Hot Gossip (episode #1609)

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’ve been thinking lately about reorganizing my office, which has me thinking about how I organize my books on my shelves.

Oh no.

And so I very much appreciated an interview that I read with Jane Smiley, the author, who was asked, how do you organize your books? And she said, only by kicking them out of the way so that I won’t trip over them.

On one hand, I totally get that. On the other hand, don’t kick your books. There’s still the middle schooler in me who thinks of them as precious. But there’s also the adult in me who knows that, like, boy, my house is loaded with books. Something has got to be done. Clear a path. Clear a path.

I have a teetering stack next to my bed that I reflexively push back against the wall every time I go by. And all it’s going to take is one of the cats just brushing it the wrong way. And the whole thing is going to go down.

Well, you know, in thinking about how I’m going to organize the books on my shelves, I was heartened to come across a quotation from Luke Van Dunkersgoed, who is a software expert. He said, think not of the books you’ve bought as a to-be-read pile. Instead, think of your bookcase as a wine cellar. You collect books to be read at the right time, the right place, and the right mood.

And I really appreciated that because I’ve been thinking, oh, should I put them in alphabetical order? Should I sub-organize the sections? But I really like the idea of just comparing your bookshelves to a wine cellar where you just sort of stroll in and you think, well, what do I feel like today? And maybe you make a serendipitous choice.

We’d love to hear about how you organize your books or the chaos that books bring to your life or great quotes about how to organize your books or books in general. You know, we’re book freaks over here. Bibliophiles to the worst degree. 877-929-9673. Email words@waywordradio.org or find out more about the show on our website at waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hi, my name is Jessica. I’m calling from Denton, Texas. Hello, Jessica. Welcome to the show. Hi, Jessica. I work at a hospital and the nurse’s station is where all the hot gossip happens. So I came down to the rehab office where I work, and I said, wow, the tea is really hot up there. And my coworker, who’s a little bit older, didn’t understand the reference. So I told her that’s, you know, what the kids call gossip these days.

And it got me thinking, you know, what are other phrases or references to gossip that have been used, you know, over the decades? I kind of talked to my family about it, and my mom came up with, like, to dish. And my dad’s military, so he came up with, like, the scuttlebutt.

Oh, good one, yeah. Yeah, and then me growing up in the 90s, the one I could think of was, like, the 411, you know, what’s the lowdown? But I was kind of thinking about maybe phrasings or terms, like, pre-1980s. Like, what were phrasings that might have been used to refer to hot gossip?

The hot goss. What did we call the hot goss, Martha, back then? Back in the dinosaur age. Well, starting in the late 1800s, people talked about the scoop. That came from newspaper lingo. You know, what kind of scoop did you scoop up? You know, the well of gossip out there.

And you mentioned scuttlebutt, which is a really interesting term because it goes back to the idea of a cask of drinking water on a ship. And people would go, you know, the sailors would go and hang around the scuttlebutt to drink water. But they were also dishing gossip, sharing gossip the same way that people do that around the water cooler today.

That is so funny. I’ve never in my life understood what scuttlebutt is. That’s funny. But then you have ones that aren’t so wholesome like the dirt and the poop and the dope, which all can all name gossip.

What was the last one? Dope. Like the straight dope. Yeah. But dope has not always meant drugs. Sometimes it just means chemicals. And actually dope also meant the syrup that was applied to the carbonated water that made a soda.

Oh, wow. I didn’t know that either. Dope a lot of times just meant the important ingredient in any mixture. Oh. Yeah. And in prison slang, you might have grapes. Because where do you get your gossip? You heard it on the grapevine. And what’s on a grapevine? Grapes. So grapes, grapes are your prison slang.

And particularly juicy gossip or tragic gossip is gore. G-O-R-E, gore. Ooh, I like that one. And then there’s something they say in the West Indies. There’s a variety of different ways of phrasing it. It’s susu or sese or shese, which imitates the sound of whispering. So in West Indies, a little susu. I got a little susu for you. It’s a little gossip.

I like all these new phrasings. I think some of these could come back around. And you probably heard the skinny, Jessica, right? Give me the skinny. Oh, yeah. Yeah, the skinny. But that’s more about like, just give me the straight facts. I want the truth.

Oh, I didn’t realize that was kind of the meaning of that. And Jessica, there’s a whole long list of words that we could go through for people who share gossip. Oh, my goodness. I mean, we all do it. But let me just share one of my favorites that actually goes all the way back to ancient Greek. In English, it’s spermologer, S-P-E-R-M-O-L-O-G-E-R, spermologer.

