How We Roll

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.

The other day I was getting down to the end of a roll of toilet paper at home, and I had a big surprise.

Grant, you’re looking at me like…

Yes, wondering where you’re going.

This is relevant to a show about language.

The cat came in and started batting at the toilet paper.

No, no, no, that often happens.

No, what happened was I got down to the end and there was no tube.

Oh, interesting.

Have you ever?

I had no idea.

I have seen that in institutional roles, though.

Yeah, in institutional roles, but now for domestic use.

Right.

Scott Tissue is starting to sell what they call tube-free toilet paper.

That means a lot of craft projects are going to be unfinished.

Well, yes, and you’re zeroing in on what I was going to talk about, because this is a show about language.

And I was going to talk about all the different names for that cardboard roll that’s in the middle of the toilet paper.

Right. Or the paper towel roll. Sometimes it’s the same.

Yeah, we’ve talked about this on the show before.

And the one that stuck with me was the do-do-do.

Because what do you do? You put it up to your face and you make a trumpet noise, right?

Exactly. Yeah. And we’ve heard from lots of listeners who call them oa-oas or der-ders or tur-ters.

And what I was thinking about is the fact that since we aired that show, which was years and years ago, we have lots more listeners.

And I’ll bet we can hear lots more names for that role that may go missing.

I mean, we may have to have a requiem for a der-der.

Oh, because this is a family word.

It tends to be the thing where you come up with your own in-house slang for it.

Right.

And it often gets named for how it’s used.

You know, little kids pick that up and they make a kazoo out of it.

You put tissue paper on the end.

But what do you call it?

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Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi.

This is Rick from San Diego.

Hi, Rick.

How are you doing?

Hey, Rick.

I’m doing well.

How about you guys?

All right.

What can we help with?

Well, you know, it’s baseball season.

And for some reason, it had me thinking about the words bleachers and stands as in the sentence.

He hit a home run into the left field stands.

And stands especially does not make sense for a place where people are sitting.

But even bleachers to me seems like an odd word.

So I’m wondering if you can give me some background on those.

Oh, yeah, definitely.

Yeah, bleachers is pretty easy.

It’s the place where you sit and sort of bake in the sun.

Where you get bleach.

All the color leaches right out of you and red comes in instead.

Yeah, those uncovered benches where you don’t have reserved seats.

The cheap seats, in other words.

So it actually does kind of make sense.

Yeah.

Like if you leave clothes on the line too long, they’ll bleach out.

Or a poster in the window where it gets some sun, that’ll bleach out.

That kind of bleaching.

And I believe that does come directly from baseball, 19th century descriptions of stadiums and the places where people sat.

Stand is a little bit different.

Stand is a weird word in English.

It takes so many different meanings.

And as far back as the 17th century, a stand was where spectators often stood to watch things like horse races and that kind of thing.

But stand is weird because, you know, we have bandstand, we have witness stands, but people don’t stand there anymore.

So it’s, I guess, kind of hard to know exactly how it transitioned.

Or is it just a coincidence, I guess, that we sit in stands?

That we sit in stands.

Yeah, well, the stand has long been a structure that literally stands there.

That’s what it has in common with bandstand, with speaker’s stand, with witness stand.

It’s like a station, yeah.

Yeah, so it’s a physical structure usually that sits in place.

Now, whether or not it encloses seats or it encloses just an area for spectators, that’s another whole thing.

But the stand refers to the structure and not what the people are doing.

Exactly.

Okay, so it’s just circumstantial to the various uses of the word stand.

Yeah, that’s right.

Because like as Martha said, stand is a super complex word with lots of diverging meanings and a great etymological tree.

Right.

Then, of course, there’s grandstand.

And the verb we get from that grandstanding, the grandstand being in baseball, the place where you sit under the roof.

Oh, okay.

Pale Alextia.

Yeah, yeah.

Pale Alextia.

Not the bleachers.

Yeah.

Not the bleachers, yeah.

Oh, great.

That’s all very interesting.

And I don’t know why words like that sometimes come into our minds, but it was haunting me slightly for some reason.

Oh, understandable.

Well, thank you so much for calling, Rick.

Thank you.

Okay, have a good day.

Bye-bye.

All right, bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

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

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, I am Sarah.

I’m calling from San Diego.

Oh, welcome to the show.

How can we help?

Thank you.

I’m originally from Ethiopia,

And I have a timely question for you.

Okay.

What would be a title for Bill Clinton if Hillary Clinton is elected president?

