

I appreciate it.

All right, take care now.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Well, give us a call, 877-929-9673,

If you want to talk about language,

Or send us an email, words@waywordradio.org.

The Word Quiz and lots more as A Way with Words continues. Stay tuned.

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

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

And wafting over our heads in a giant iridescent bubble and waving his wand.

Oh, the bubble popped. It’s our quiz guy, John Chinisky.

Catch him.

Hey, hi.

Are you a good host or a bad host?

Which guys are you?

Don’t fall on the house.

Watch the crown, will you?

Thanks.

Now, listen, you know, there’s a common form of wordplay that I don’t think we’ve talked about before.

It’s called language games.

There are lots of them, but the most well-known is probably pig Latin.

If you don’t know it, and perhaps you’re very, very young,

It’s a way to disguise English from someone who doesn’t know the rules.

Typically, you take a word’s first consonant, like b, or t, or k, or a consonant blend, st, ch, gr,

And you move it to the end of the word and add a-y.

A, for example, igipe for pig, and atinle for Latin.

That’s pig Latin.

Now, for quiz purposes, I’m interested in pig Latin words that sound like non-pig Latin words or phrases.

For example, assay is a real English word meaning to test metal or ore.

But it sounds like the pig Latin for sass, meaning impudence or cheek.

Sass, assay.

Right?

Got it?

Got it.

Good.

I’ll give you two definitions.

One defines an English word.

The other defines the English word that the first word’s pig Latin sounds like.

And you’re going to give me both.

Okay?

Okay.

Gotcha.

All right.

A feeling of surprise mixed with admiration, having started and in progress.

Oh, underway and wonder.

Yes, very good.

Wonder and underway.

Very good.

A two-word phrase meaning cornered by pursuers, a flying mammal.

Oh, that’s a good one.

At bay.

And bat.

Yay.

Bat Bay and Bat.

Yes, very nice.

A flying insect.

Essentially an online garage sale.

Oh, eBay and Bee.

EBay and Bee.

Yeah, pretty simple.

To remain beyond the limit of one’s expected time.

A kind of strong, dark beer.

Outstay and Stout.

Yes, Outstay and Stout.

Exaggerate the performance of a dramatic role a short-billed waiting bird.

The bird is plover yeah and overplay yes oh wow nicely done over.

Well listen that’s enough pig latin for me i’m suddenly hungry for a ham sandwich so we’ll.

We’ll see you next time.

Give our best to the family.

You too, guys.

Take care.

This show is about words and language and books and literature and jokes and puns and lots of fun and goofing off.

And we would like you to be a part of it.

You can call us.

You can write us.

You can text us.

You can talk to us.

All those ways to reach us are on our website and all of our past episodes at waywordradio.org.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi there.

This is Maureen O’Boyle calling from Charlotte, North Carolina.

How are you, Martha?

I am doing well, Maureen, from Charlotte.

Yes. Years ago, like way, way back in the 90s, I was asked to co-host the St. Patrick’s Day Parade for NBC.

Like the big one? The national one?

Whoa. Really?

Yeah. With a name like Maureen O’Boyle, I am Irish.

A little bit. Sounds a little Irish.

So I was thrilled. And we have run throughs, which are where you meet with the foundations that support the parade. And you go through the many different pipes and drum bands that you’re going to need to pronounce and you need to get the proper Irish pronunciations and so forth.

And at the end, one of the members of the Order of Hibernians said a reminder.

The most important thing to not say is Murphy’s Law, where anything can go wrong, it will.

And we happened to have rain and snow that day.

So he wanted to make sure nobody said that.

And he said it’s a racist statement against Irish people. Well, you know, I don’t want to throw anybody under the bus. I just took it for exactly what he meant. And I’m kind of curious, is that really the origin of Murphy’s Law?

Wow. Layers upon layers. The full onion here, Maureen.

It is.

I can get why somebody might not want that said on a big broadcast.