And it goes back to an ancient Greek word that means a gatherer of seeds, you know, like a bird is going around and just picking up seeds here and there. And the Greek word spermologos gave us this word spermologer, which is somebody who goes around picking up gossip and spreading it around. It’s a very official title.

That sounds very official, right? A lot of these terms are heavily gendered towards women, but men are just as bad at gossips. As a matter of fact, they talk about prostitution being the oldest profession, but I think the oldest hobby is gossip.

Well, that’s what’s so funny about this current lingo of the tea is I feel like maybe historically it wasn’t as appropriate to admit that you were gossiping or that you had to use like a more under the less obvious term. But now it’s just like, no, this is the tea and I’m giving it to you straight, you know. So it’s interesting how the stigma around gossiping and how honest we are about it has changed a little.

Well, maybe we’ll be more honest with ourselves about everything because we need a little more honesty in the world, don’t we? Yeah, that’s true. Well, Jessica, there are a ton of these terms and we’ve just given you a smattering of them. Maybe there’s something in there that you can use. Or maybe you all can coin something else just appropriate for the medical professions, you know? Give me the chart.

Oh, my gosh. What are the latest charts? I don’t know. I don’t know what it would be. Give me the vitals. What are the vitals here? Yeah, give me the vitals. Perfect. There we go. What’s the AB positive on the situation today? We just created something here.

Oh, my gosh. Well, thank you guys so much. This was really fun. All right. Take care now. Be well. Thank you, guys. Bye. Bye-bye. Bye, Jessica.

What do they call gossip in your field? What are people who gossip known as? Maybe there’s something fun that you want to share. Send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hi there. You have A Way with Words. Hello. I’m Mark from Richland Center, Wisconsin. And I was calling to ask about Murphy’s Law. It’s a strange thing, Murphy’s Law. It has such a bad reputation, but maybe its reputation comes from a different moment in time when the British were trying to colonize Ireland, and the most common name in Ireland being Murphy. So when a British constable or somebody comes onto a scene where some resistance against that colonization has been happening, the constable will say, well, who did this? And they’ll just say Murphy.

And before you know it, a whole bunch of successful resistance has happened against the British colonies or the British colonial process to the point where they’re so frustrated that they themselves called it Murphy’s Law, that if something can go wrong, it will.

But that’s just my thought process.

I have no idea where Murphy’s Law came from.

But being Irish myself or of Irish descent, I’d like to think that it’s proof of successful resistance.

It’s not a bad theory, but unfortunately there’s no evidence to support that.

I should say, though, that the idea with similar phrasing that everything that can go wrong will go wrong has been traced back at least to the 1860s.

But calling it Murphy’s Law, that name for that kind of idea only dates back to the 1940s.

So the concept is old, but the naming of it is new.

And so that’s kind of the difficulty that we have here.

And what we do know, the first use we find in print relates it to, jokingly calling it, one of the laws of thermodynamics.

There are a bunch of researchers, amateur and professional, who hang out on the email list of the American Dialect Society.

Fred Shapiro, who’s written a couple of great books, Stephen Goranson and Bill Mullins.

They have disproven all of the common theories about the origin of Murphy’s Law as a term.

And they’ve uncovered an interview by psychologist Anne Rowe of Caltech with mathematician and physicist Howard Percy Bob Robinson.

And he talks about it being maybe a mythical fourth law of thermodynamics in 1949.

Because the Irish are so hot-blooded?

What is the thermodynamic name?

No, Irishness never comes into it.

It really does nothing about Irish, just calling it Murphy’s Law.

And it never really talks about the character of the Irish, even though Murphy is an Irish name.

And so sometimes, and in a second place, he phrases it as anything can happen and usually does, which isn’t a bad rephrasing of the thermodynamic law of entropy.

So it’s interesting that it might be just simply a rephrasing of the idea of entropy.

That things kind of fall apart and things naturally will not hold.

Right, right.

You know, one variant on Murphy’s Law was proposed back in the early 90s by an editor in Australia.

And it reads in part, if you write anything criticizing, editing, or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written.

And he called that Muffrey’s Law.

It looks like Murphy’s, but there’s a typo.

And my gosh, that’s so often the case.

You commit the error, you’re criticizing yourself.

So anyway, that’s what we know about the origin of Murphy’s Law.

I like your theory.

The Irish certainly did not, they withstood the British dominance for many centuries.

So certainly the fighting spirit is there.

Well, thank you guys.

You have a great show.

Thank you.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Be well.

Bye-bye.

Find out how to reach us on our website at waywordradio.org/contact, where you can also find all of our episodes that you can listen to end-to-end nonstop for the rest of your life.