How do you call him?

What would you call Bill Clinton?

What would his title be if Hillary Clinton is elected president?

That is a timely question.

That’s a good question.

Do you have suggestions for us?

In my native language, as far as I know, we don’t have this term.

You know, I believe that a society coins a term when it corresponds with reality.

Yeah, that’s right.

When we need a word, we make it.

That’s why I’m calling.

Because this has come up before.

This has come up the last time Hillary Clinton ran.

It comes up just as an idle question pretty much every four years.

Now we are deep into the 2016 race.

Hillary Clinton is probably going to be the Democratic candidate.

And we have a problem.

There’s another problem with the Clintons, which is that Bill used to be president himself.

So you can’t address them both.

And informally, people still call him President Clinton, his last highest title.

So we can’t actually still call him President Clinton if his wife is also President Clinton, right?

Typically, what comes out, almost everyone first thinks of first gentleman because gentleman corresponds pretty well to lady.

It’s got a couple connotations that particularly given the sex scandals that he went through don’t really maybe apply to him.

He’s not a certain kind of gentleman, but he is another kind of gentleman maybe.

Also, people have suggested for him, particularly this one man, First Bubba, because Bubba is a slang term for a good old boy or country boy in parts of the South.

I used it when I was a kid to refer to my brother, Bubba.

Wow.

But that’s a joking one.

You’ll never find that, say, engraved in a gold leaf document that is framed and put on the wall, First Bubba or anything like that.

In the Philippines, apparently, they do use First Gentleman, kind of quasi-formally.

And another joke that Bill Clinton himself likes to tell, which I think is funny,

Particularly if he is speaking in the United Kingdom, where the joke makes a lot more sense,

He will joke that they would call him the first laddy, L-A-D-D-Y,

Because a laddy being a cute name for another fellow, a male friend.

Yeah, it’s very interesting, yeah.

You know, Sarah Palin, when she was governor of Alaska, she called her husband the first dude.

First dude, yeah.

Yeah, so we’ve had all these joking answers, but we’ve never really had to address it seriously.

Not yet.

When in doubt, it’s really interesting thing is even though the United States really tends toward jokes and hyperbole and we love innovating with language,

I suspect that we will default to, when we’re referring to them as a pair, the President Clinton and Mr. Clinton.

And he will just simply be Mr. Clinton.

And the press can call him all the titles they want, but none of them will actually be formal.

They can call him First Gentleman.

They can call him First Laddie, First Baba.

But he will still just formally be Mr. Clinton when he is introduced, say, to another head of state alongside his wife.

Make sense, Sarah?

Wow.

Yes.

Very interesting.

Thank you so much.

Yeah, sure.

Thanks for calling.

Thank you for raising the question.

Take care.

Bye-bye, Sarah.

Bye.

We’re sure everyone else has a lot of suggestions.

Every single time this comes up, the comments section and every newspaper are filled with a ton of genuine, heartfelt answers and a lot of goofy, jokey ones.

If you’ve got one, give us a call, 877-929-9673, or email us, words@waywordradio.org.

Here’s a term that’s new to me, GPS art.

Do you know this?

Yeah, people, they’ll do a run, for example, and make it the shape of a dog or a heart for their girlfriend.

You can bike it or walk it or run it or drive it.

Yeah, all these people are using these GPS apps to create more and more elaborate art in urban areas.

And you can go online and you can see people whose routes through a city look like Yoda or Darth Vader or something like that.

So every GPS kind of pinpoint creates a dot on the map.

So it’s going to connect the dots through a city.

Yeah, or lines.

And then your route is reflected on the map digitally, but not actually.

Yeah, how cool is that?

I mean, it’s actually a thing.

You can see photos of it.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Yasmin from Escondido, California.

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

I was wondering if you could tell me anything about the word Scrabblepore.

So Scrabblepore, where did you pick it up?

I was out having lunch with a friend. Her name is Carol.

We were celebrating her 70th birthday, and she was telling me a little bit of back history about her family, how I believe it was an aunt or an uncle, and they grew up around the Appalachian Mountains.

And she was trying to describe how they pretty much had nothing.

They weren’t very rich people, and she described them as a very scrabble-poor family.

And I tried to ask her, you know, scrabble-poor, I’ve never heard that before, what exactly does that mean?

And she was kind of struggling to describe it herself.

So it stuck with me, and I just really wanted to find out what it meant.