I can get that because even, let’s just, before we answer your question, let’s just look at it either way.

If it wasn’t a slander against the Irish, some people might think it was anyway.

Because not everyone’s going to know its story and you’re not going to sit there on the air and explain its history.

And if it was a slander against the Irish, you wouldn’t want to say it.

So either way, you shouldn’t say it because.

Correct.

I never have been one to say it, just so you know.

Yeah, yeah.

Because, like, there’s a certain kind of person who will say it because they know if it’s not a slander, they just want to have the argument, you know.

They just want somebody to call them on it so they can self-righteously say, well, it’s not really a slander because Murphy wasn’t named after an Irishman, you know.

And that’s not really what life is about.

You don’t really want to say a thing just so you can be called on it and, like, virtuously explain that you’re in the right.

But the truth is, it was probably named after a real Murphy.

But he was an American.

And he wasn’t an Irishman.

And although his heritage was probably Irish, it wasn’t because he was a bumbling, incompetent fool.

You know, it wasn’t because he was being blamed because of his Irishness.

It isn’t a slander against an entire nation of people or an entire heritage.

He worked for the Air Force on rockets.

And there was a kind of a tradition that in the testing that they were doing that it seemed like throughout their testing, things would just typically go wrong.

And the line was, if there is any way of doing it wrong, he will do it wrong.

Now, the idea, the concept underlying Murphy’s Law is much older than that.

It goes back to at least the 1860s.

And there are other stories and other tales that kind of feed into this.

A lot of them having to do, by the way, with aerospace and testing of rockets and airplanes.

But the term itself, Murphy’s Law, didn’t come out of Irish slander.

Yeah.

Well, it is a terrible phrase, but I was always, I just believed him and I’ve been so curious.

But the thing is, Maureen, like I said, like, if you’re on a national broadcast, why take the chance?

People who don’t know the story might think it anyway.

Yeah, something can go wrong and will go wrong for some people.

Maybe a way to phrase it is somebody might, if somebody can misunderstand, they will misunderstand.

That’s Grant’s law.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

And it was a thrill.

And I did it more than one year.

It was probably some of the most fun days of my life.

The most beautiful, one of the most beautiful parades in New York.

Well, thank you, guys.

I love your show.

It’s so much fun.

Yeah.

Thanks for calling.

Call us again sometime, Maureen.

Thanks for calling.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Stephen Fry, the British actor and comedian and all-around logophile, has a wonderful newsletter,

And recently he was commenting on artificial intelligence, and I loved what he said. Let me

Just share a little snippet from it. He wrote, you may have noticed that I render artificial

Intelligence as capital A, small i, not capital A, capital I, throughout this piece. This is my

Fruitless, no doubt, attempt to make life easier for people called Albert, Alfred, Alexander, et

Al. Ho, ho. And then he says, in sans serif fonts, AI with a majuscule I is ambiguous. How does the

Great Pacino feel when he reads that al is a threat to humanity? So let’s all write AI as capital A,

Small i. And Grant, I love that idea. I have a friend named Al, and whenever I text to or about

Him, it looks like I’m saying AI. Yeah, I have a great friend named Al, and the joke never dies.

But also, capital A, lowercase i, kind of looks like a scream of terror. So if you’re an AI

Alarmist, kind of is appropriate. It is appropriate. So seriously, I really like this as an

Innovation. I think maybe the train’s already left the station, but I like the idea.

Yeah, Stephen Fry, always like 10 chess moves ahead of the rest of us.

You can text us or call us at 877-929-9673, toll free, in the United States and Canada.

Hey there, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Ashley from Berea, Kentucky.

I’ve really been looking forward to talking with you all about a word that my dad says.

I’m actually calling on behalf of my whole family.

As far as we know, no one else says this word.

We’ve never heard anyone else say it.

So the story is that when my sister and I were small, probably like early elementary age, around the dinner table one night,

My sister said to my mom and dad, what does the word Nord mean?