Art critic Peter Sheldahl died last year at the age of 80.

And a few years earlier, he wrote a lovely essay for The New Yorker called The Art of Dying.

And in it, he reflects on the process of writing.

And he says, when I finish something and it seems good, I’m dazed.

It must have been fun to write.

I wish I’d been there.

And I can so identify with this.

You know, sometimes you’re writing and you struggle and you struggle and then you get into the zone.

And it’s almost an out-of-body experience.

Right.

Yeah, I agree with that, the zone.

But also sometimes the self-doubt that you have of not being good enough makes you amazed that you are good enough.

That you can create something amazing.

These two forces make you surprised that you can make something great or something passable, at least.

Yeah, pleasantly surprised.

You come back and you think, wow, who wrote that?

Share your thoughts about writing.

words@waywordradio.org.

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 with apologies to Eugene O’Neill, the quiz man cometh.

It’s John Chaneski, our quiz man.

Hi, John.

Hey, John.

That’s me, guys.

Hi, nice to see you guys again.

You know, sometimes people ask me, how can I be funny?

And, of course, I can’t teach you how to be funny, but I can teach you to be amusingly annoying.

In fact, it’s sort of the stock and trade of a dad.

For example, if someone makes an illustrative noise to enhance a story, I’ll always ask them to repeat it.

It’s annoying as hell, but what’s important is that I think it’s amusing.

So like, for instance, it says, oh, yeah, they’re walking down the street, and all of a sudden, ka-chunk, the guy fell over.

I’m like, sorry, what did the guy do?

Ka-chunk.

I’m sorry, one more time.

What did he do?

Ka-chunk.

As long as you make somebody repeat something over and over again, it’s annoying to them, and it’s amusing to you.

Now, another thing is to ask annoying questions about where things are.

For example, if someone says, we’ve got to get moving on this.

The time is now.

I will always interrupt and say, I’m sorry, excuse me, when is the time?

Now.

Sorry, when?

Now.

Now you’ll know how to be annoyingly amusing.

I’ll describe a situation and ask you where or what something is, and you have to tell me again and again where or what it is, all right?

Oh, no.

Yeah, no, you’ll get this.

It’s easy.

It will be very, very annoying.

Here’s the first one.

Yes, you’re right.

I don’t see any more aliens around.

What did you say the coast is?

Clear.

I’m sorry.

What was that again?

Clear.

The coast is what?

Clear.

It’s clear.

Clear.

That’s right.

The coast is clear.

All right.

Sure.

You’ve got the drop on me and the tables have turned.

Where did you say the shoe is?

The shoe is on the other foot.

Where can I locate that shoe?

Wait.

Sorry.

What again?

Where is that shoe?

It’s on the other foot.

Oh, on the other foot.

Okay.

Okay. True.

So true.

There are clear signs that something unpleasant is about to occur.

Where did you say the writing is?

I was going to say in Denmark, but…

The writing is in Denmark.

I’m sorry.

Where was it again?

On the wall.

I’m sorry.

Where?

The wall.

It’s on the wall.

Oh, on the wall.

On the wall.

Sure.

It’s over there on the wall.

As you say, this project is very complicated and something could prove to be a problem.

Where did you say the devil is?

In the details.

Where’s the devil again?

In the details.

In the details, right.

Okay.

Finally, yes, Professor, it’s all said and done.

We just need to record this for posterity.

What did you say the rest is?

History.

What?

Sorry, come again?

Come, what’s that?

One more time?

Try this here over here.

The rest is her story.

Try this side over here this year.

That’s my better.

The rest is her story.

Her story.

That’s right.

Okay.

Anyway, listen, I’ve got to go chase after my family.

They just left me, so.

Right.

Right.

I better get going.

You guys are great.

Thank you, John.

Oh, John, that was actually very fun.

I really appreciate that.

Thank you, Martha.

Thank you, Grant.

Nothing like bickering with friends.

That’s right.

Maybe you’ve been bickering about language in your house, or somebody misunderstood something where you work.

We’d love to sort out your language confusion.

Call me and Martha, 877-929-9673, or tell us the difficulty in email, words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, how are you? Tigger Gray in Tallahassee, Florida.

I hear birds in the background. Must be a nice day in Tallahassee.

Oh, it’s lovely. Yeah, I’m sitting on my front porch where I basically live.

Nice.

It’s lovely out here.

What’s on your mind, Tigger?

Well, whilst making breakfast the other day, my wife and son were hanging out in the kitchen, and my wife was describing to us an operation she’d recently gone through on her thumb for arthritis, where the doctor had removed a bone and replaced it with a wire to keep the finger and thumb together, at which point I shuddered and said out loud, oh, that just gave me the collywobbles.