So this is really, really poor, just having to scrape and scratch for everything.

Well, many of our listeners will have heard of hardscrabble.

Do you know hardscrabble, Yasmin?

I don’t.

Hardscrabble is often used as an adjective to refer to very much the same thing.

A hardscrabble life is a life where you’re constantly struggling.

You’re constantly trying to provide food and shelter and the basic necessities of life.

And it is traditionally collocated or associated in this country with poor rural life.

Hard scrabble life typically means a farmer whose land doesn’t really produce and who has got a lot of kids that they can’t really feed and that sort of thing.

But the important part of both of these words, both scrabble poor and hard scrabble, is the scrabble itself.

And it’s connected to a wider number of meanings and several hundred years of history of the word scrabble having to do with scratching in the dirt when it refers to animals.

But when it refers to people, it’s kind of an extension of that going back to the 1600s.

It’s just a pure struggle or stumbling, or you might say he scrabbled up the hill.

And then by that you mean he was having a hard time with his hands and his feet getting good purchase, and maybe the rocks were tumbling, and he wasn’t quite making the progress that he wanted and kind of slipping back every once in a while.

It’s literally that idea of kind of just everything’s against you, and no matter how hard you try, you’re hands and feet at the earth trying to make a go of it.

You’re scrabbling.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

Oh, my goodness.

Yeah.

That’s really neat.

So literally crawling your way through life.

Yeah, literally.

Like, just imagine somebody scratching.

And in the case of farmers, literally scratching at the earth trying to make, you know, make the drought go away, you know, hoping you plant the seed and hoping beyond hope that there’s enough water to make the corn grow.

Yeah, it’s a powerful word.

Thank you so much for letting me come on the show.

I listen to you guys all the time.

I love the show.

Thank you for your call, Yasmeen. We really appreciate it.

Thanks, Yasmeen. Bye-bye.

Thank you.

Bye.

877-929-9673.

Do they talk funny out your way?

Share your stories as A Way with Words continues.

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 joining us now from New York City is our quiz guy, John Chaneski.

Hey, John.

Hey, Martha.

Hey, Grant.

Hey.

Hey, buddy.

What’s up?

Well, you know, I host Pub Trivia every week at a place here in New York, and it’s a lot of fun.

One of our rounds that we do as part of our five round night is called Name Three, and it’s sort of a tribond thing.

And I give you three words.

You tell me what they have in common.

There’s lots of names for these.

They call it, you know, triple threat or whatever.

I call it the missing link here today because we need our own thing.

So a missing link.

I’m going to name three things, and you tell me the link that those three things share.

Okay.

And is it going to be a word or an idea?

What are we talking about here?

Yeah.

It’ll be mostly word-related, but there’s some trivia involved.

Okay.

Like, for instance, if I said, well, this is not word-related, but if I said Jefferson, Washington, Franklin, and you said dead white guys, not specific enough.

You have to go a little more founding fathers, things like that.

Okay.

Gotcha.

Here is the first one.

Numbers, acts, judges.

Oh, books of the Bible.

Books of the Bible, which also are things, which is good.

How about samosa, pierogi, creploc?

Oh, all little kind of closed, meat-filled hand food.

Right.

Closed, meat-filled.

It’s almost exactly what I have written here.

Closed, meat-filled hand food.

What’s the official name?

Some kind of dumpling almost, right?

Dumpling is what I was waiting for, yes.

Yeah, but they don’t always,

Well, I’ll argue later about what a dumpling is.

Oh, no.

That’s all right.

It’s all good.

It counts in the plus column.

Here we go.

Bandstand, buffalo, pie.

American.

American what?

American blank.

American bandstand.

Yes, American bandstand, American buffalo, and American pie.

Very good.

How about Bible box, roll top?

Secretary.

Types of desks.

Can you describe a Bible box for me?

I don’t know. I just knew the other two.

It’s sort of like a lap desk.

It’s like a box with a lid, but like a big heavy wooden one that you put in front of you.

How about this?

This one’s very simple.

K-G-M.

Letters.

Letters is a good start.

Consonants.

Are they letters?

Are we spelling these out as words?

Yes, they are letters.

No, they’re letters.

Let’s put it this way.

Letters that all stand for the same thing.

Oh, thousands?

Yes, thousands.

All three of those stand for a thousand.

What does E stand for a thousand?

Oh, no, it wasn’t E.

It was M, sorry.

M, right, right.

Gotcha.

There we go, yeah.