And they said to her, I don’t know.

What is that word?

And she replied and said, but dad, you say that word all the time.

And so apparently it took them back and forth.

But eventually they realized that it was true.

My dad often says this word.

It’s Nords, N-O-R-D-S.

And he uses it as a contraction for in other words.

So Nords, N-O-R-D-S, as a contraction for in other words.

What did he say?

Well, the story is that he had no idea that he used it.

He wasn’t aware of it at all until my little sister, when she was so young, pointed it out.

And then once she did point it out, he became aware of it.

But he just continued using it in his language regularly.

To me, one of the things that stands out about it is that it flows so naturally in his conversation, and it makes so much sense in his sentence construction that people don’t notice that he’s saying a word that’s unfamiliar or maybe an unknown word.

Because the way he’s using it makes so much sense.

Can you give us an example in a sentence?

Sure.

The entrance to the trail was hidden,

Nor you wouldn’t notice it if you didn’t know it was there.

Nords.

I love it.

I love it.

Give us another one.

Okay.

So another one is she lives in the next town over.

Nords, it’s not too far of a drive.

I don’t think I say in other words that often,

But he seems to be shoving it in there everywhere he can.

He doesn’t.

So I don’t, yeah.

So it is kind of a sentence structure that he often uses

Where he’s putting things in other words.

He’s restating something to clarify his meaning.

Yeah.

Well, so Nords, N-O-R-D-S.

So, Ashley, I have never seen Nords as a contraction of in other words.

Oh, my goodness.

Nor have I.

Oh, I love it.

It reminds me of some other words, though,

Because there’s a tradition of condensing contracting words in English in this way, though.

So it conforms to, as they put it, the morphology of English.

So we can track a lot of words in English, usually involving the copula, which is the verb to be, and negation.

So words like isn’t, is not becomes isn’t, or wasn’t, was not becomes wasn’t.

But we also do it with words like ordinary becomes ornery, you know, spelled O-R-N-E-R-Y, ornery.

A good country word, you know.

We talk about an ornery mule, you know, a very, very stubborn mule.

Or goodbye comes from God be with ye.

So these are very similar to the way that your father has fashioned nords.

In other words, it becomes nords.

So it’s just like a condensing, contracting down without apostrophes into a shorter form.

And it does the same job of the longer form.

Something tells me he has a lot more of these.

Yeah, I suspect a man from North Carolina with a word.

Word like that has got a lot of little linguistic charm in his idiolect. He does. He does. Well,

Thanks for giving us the space to talk about it. And thanks for the show. We sure do enjoy it.

Yay. All right. Take care now. Bye-bye. Okay. Take care. Bye.

Share your stories about language with us. 877-929-9673. Hello. You have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Yvonne calling from Rock Hill, South Carolina.

Well, what’s on your mind today?

So I grew up in Vermont and my mom, who was born in 1932 and grew up in Massachusetts,

Through her whole life, whenever anyone in her family wanted to communicate that what

They were saying was the absolute, like honest truth, and you shouldn’t doubt what they’re

Saying, instead of saying, you know, cross my heart or, you know, I swear to God or whatever,

They would say honor bright. And I always thought growing up that it was on a bright. And so that’s

What I said my whole childhood. And I learned, which didn’t make any more sense, but I learned

Later that it was actually honor bright, like on my honor, the word honor bright. And I asked my

Mom, like, where did you guys get that saying? Because we used it a lot growing up. And she

Is not sure. She thinks they might have read it in like a comic or seen it in a commercial or

Something. But I listened to your show and I thought I would call in and see if you guys

Could help me out. On or bright in a commercial. I’m thinking of laundry detergent or something.

Yeah, I have no idea. That would be a good name for a product that cleaned clothes.

It would, wouldn’t it?

I know, right?

Yeah, it is interesting because it’s usually a Bruticism.

It’s usually more common in the UK than in the United States.