And to which my son went, what?

And Sarah, my wife, said, what?

I said, the collywobbles, you know, the collywobbles.

And they said, I’ve never heard of that word.

And so I told them what it was, what I thought it was, and what I know it to be.

And Sarah immediately said, you ought to call A Way with Words.

Yes, you should.

All right.

Tell us about you and Collywubbles.

Are we hearing that you’re not from Tallahassee?

Right.

I’m English originally.

And ultimately, my aunt and my mom used to use it all the time to describe when they were, you know, upset in the tummy or more to the point when something makes you cringe.

And her describing that operation on her thumb totally made me cringe.

And did it make your stomach feel funny?

Oh, yes, absolutely.

It’s deep. It’s inside.

It’s almost…

It’s kind of like falling in love,

But you’re going, wait a minute, this is not right.

So a negative butterfly is in the stomach.

Right, negative butterfly.

There you go. That would have easily explained it.

The willies or the heebie-jeebies.

Yep, exactly.

And the molly grubs.

I’m really surprised that your family hasn’t heard this term.

It’s been around since the early 19th century and generally means, well, gastrointestinal distress.

It might come from a combination of colic, as in colon, you know, a pain in your stomach, and the word wobble.

So colic and wobble together.

We’re not sure where this word comes from, but there are lots of variations of it, like golly wobbles or I got the curly marbles.

Or the collar moggies.

But I’m kind of surprised.

My body certainly wobbled when I heard her describe the operation.

Yeah.

Your golly certainly wobbled?

I was a little like, yeah, over here, too.

I was like, a wire?

Yeah, really.

So, yeah, but Sarah’s American, you know, from Tallahassee,

And my son was born here, Harrison.

And, yeah, it’s a case that they’ve not heard me say that.

Huh.

And I actually have an American accent, but when thinking and talking English, I become English again.

But that just popped right out in the middle of cooking breakfast.

I imagine that’s a fairly common occurrence in your house, where they all hold you to account for your weirdness.

Without a doubt, they think I’m weird. Yes, absolutely.

Thank you for calling.

And I’ve got to say that these cross-cultural conflicts are always great fun for us.

If you have any others, you and your family have these two different dialects crashing together, do call us, will you?

Absolutely.

All right, take care.

Bye-bye.

Thanks.

See you.

There’s a funny thing that happened in your house.

I know that there is where somebody said something that nobody else understood, but they swore it was real.

We would like to sort that out with you because we are going to have answers, or we’re going to try to have answers.

Call us, 877-929-9673.

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

And if you’re not in those two countries, you can still reach us.

There’s a WhatsApp number.

Go to waywordradio.org/contact.

We got an email from Carrie in Ohio who writes,

When my 18-year-old was two, she’d always ask for LMNOPs.

It took us forever to realize it was M&Ms she was asking for.

Isn’t that cute?

That’s very cute.

Carrie goes on to say she also called hot dogs go dogs.

And no matter how many times we practiced hot dog, she couldn’t drop the go.

She’d even say hot go dogs if we tried to get her to practice it the right way.

We still call them go dogs from time to time.

I wonder if she had that book.

Remember the go dog go book?

Go dog go.

Yeah.

I wonder if she had that book.

Maybe that influenced her.

That’s what I’m thinking too.

Maybe she had LMNOP.

Yeah.

Yeah, because that was another book, wasn’t it?

From the same set.

Oh, that’s very cool.

Kids are so cute.

And isn’t it great how we just pick up those expressions that the kids come up with and you use them the rest of your life?

Yeah, and that’s one of the things that frustrates linguists when they try to, like, come up with these really complicated expressions about why a language changed.

And, you know, sometimes maybe it was just a two-year-old.

Good point.

Maybe, like, Indo-European changed just because of a bunch of two-year-olds.

Maybe there was no big thing that happened.

Share your stories about kids and language.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi.

Hi, Martha.

Hi, Grant.

Hello.

Hi.

So my name is Sarah.

I’m calling from San Antonio, Texas.

And my call regards a oft-asked question here in Texas.

Which is when you go to a restaurant and you order iced tea, the immediate question to follow is sweet or unsweet.

And this has always been kind of a pet peeve of mine, maybe wrongly.

I guess I’ll find out.

Because to me, I always thought, how can this tea be unsweet?

I thought un meant an undoing or a reversal of some sort.

So to me, it just didn’t sound right when people would ask, do you want it sweet or unsweet?

I would just think, do you want iced tea or do you want it sweetened iced tea?