Finally, raspberry, answer, Neel.

How are you spelling Neel?

K-N-E-E-L, Neel.

Raspberry, answer.

Silent letters.

Yes, silent letters.

Raspberry is the silent S.

P.

Well, P.

Silent P, right?

Answer?

W.

W.

And Neil.

K.

The K, which was silent until I spelled it earlier.

K.

And that’s your missing links for today, guys.

You were fantastic.

Nice work.

Thank you so much, John.

This is a show about language and how we use it.

Give us a call at 877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Mike in Greencastle, Indiana.

Hi, Mike.

What’s up?

Hey, Mike.

I’m doing well.

How about you folks?

Okay.

What can we help you with?

Well, I kind of have a pet peeve or at least a question about the usage of the word service as a verb as compared to the word serve as a verb.

I used to work in marketing for a major investment firm, and part of the job was writing presentations and brochures and annual reports and things.

And any time I talked about serving our customers, the other reviewers would change it to servicing our customers.

And to me, that seems wrong in a lot of ways.

Does it suggest certain barnyard acts to you?

It does. Maybe it’s just because I grew up in the country.

But not just barnyard acts, but to me, when you speak of servicing something, that implies either that it’s servicing an object, like I took my car to be serviced or the HVAC guy came and serviced my air conditioner, or it’s, as you said, the act of mating.

You know, a bull services cattle.

So, Mike, do they give you any reasoning for why they would change it?

Not really.

I think they were just bosses or maybe that was the norm within that company.

-huh.

-huh.

Yeah, I would much rather go with serving.

Yeah.

I don’t see.

You serve a customer.

You serve a client.

Yeah.

You service a machine.

It seems to me that at best, it seems less personal to say you service a customer.

Or at worst, again, you’re treating them as objects or in a scandalous way.

Well, you know, serve used to also have that copulatory meaning a long time ago, but it’s been 100 years since that was really common.

So serve is definitely the better choice now, whereas in 1900 it might have had the same connotations as service does to you.

And besides that, it just seems like an unnecessary addition of a syllable, sort of like changing use to utilize when you don’t need to do that.

Yeah, people loving the particular jargon sounding, right, of the verbing of a noun.

Yeah.

I mean, I still call customer service, but that’s a different thing.

Right.

Maybe the implication of increased formality was behind their preference for service rather than serve.

It could be.

Yeah, people do have a tendency, particularly in business environments, to add on layers of separation between them and their audience because they feel that kind of remove properly demonstrates the hierarchy, you know, the power differential in the relationship.

Whereas something that’s more familiar might seem like they are misdirecting or misguiding the customer to thinking that the relationship is different than it is.

Unfortunately, I think the relationship should be as close as possible when you’re looking at making a good impression for the company, conducting marketing activities, and so on.

So rather than separating yourself, I think you should try to do the opposite.

Yeah, it sounds like we’re with you.

I would never say, except as a joke, servicing a customer.

Or servicing our listeners.

I would say we serve our listeners.

We serve them, yeah.

And the nice thing about that is it has connotations, serving has connotations of inverting the actual hierarchy, making it clear that you see yourself at their beck and call, or you see yourself as providing a thing that they require or that they want.

Well, that’s a really good point.

Yeah, sort of like servant leadership.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, it’s a different thing if you take your car in to be serviced.

Yeah, because it’s not between two people, really, right?

It’s between a machine and a mechanic.

Right.

So, Mike, we’re with you.

Yeah.

Well, good, but I do have to admit that friends and family sometimes call me a grammar Nazi, so.

Oh, yeah.

Don’t let them get away with that.

Say that you’re a grammar fan.

There you go.

You’re an aficionado of grammar.

A grammarian, a grammando, something like that.

There you go.

Thanks, Mike, for your call.

All right.

Thank you very much.

Take care, Mike.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

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Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha.

Hi, Grant.

This is Eric from Orlando, Florida.

Hi, Eric.

How are you doing?

What’s up?

Recently, after all the stories we were hearing about Bodie McBoatface, about the sort of joke construct of name-McName, like Bodie McBoatface or Jokey McLaughlin.

Or even in Denver now, they’ve got a goose on the city-county building that they’ve named Goosey McGooseface.

And I was wondering where that construct came from and why that became the popular construct and not something like Bodie Vaughn Boatface.

Bodie Vaughn Boatface.

So Bodie McBoatface, just for anyone who hasn’t been keeping up with the goofball world known as the internet, was the name chosen by the internet at large for a research vessel in the United Kingdom, right?