I mean, it’s not unheard of in North America, Canada, the U.S.

And we’re more likely in the U.S. and Canada to say things like,

Scouts honor, or maybe even honest truth,

Or I swear on a stack of Bibles,

Things like, I’ll cross my heart and hope to die.

But Honor Bright is just somehow more British.

And of course, they would spell it H-O-N-O-U-R instead of H-O-N-O-R.

And so I wonder if it’s just a remnant of someone having read it in a British text.

I mean, it is in Shakespeare, for example.

You’ll find it in Troilus and Cressida in Acts 3.

Perseverance, dear my Lord, keeps Honor Bright.

To have done is to hang quite out of fashion like a rusty mail in monumental mockery.

But that quote about perseverance keeps honor bright is a thing that you might run across in people who love to cite Shakespeare in their work.

Was anybody in your family in the Girl Scouts?

Because I recall a Girl Scout Vesper that goes,

Softly falls the light of day as our campfire fades away.

And it goes on and on.

And then it says, have I kept my honor bright?

Can I guiltless sleep tonight?

You know, sort of putting a big obligation on you.

That’s amazing.

The bright in this, including in the verse that Martha just recited, is that the bright here isn’t about light versus dark.

It’s about purity and incorruptibility.

It’s about having unstained virtue.

So if you keep your honor bright, it means that you’ve done nothing that would stain the honor of, say, the organization that you belong to or your family name or your own name.

Yeah.

Well, that’s what we know, Yvonne.

Thank you so much.

That’s all very, very interesting.

It’s nice to have things to listen to that are just like fun and informative and just make everybody knowing more and being better.

Oh, you can say it. You like listening to a couple of dorks.

Hey, man, dorks make the world go round as far as I’m concerned.

Don’t we?

Yeah, we do.

All right. Be good. Take care of yourself.

Thanks for calling.

Thank you so much.

Bye-bye.

Take your honor, Bright.

I sure will.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673 is toll free in the United States and Canada.

You can also email us words@waywordradio.org.

Stay put. We’ll be right back to untangle the web of English.

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.

A baby’s first word is a major milestone.

It’s an occasion to celebrate and savor, and it changes the relationship between caregiver

And child.

But you know, in some cultures, other milestones are far more important.

Among the Navajo or Diné people, for example, it’s not a baby’s first word, but their

First laugh that’s eagerly awaited. And it’s believed that that first laugh marks the moment

When babies transcend their spiritual existence to live with their family in the physical world.

And within days, the person who first elicited that laugh throws a big party to mark the occasion.

Linguists spend a lot of time studying early language acquisition, but what’s far less studied

Is language at the end of life. How do dying people communicate in those last days or hours

Or moments? Well, there’s a new book that explores language at both ends of life and ties it all

Together in a way that’s as fascinating as it is original. The book is by linguist Michael Erard,

And we’ve discussed his earlier book on hyperpolyglots who speak dozens of languages.

His new book is called Bye Bye, I Love You, the story of our first and last words.

And the first half of his book concerns language at the beginning of life, like what exactly

Counts as a child’s first word.

And then the second half of his book is about language at the end of life, because, you

Know, we often attach a lot of significance to famous last words or being there to hear

The last thing that a loved one says.

And we imagine people retaining their full linguistic capabilities on their deathbeds.

But the fact is, that’s usually not the case, because words at that point are often replaced by looks or gestures or touch.

And Erard suggests ways of thinking about all this that may make that communication and those memories more satisfying for everybody.

And the book also answers a lot of questions you might not ever have thought about, like

What is a likely first word that caregivers often miss?

And do people’s last words have anything to do with their first words?

And Grant, I’ve only scratched the surface of this book, but suffice it to say that it’s

Beautifully written, it’s wide-ranging, it’s deeply personal too, and moving, and it’s

Chock full of information about language.

I really think you and our listeners would dig it.

Yeah, I would expect nothing less from Michael O’Rourke, who is a fantastic linguist and a great writer.