Well, Sarah, what are your thoughts about which tastes better?

I’m not a sweet tea person.

Growing up in Texas, and I’m sure it’s prevalent in the South, it’s just too sweet for me.

I don’t mind a little bit.

But when they say sweet tea, they mean really sweet tea.

Oh, yeah.

It’s almost a syrupy.

Yes.

Yeah. So does the un-automatically mean a reversal? Does it mean that a thing used to be sweet and we took the sweetness away? That’s what you’re asking.

Yes, exactly. Because in my mind, I think something’s been undone or, you know, unrolled or unfolded, whatever it is, and that means it previously was folded.

Yeah.

Yeah, that folded is a really good one to hang on to here because you can have something that was folded be unfolded.

And you can have something, but however, you can have things that are unbuilt that were never built.

And you can have things that are unbelievable that were never believable.

And so particularly with adjectives, un doesn’t have to mean a reversal.

It can simply mean not or the absence of a condition.

And so sometimes that un is about a comparison to expectations.

So, for example, an unopened tomb, you know, T-O-M-B, was once open.

But by comparisons to our expectations, that tombs usually remain closed after their contents are put in, we consider it unopened.

Right?

Yeah, if we if we call something an unopened door it means we haven’t opened it yet although circumstances might indicate that we will soon or should have already opened it. Although obviously, the door has been opened before but right now we’re calling it unopened because people expect us or we expect ourselves to have opened this door to soon have opened this door. So it’s all about expectations here.

Yes, I was gonna say that unopened actually I just kind of had a light bulb and I thought, you know, when you buy something from a store, you expect it to be unopened. But it was previously opened.

Right.

It shouldn’t be open. So the expectation is, I see what you’re saying. That’s a really good point.

Yeah.

So that is exactly where unsweetened tea fits in. By all expectations of Southern gustatory habits, it should be sweetened. Therefore, when we call it unsweetened, we are indicating that unsweetened is the unusual condition and that sweetened is the usual one.

Okay. So I can get rid of that pet peeve now, I guess.

Yeah, relax. Have a tall, cold glass of tea and relax. Put your feet up. Maybe a little fried chicken.

So it’s funny, though. Adjectives with un and verbs with un behave a little differently. With verbs, the un prefix is indeed almost always about a reversal, a reversal of condition. So you have undo, untie, unpack, unfold, like you mentioned. And those are almost always about a thing that was that is no longer.

Okay.

That makes sense.

And I can finally put this to rest.

Yeah.

So it’s about expectations.

What do we expect?

The unindicates that an expectation has been reversed.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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

Hey there.

Welcome to A Way with Words.

Hi.

My name is Ronald.

Hi.

I’m calling you all from Columbia, South Carolina.

Wonderful.

What’s on your mind?

Well, the thing that I’m thinking about, a lot of times I hear the word hope and I hear the word help.

And sometimes I hear people say, I’m going to help you with your homework.

I always thought it was, I’m going to help you with your homework.

And I said, well, maybe it’s just a regional thing or something.

But I’ve heard it pronounced and said that way many times, even from very educated people.

And so now I’m kind of confused.

I stick with, I help you.

I will help you with your homework.

But I don’t use hope in that same manner.

And I just wonder, what is the origin of that?

Okay.

Yeah, so people are saying the word H-E-L-P so that it sounds like the word H-O-P-E.

Help sounds like hope.

Absolutely.

They actually say, well, I’m going to hope her with something.

I said, what do they mean I’m going to hope her with something?

Yeah, there are two things at work here.

One is there’s a British dialect, an old version of the verb hope that’s hanging on

and has been hanging on for centuries where the past tense forms were spelled H-O-L-P or H-O-L-P-E-N.

And sometimes H-O-P-E.

And they’ve hung on for centuries in little pockets throughout the United States,

especially in the American South.

And those themselves are carryovers from Middle and Old English.

It’s usually the past and past participle forms.

Now, it’s not that common anymore.

And when you do find it, it tends to be the older folks.

Not always, but usually.

But there’s another thing that happens, again, in the southern United States,

where speakers of certain dialects, and these are regional, just like you guessed,

so you got that right, they drop L sounds before what are known by linguists as back vowels,

such as O, these are vowels literally pronounced in the back of the mouth,

especially when those vowels happen before certain consonants.

So the same people that say hope instead of help might also say code instead of cold.

So they say C-O-D-E instead of C-O-L-D, especially if they’re younger.

Do you know people who say that?

Yes, of course.

They might say hoed, sounds like H-O-A-D, instead of hold, H-O-L-D.

Oh, that’s very interesting.