They put a survey online and as people tend to do, they game that sucker as much as they could.

Yeah, never have a naming contest online, right?

No, no.

That’s a bad, bad idea.

But the names usually are really funny and worth a laugh.

I think Sir David Attenborough is a really great name for a research vessel.

I’m hoping what he’ll do at the ceremony where they officially name the boat that he’ll say, I actually like the other name more.

A lot of linguists and lexicographers and people who follow language have really been looking into this, Eric, and have spent a lot of time, a lot of fun time looking into this for like the last 10 years.

Because this trend has been going on for kind of peaked a couple years ago.

And we’ve got evidence of it happening at least for the last 20 years.

And our colleague, Ben Zimmer, who writes a language column for The Wall Street Journal, among many other things, has told me on Twitter that he has some evidence from 1987 of people saying things like Hickey McHicks from Hicksville, from Cheers.

We had this thing with the Mc prefix in English, particularly American English, where we attach it to words to kind of suggest that they are typical of their kind.

That they’re like a, when you say Martha McRadio, then you’re saying, well, she’s kind of like the typical awesome public radio host, right?

Martha McNerd is what I would say.

Martha McNerd, sure.

And this goes back to the 1940s.

We’ve also used the Mc prefix to mock.

And as we move into the modern day from the 1940s, more and more it’s used in script writing for shows like Friends, where you use it to kind of tease somebody or to make a gag or make a joke.

Or Grey’s Anatomy, Patrick Dempsey’s character McDreamy.

Right. Well, one of the things that McDreamy is missing, though, is the reduplication.

And the reduplication is the repeating of the syllables here, the mick, mick, mick, right?

Yeah, but you don’t need it because he’s so dreamy.

Yeah.

So on Friends, the Cutie McPretty from 2000 was one.

And then there’s another variant that doesn’t really use the mick at all, but it still has the reduplication.

That’s Helperton from Ace Ventura when nature calls in 1995.

And there’s a ton of these.

And they all have this context of a little bit of humor, a little bit of teasing, not too serious.

Sometimes it’s self-deprecating and suggesting that someone is very much like the personification of the words involved in that invented name.

Yeah, the quintessential, yeah.

Is that all ring a bell?

It does. It certainly helps.

Well, we hope we’ve been Helpy Helpertons.

You’ve been Awesome McAwesome.

And not Dopey McDopertons.

Sketchy McSketcherton.

Oh, there’s a ton of these, right?

Yeah.

Thanks, Eric.

Sure, thank you.

Okay, bye.

All right, bye-bye.

Bye.

Call us with your language question, 877-929-9673, or send us an email.

That address is words@waywordradio.org.

We have a very active group on Facebook, and you can always tweet us at WayWord.

I’ve been having a great time going through Bartlett’s 1848 Dictionary of Americanisms.

Do you know what a sneaking notion is?

Sneaking notion?

I don’t know.

An idea that slowly dawns on you?

That’s a good guess.

But to have a sneaking notion for a lady is to have a timid or concealed affection for her.

Oh, a sneaking notion.

I see.

Yeah, like you might not be able to work up the courage to talk to her, but you have a sneaking notion.

A sneaking notion.

I like it.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Jim Markley from Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.

Hi, Jim. How are you doing?

Hey, Jim.

Well, I come from a long line of Hoosiers, and my grandparents, when they would fix lunch sometimes, they would put a couple pieces of bread with cheese between them, and they would grill it.

And what they called that sandwich was a toasted cheese witch.

I have never heard anybody else say that.

I wonder if that’s something specific to Indiana or just specific to my grandparents.

Jim, let me ask you, where in Indiana?

Well, near Fort Wayne is where the Markleys are from, so it would be in that area.

Oh, that’s so interesting because I have a dear friend from Fort Wayne who always called them cheese toasties.

And the first time I ever heard cheese toastie, I’m afraid I laughed at her.

Did you ever hear cheese toasties in that area?

No, no, I didn’t.

And I have other relatives there, and I never heard any of them say anything but, you know, grilled cheese sandwich.

So I don’t know.

Toasted cheese, which.

Yeah, I’ve seen that before.

It’s not all that common.

I’ve seen it in places like Pennsylvania and the Midwest a little bit, but it’s not nearly as common as grilled cheese.

I mean, maybe you should tell us exactly what that sandwich is like.