And it sounds like something I need to put on the top of my stack of books to read.

And I’m struck here by the fact that so many of our listeners have heard me talk over the last 18 years about my son.

And they’ve heard me talk about his acquisition of language and the little funny things that he said.

And yet I don’t really remember his first word because it’s kind of a transition.

You, as the caregiver, know their needs and their wants.

And so, for me anyway, and my wife, it wasn’t really about his first word.

You know, we understood him before language really was a thing for him.

Yeah, that’s so interesting.

By gesture and noise and context, it really, it just kind of flowed.

Right. And you assign meaning to those gestures and those looks and glances. Grant, I find that so interesting because after reading this book, I went around to lots of people and said, do you remember your first word or your child’s first word? And for some people, that first word or that supposed first word was very, very important. And other people just kind of shrugged.

You know?

Yeah.

Yeah.

yeah Well, it’s kind of like some people know when they took their first steps and some people don’t.

Right.

For some people, it wasn’t a big deal.

But we all have these life moments.

And I appreciated the Dine people and the idea of the laughter was their moment.

Yeah.

I love it.

So much of it is cultural and not really tied to biology at all.

Mm—

Absolutely.

Well, this book is packed with all kinds of interesting ideas that I think will be new to a lot of people.

And I really recommend it.

Again, it’s called…

Bye Bye, I Love You by Michael Arard.

And we will link to this on the website as we do all the books we talk about on the show.

You can find them at the end of the episode descriptions.

If you have a book that you love that you’d like to share with us so that we can share it with the world,

Absolutely send it to us.

words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Emily calling from Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Hey, Emily, welcome to the show. What would you like to talk with us about?

Oh, so I’m married to a Dutchman. He moved to Canada from the Netherlands,

And he’s a native Dutch speaker who speaks English very well, but he often notices these

Oddities when I’m speaking, these little oddities of the English language. And

And when they come up, I often think of your show.

And then finally one day one came up and I’m like, I really need to phone this in.

So my question is about the word grocery and groceries.

So we were talking over dinner one night.

And I mentioned that a local political comedy show was filming at the local Italian grocery.

And my husband looked at me kind of funny.

He’s like, grocery?

Like a carton of milk, like cheese, right?

Because, you know, to him, he hears me go for groceries.

So I’m going to pick up groceries.

And so he thinks, okay, so grocery singular is one item of food.

Groceries is plural.

And so he looks at me and he knows it’s kind of off and a little bit funny.

And I’m like, yeah, that’s weird.

Because a grocery is the store where I go to buy groceries.

So I thought, I need to phone A Way with Words and sort this out.

Where does this word come from?

Why does plural mean something different and singular something else?

Shaking his head at English for the thousandth time.

Yeah, that’s pretty much the very literal Dutchman.

Just kind of like, what?

What are you saying?

Oh, yeah.

And it really is one of those places where English shows off its willingness to just throw out the rules.

Yeah.

Let’s trace this kind of by century just to see what happened here and kind of like detectives look at this and just kind of figure out where it all fell apart.

Great.

So grocery comes to us from French, as you might guess.

It’s kind of like if you know French at all, you can kind of figure this out.

And the first grocery in French was wholesale goods, somebody who sold, not somebody who sold it, but the goods themselves.

And you can see that in gross, G-R-O-S-S, if you think about bulk items as a gross of something, right?

Yeah.

And then it was the bulk items themselves, the wholesale goods, then became the word for the person who sold them.

And that word was borrowed into English as a grocer.

So G-R-O-S-S-E-R-I-E became G-R-O-C-E-R in English.

And that word stuck around for a long time.

By the 15th century in English, we got the grocery as the trade or profession of being a grocer.

So it wasn’t the story yet.

And it wasn’t an individual food item.

But it took until the mid-19th century, we’re talking, you know, 300 years before it became the store itself that sold food and household items.