Yes, I have.

But I just didn’t think of it in the same manner in which you were saying it.

I just thought it was something that they just simply said.

But now this gives me more of a reason why they do what they do.

And you’re right.

The people who usually say, I will hope you, they are older.

Well, you know, probably middle-aged to older.

I don’t find the youth ever saying that.

Yeah, so there’s two different dialect things happening here.

They have some overlap, but they happen for different reasons.

So we see across the United States the older dialect patterns changing or disappearing,

but new dialect patterns coming in, and occasionally they intersect.

Okay, I really appreciate your answer because it helps to clarify better for me.

All right, be well. Take care.

Okay, goodbye.

Bye-bye.

We really appreciate getting these linguistic field reports from around the country

and around the world. You can call us at 877-929-9673 or send us an email. That address is

words@waywordradio.org. I was delighted to learn the other day that in the Cornish dialect

of southwest England, an icicle can be called a conquer bell.

Oh, how lovely.

I think all the poets immediately need to add that to their list of words to use in future

poems.

So figure out what rhymes with conquer bell and email us words@waywordradio.org.

More of A Way with Words coming up.

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

And I’m Martha Barnette. In the late 16th and early 17th century, John Donne wrote about love,

sex, and death. His love poems have been described by some people as the greatest in the English

language, but they’re famously difficult to unravel. Author Catherine Rundell compares this

process to trying to crack a locked safe. And she’s written a new book about Dunn. It’s called

Super Infinite. And she describes it as a biography and an act of evangelism because she’s passionate

about what she calls Dunn’s burning originality. And she writes about it with a lot of zest and

wit. From an early age, Dunn was intimately acquainted with death. He was born into a

Catholic family in London at a time of fierce anti-Catholicism. Close relatives were imprisoned

and killed for their beliefs. Dunn also survived a plague that ravaged London, and he joined an

expedition against Spain in the Anglo-Spanish War. Back home, he was briefly imprisoned for

marrying a girl without her father’s consent, and they later had 12 children, but six of them died

young, and he was forever struggling to earn enough to feed the rest, and he was writing all

the while. And eventually he converted to the Church of England, he joined the clergy, and he

became dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, where he became something of a celebrity. Thousands of

people would come to hear his sermons. His poetry is hard to characterize. It can be satirical,

gloomy, carnal, exuberant. He broke from tradition by using jagged lines and jarring imagery.

One of his love poems actually likens lovers to the legs of a compass used to draw circles,

and other poems are downright misogynistic.

But Rundell insists that if you tease out his larger themes, if you work to crack that

safe, you’ll be richly rewarded.

She writes,

He was a man who walked so often in darkness that it became for him a daily commute.

But there are also few writers of his time who insisted so doggedly and determinedly on awe.

He was often hopeless, often despairing, and yet still he insisted at the very end,

it is an astonishment to be alive, and it behooves you to be astonished.

Dunn wants us to see the connections around us, our connections with infinity, or as he calls it,

the super infinite, and also the connections with each other.

Yeah, there’s the famous Meditation 17 from his Devotions upon Emergent Occasions

and Several Steps in My Sickness.

What a title that is.

From 1624 that has, well, a couple phrases in it I think everyone will recognize.

It’s probably his most famous work.

It starts,

No man is an island entire of itself.

Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.

If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less,

as well as if a promontory were,

as well as any manner of thy friends or of thy own were.

Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind,

and therefore never sin to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.

And so we have not only a famous Hemingway novel, probably one of his best works,

but we have, O Man is an Island, which became a proverbial phrase in English because of done.

Yeah, that’s far and away his most accessible poem, as far as I can tell.

And the rest of his work, as Rondell says, is really challenging,

but her book itself is really fascinating, if nothing else, for the texture of life during that time.

So that book, again, is Super Infinite by Catherine Rondell.

We’ll link to that book on our website.

And we know we have a lot of poetry fans.

You can send your favorite poets or poems to us, words@waywordradio.org.

Or tell us about it on the telephone.

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

And if you’re not in those countries, there are other ways to reach us.

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

Here’s a tweet I liked from Jeremy London.

If we named people the same way we did a thousand years ago,

we’d have dudes name things like Darren the Depressed or Isaac the Uninsured.

And Grant, it made me wonder, you know, what would you be named if you were named that way?

What would I be named? Oh, I don’t know.

So it’s about my main characteristic.

I guess. Or your main characteristic at the moment.

I immediately went to Martha the Curious.

Martha the Curious.

But yeah.

So what would be your main negative one, though?

A negative one about me?

That’s if.

Well, curious could work more than one way, I guess.

That’s true.

Martha, who ends up with squid ink on her face, because she says, what’s this creature?

What about you?

Grant the Scowler or Grant the Parchment Hoarder.

I like the parchment hoarder. That’s good.

We’d love to hear what your name would be if you were named a thousand years ago.

Let us know on Twitter @wayword.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello. Hi, Martha. Hi, Grant. This is Stacy calling from Marquette, Michigan.

Hello, Stacy. Welcome to the show.

Hi, Stacy.

Hi. Thank you.

My family, my, my opa, my grandfather, Otto, had always used the word with us, the grandkids. And then my father used it as well. And we were misbehaving and maybe we were in trouble. And the word was punch. And we were told, you know, if you don’t get it together, you’re going to get a punch. You’re in trouble. You’re going to get a punch. That was normalized in my family. But when and I would use that word with friends at school or elsewhere, no one else had ever heard of that word. And so I was kind of embarrassed. And I’ve always sort of wondered where it came from.

And a little bit of research that I’ve done, and I mean very little, is just finding a German word. Because my grandfather was first generation and fluent in German. Was to mean government overthrow. And I thought, well, I’m pretty sure Opa didn’t mean that. I’ve always wondered what Putsch means. I was going to guess that Opa Otto was a German because Opa Otto sounds very German to me.

Very German, very German. He was fluent in German and also fluent in Swedish because he was an iron worker. And where he worked, they spoke Swedish. And so he picked that up as well. So he was a bit of a linguist in a way.

Yeah.

Okay.

So when he told you that you were going to get a putch, what were you anticipating getting? What did he tell you a putch was?

A putch usually meant a spanking. And for anyone listening, it was usually just a little spank. We didn’t get wooden spoons or anything like that. It just usually meant that you were going to get a little spanking.

Am I hearing a P there? That’s like P-U-T-C-H or P-O-T-C-H?

Well, I look, when I have researched it a little bit, I was spelling it P-U-T-S-C-H, just guessing that that was how it was spelled.

There we go. That makes sense.

P-U-T-S-C-H.

So he might give you a little putch on your tuchus.

Yeah.

A little slap on your behind.

Yeah.

Well, the German word putch, P-A-T-S-C-H, means a slap. And it’s probably onomatopoetic. So if he was talking about giving you a potch or a putch, it was a little slap. The reason that you saw those other words having to do with the government is that there is a related dialectal German word putch, P-U-T-S-C-H, that means a sudden blow or a smack. And it came to be used in German to refer to an attempt to overthrow a government or an armed insurrection.

And in fact, in the 1920s, there were several of these in Germany. And one of them was in 1923. Hitler and his followers unsuccessfully tried to overtake the German government in something that was called the Beer Hall Putsch. And English journalists ended up adopting this word putch to mean a violent overthrow of a government, which is really interesting because it has to do, you know, it goes back to this early, early sense of a slap or a blow. And you also see this kind of thing when you’re talking about a coup d’etat. The French word coup has to do with striking. And in Spanish, the word for that kind of thing is golpe, a striking. And so a putsch is a strike against a government. And the related word patch in German means slap, and it’s been adopted into dialectal English as PUTCH, like you said, P-U-T-C-H or P-O-T-C-H. And so it’s a real range from from a little bitty slap to overthrowing a government.

Certainly has a range. And I just made, I just assumed what the spelling might be without really thinking of alternative spellings and just wondered if my Opa was just making up a word or maybe if it was something from his own family.

Oh, no. He probably was warned when he was a kid that he was going to get a potch. And, Martha, you said something about a potch in tuchus, which is a clue to more information that you can drop on us.

Right, that there’s a Yiddish connection here, that potch in that sense is a Yiddishism.

Yeah, so lots of our listeners probably remember as kids hearing about a potchki.

Pachki-ing. Pachki is a verb meaning to fool around or to mess around, which also is related to that word.

And being warned that they were going to poch and took us if they misbehaved. They’re going to smack on the bum. And that definitely aligns with how my opa used the word for sure. And frankly, my dad.

Yeah, it’s kind of more like a push that moves you along rather than something that stings, right? That’s a good way to put it. It’s more playful than a vigorous belting. Absolutely.

We never had any sort of vigorous discipline other than, you know, getting the, you know, the evil eye or being told that, you know, our parents were disappointed in us, which was like the ultimate worst possible thing ever. So a punch was sort of a, you know, you kind of need to get the program here. So do-do-do. A demonstration of strength rather than of anger.