Now, what’s interesting is you can have a bakery as a place that you can sell baked goods, or it could be the store or the factory.

But the grocery was only ever the store, right?

You don’t have a grocery factory.

Yeah.

And then something happened in the early 20th century where we took that term that referred to the store and people started using it to refer to the items that were sold in a grocery store, but only in the plural.

And there’s a word for this.

It’s called a pluralitantum.

So these are things like scissors and pants and glasses that exist pretty much mainly in their plural form.

And we don’t really talk about, most people don’t talk about a pant, except if you work in the business.

A scissor, yeah.

Yeah, I don’t have one glass.

I have a monocle, right?

I have glasses.

Some people talk about having, pass me the scissor, but we all look at them as they’re weird.

Usually we talk about them as scissors.

And that’s what happened with groceries.

We only really refer to, I go to the store for groceries.

If I go in and I buy a single banana, I don’t tell people I bought a grocery.

I just say I bought a banana.

Unless you’re my husband.

Yeah.

Well, Dutch people are very straightforward and plain spoken.

So we’ll give him that.

That’s right.

And that’s what we love about the Dutch.

So that’s kind of what happened here.

It just kind of skipped the singular stage and went straight to plural and never was a singular for an individual item for sale.

The only way it’s a singular is if it’s a store.

But it’s not a singular if it’s for an item for sale.

And this shift happens because of what’s known as a metonymy.

So this is when a term expands to refer to a whole group of items.

So anyway, to just kind of summarize this, grocery means the grocery store.

We do this with pharmacy.

We do this with bakery.

Groceries mean food items because shopping involves multiple things.

And grocery doesn’t mean a single item because grocery originally referred to a trade or a place and not an individual product.

Yeah, that’s great.

Fantastic.

Emily, thanks so much for calling.

As Grant always says, we love these moments of language friction between couples who come from different linguistic backgrounds.

So I hope you’ll call again and share more of them.

Yeah, I’d love to.

Thank you so much for having me.

All right.

Take care now.

Give our best to your fella.

Thank you.

Bye.

All right.

Ciao.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Mark Hanlon.

I’m from Bismarck, North Dakota.

Hi, Mark.

Welcome to Aware With Words.

What’s on your mind?

Many years ago, I sailed on the Great Lakes, and the first time I went aboard a ship, or shortly after that, I was part of some emergency routine they would go through every week to practice.

And above my bed was a sheet to tell me what to do.

And it said I was to go to the back of the ship and on the port side attend the sea painter.

And I had no clue what a sea painter was until I got there and somebody pointed out it was a rope.

I think it was a rope attached to a lifeboat.

But I’ve often wondered since then why a rope would be called a sea painter.

Yeah, when I hear the expression sea painter, I sort of think of an artist standing with an easel.

No, that can’t be right, Martha.

Well, it’s not.

It’s not right.

It just comes to mind, isn’t it?

In terms of this rope, Mark, do you remember about how long it was?

Like, was it a really short rope or a really long rope?

I think it was probably 20 to 30 feet long.

I think it was attached to the lifeboat on the port side at the back of the ship.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense, Mark,

Because the term painter itself is a term that means a rope at the bow of a little boat

Or a dinghy that you would use to tie it to a dock.

And a sea painter is a much longer rope,

A strong rope that would be attached to something like a lifeboat so that it would, you know,

Withstand the action of the sea.

But why would we call it a painter?

P-A-I-N-T-E-R.

Well, we’re not 100% sure, but we suspect that it has French roots.

There’s an old French word, pendu, which means a kind of rope.

And it goes back even farther to words that have to do with hanging, like pendant and pendulum and pending and pendulous.

So this word painter was adopted into English, into Middle English from French, where it was more like pendu.

I see.

And so it was a rope for hanging things on a ship, like hanging a boat from the side of a ship?

Yeah, like hanging a lifeboat from a ship.

And there was also a really interesting, this word goes way back to the 14th century, painter.

And there’s also an interesting idiom, cut the painter or slip the painter, which means simply to sever a connection metaphorically or to break free.

I’m going to slip the painter.

You know, I’m going to quit my job and slip the painter or quit working on that ship and slip the painter.

I see.

Well, Mark, I hope you get some sailing there in North Dakota.

I don’t imagine there’s anything like the Great Lakes, but if you still got a hankering, I hope you can get it.

Oh, I get out in my fishing boat.

Nice.

Very good.

Take care of yourself, and thanks for calling and sharing your memories.

Thank you.

All right.

Take care.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye, Mark.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hey, Martha.

This is Carrie Ann, and I’m with my cousin, Danielle.

Hello.

Hey, Carrie Ann and Danielle.

What’s up?

What’s up?

And where are you?

We’re calling from Minneapolis, Minnesota, and we had a question about pronunciation

Of the word rhetoric or rhetoric.

Okay.

Yeah.

What’s your experience with those words or that word?

So, I mean, I like I think when I like learned it, I was reading.

So I think I probably pronounced it rhetoric.

But after talking, I started to say rhetoric.

And Danielle says rhetoric.

And we’ve talked to a couple of people about it and they say it’s actually two different words.

Who talked to you about rhetoric and said that it was a different word?

My brother said that it was two different words, and another person that I work with said it was two different words.

I could see.

Were they talking about rhetorical as being a different word?

Yeah, I think that’s kind of what they’re going off of.

Okay, because I don’t believe that the pronunciation of it as rhetoric was ever a word on its own.

I think they must have been referring to rhetorical because rhetoric has always been the pronunciation for R-H-E-T-O-R-I-C in both U.S. and U.K. English.

And we can find this as far back as pronunciation dictionaries go in both languages.

And that’s because it fits into a weird class of words where that third to the last syllable is pronounced.

And usually it’s the second to the last syllable, but words like choleric and turmeric and lunatic and heretic, I’m sorry, heretic and politic are pronounced that way.

So rhetoric has never been the pronunciation for that.

But, you know, it’s weird, Martha, the way that we learn these words from reading, and they surface perfectly well while we’re reading.

But when we start speaking to them, we’re like, oh, wait a second, that’s not right.

Yeah, Grant and I always say that if somebody is pronouncing a word like that incorrectly, it’s probably because they’re a big reader.

Yeah, their reading got ahead of their speaking and their hearing.

Yeah, and we’ve had that experience.

I mean, I used to say epitome instead of epitome, you know.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, the number of people who say hyperbole instead of hyperbole or infrared instead of infrared.

Well, that is good to know.

All right. So how do we do? Did we help you out?

Yes, that did. That did, actually. And now I can tell everybody that it’s rhetoric instead of rhetoric.

Yeah, and that we said it was fine. And all you did was you had a reading thing that kind of got in the way of your speaking thing and you sorted it out and you moved on.

Yeah. All right. You two take care of yourself and be well, all right?

Yeah, you too.

Call again sometime.

Thanks, you two.

Bye.

Okay, bye.

Goodbye.

Bye-bye.

A Way with Words senior producer is Stefanie Levine.

Tim Felten is our engineer and editor, and John Chaneski is our quiz master.

Go to waywordradio.org for all of our past episodes, podcast links, and ways to reach us.

If you have a language thought or question, the toll-free line is always open in the U.S. and Canada, 1-877-929-9673.

A Wayword Words is an independent nonprofit production of Wayword, Inc.

It’s supported by listeners and organizations who are changing the way the world talks about language.

Although we’re not a part of NPR, we thank NPR stations throughout the United States that carry the show.

And special thanks to our nonprofit’s volunteer board.

Michael Breslauer, Josh Eckels, Clare Grotting, Merrill Perlman, Bruce Rogow, Rick Seidenwurm, and Betty Willis.

Thanks for listening. I’m Grant Barrett.

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

So long.