Yeah. Oh, my gosh. Wow. I can’t wait to tell all my cousins about this. Yeah, that it’s a heritage word. This is something that you’ve inherited from your family’s roots. Absolutely. And the Yiddish connection, that’s so interesting. Yes.

Thank you so much for sharing these memories with us. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. All right. Take care now. Be well. Take care. Bye-bye.

The toll-free number to call from Canada or the United States is 877-929-9673. Here’s a word you’re likely to hear more often, especially if you have effortless attractiveness or style. That word is Rizz, R-I-Z-Z.

Oh, yeah. Riz, short for charisma, has been bouncing around for a couple of years now, but it looks like it’s coming on strong. Yeah. Isn’t it great that it goes all the way back to an ancient Greek word that means grace or beauty or kindness? Charisma comes from ancient Greek, and now it’s being formed by lopping off both the beginning and the end of a word.

Yeah, morphologically, English doesn’t typically form words like that, and the meaning has changed a little bit, right? Riz doesn’t equal charisma. It’s more about your swagger or your game or your ability to get with somebody romantically. Mm—

So keep an ear out for Riz. We’d love to know what they’re talking about on your campus at your school. What’s the slang? words@waywordradio.org.

Hello. You have A Way with Words. Hi there. This is Rebecca Stanfield. Hey, Rebecca, where are you calling us from? Jackson, Tennessee. All right. Well, welcome to A Way with Words. What can we do for you, Rebecca?

Well, when I’m married in 1989, I heard my mother-in-law, who was a retired school teacher. She was in her 60s at that point. And she used several phrases and expressions that I had never heard. They seemed almost Elizabethan. To me. She described the ne’-do-wells in the community by saying they were not work-brickle. I looked up the word brickle in one of my dictionaries, and it gave the definition as broken. So I wondered if these people who were not work-brickle had not been broken to work.

We talk about breaking horses and mules so that they will work. Work Brickle, we can help you with that. That one has a long history, not only in the United States, but in the United Kingdom. Brickle itself has its own history, meaning brittle, B-R-I-T-T-L-E, going back more than 800 years in the Northern dialects in England, and probably comes from Germanic roots, meaning related to words like break, which is similar to what you were saying, but it’s a different kind of break because there are these two historical meanings of the word.

One of them is that the person is unwilling to work. But the other one is that the person is eager to work. And they’re the opposite of each other, which is strange. In which way did your mother-in-law use it? She always used it in the negative sense, that they were not work brittle. Not work brittle. And so there are these two opposite meanings. But I think that the way that we can explain them is both cases, the person is broken by work. One person is broken because they’re so eager to work that they exhaust themselves and they have nothing left to give.

And the other person is broken by work because they’re so weak and lazy that the slightest exertion breaks them into pieces.

So both people are work-brickled, which basically means work-brittle.

They’re likely to be broken by the work.

You’ll still hear this in the United States, brickled meaning brittle.

And you’ll even hear people say peanut brickle instead of peanut brittle, you know, for the little, the crunchy dessert treat.

It’s not unheard of.

I’ve always heard of butter brickle ice cream.

You know, we don’t talk about butter brittle.

There you go.

So that’s it.

Yeah.

It’s one of those terms that I find not useful because it can mean the opposite of itself.

And in the context, it’s really hard to tell.

I think the willing to work, the eager to work meaning has faded away,

And the unwilling to work meaning is the one that’s most used now.

Well, she’s gone on to her reward now, but some of these old terms, you know,

We don’t hear them as much anymore, but I think they’re delightful.

You’re doing the work, Rebecca.

Well, thank you, thank you.

Thank you so much for sharing it.

We appreciate it.

All right.

I enjoyed talking with you.

Nice talking with you.

Bye-bye.

Well, Grant and I are eager to hear from you,

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

And let’s talk about language.

Earlier, we were talking about the book Super Infinite,

The biography of John Donne by Catherine Rondell.

Until now, she’s been better known as an acclaimed writer of children’s books.

One of them is called The Girl Savage, which draws on her childhood in Zimbabwe.

And the other one is called Rooftoppers.

And it’s about a girl who discovers a group of orphaned children living on the rooftops of Paris.

And that book happens to be informed by Rundell’s fascination with climbing on rooftops herself.

You can Google pictures of Catherine Rundell walking along rooftops where she’s not supposed to be at Oxford University.

She loves getting up high and looking down at the world.

That sounds fantastic.

Usually when people talk about exploring Paris, they talk about Paris underground.

There are all these tunnels and caves and things, catacombs.

Yeah, it’s definitely overground.

She sounds like a fascinating person.

Indeed.

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

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Engineer and editor Tim Felten, and quiz guide John Chaneski.

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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.