Yeah, I wonder if it’s the canonical grilled cheese sandwich that I’m thinking of.

It’s pretty much what I think everyone thinks of.

They put butter on bread and put cheese in between the slices and put it on a frying pan and cook it up.

Yep, that’s what I would call a grilled cheese.

There have been Cheez Witch brand names dating back as far as the 1920s for a variety of cheesy products.

That’s true.

I suspect this is just a one-off for your family.

Maybe they did borrow it from one of these brand names.

There’s one that is in the trademark database from 1950.

It’s something along the lines of, they describe it as a cheese-filled waffle wafer sandwich.

Yeah, who knows?

And then you’ll find it again just repeatedly coming up.

A lot of times it’s a challenge to the trademark because a lot of people keep re-corning Cheez Witch for a variety of different products.

And then kind of getting in trouble because the name’s already been trademarked.

Yeah, but just not that common.

No. The other thing to throw in here is that that witch suffix is super interesting because that has been tossed around for around 100 years.

We’ve been making new words out of that witch suffix, always attaching it to a root and suggesting that root and witch together form a kind of sandwich.

So that’s why cheese witch keeps getting recoined again and again and again.

And so I would also suggest that perhaps your grandparents simply coined the new word on their own.

Because they knew about the witch suffix and were comfortable just, you know, creating new stuff, new fun stuff to say.

Well, they were capable of a lot of things, so I wouldn’t be surprised.

Yeah.

Jim, thanks so much for your call. We really appreciate it.

Well, thanks for the information, and enjoy the show, and you guys are doing a great job.

Oh, that’s our pleasure.

Thanks a lot, Jim.

Thank you.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye now.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, how are you doing?

This is Bob Paré, and I’m calling you from just outside of Hartford, Connecticut.

Welcome to the show, Bob.

How can we help you?

I work in the motion picture industry as a grip and electrician.

And there’s a lot of lore around where that word grip actually comes from.

I wondered if you had any information about that.

Tell us what a grip does.

Yeah.

A grip is someone who, once the electricians place the lights,

The grips are the ones who kind of shape the light.

They’ll either block it or they’ll block a little bit of it.

The grips are also responsible for placing the camera wherever it goes,

If it’s mounted on a car or hanging from a tree.

And I’m primarily responsible for items like safety on the set.

And have you heard some of the folk etymologies about the origin of grip?

I’ve heard some of it.

And so far the most popular is that back in the day,

When they first started in the motion picture industry,

The grips were pretty much the only ones who carried tools around on the set,

And a bag of that particular size was typically called a grip.

That’s not that colorful and not that appealing.

So I’ve been trying to stop my own rumor.

So it could be right.

I’ve been trying to perpetuate the rumor that grips were named after Charles Dickens’ raven,

Whom he used in his story Barnaby Rudge, because ravens are among the smartest of birds.

They make their nest out of whatever they can find, and they’re highly intelligent.

Kind of like grips.

They have to get it done quick and get it done creatively, often under a great deal of pressure.

So it’s just quite a bit more colorful explanation.

So I’m hoping it has more to do with that.

That is indeed a colorful story, Bob, which I’ve never heard before and probably is nowhere near accurate.

But we like it.

Unfortunately, Occam’s razor applies here.

It’s one of two really easy descriptions.

The one about the grip, the kind of bag that you might carry tools in, is a really solid lead.

But a lead that I like even more is that there is, in French, grip, gripe, which means to seize or to hold.

It’s got a variety of meanings.

And it is believed by people that I trust that the word entered the American film industry from the French film industry where the word was used before.

And it came over, like fully formed is the word grip, which is more or less the same in French and English.

And it referred both to the act and to the person and then later to the person.

I understand that in the UK, it’s a little different.

The word came to the United States and then went to the UK.

But either one of those, the story that I’ve heard, which I don’t put any credence in at all,

Is the one that the grip was the guy who was wrapping his body around the hand cranked camera

So that it wouldn’t move while the shot was being made.

Oh, that’s too bad. I like that one.

So they would just stop it from bouncing.

But that is kind of, they figured that out.

They didn’t have to put a body on it.

There’s such things as bricks and weights and concrete blocks and lead plates.

You know, there are other ways that they would do that without having to hire a guy just to wrap himself around the camera.

So the simplest, least colorful explanation.

Yeah, unfortunately.

Oh, well.

That doesn’t stop us from perpetuating my rumor anyway.

I’ve been doing it, so we’ll see what happens.

Well, if it comes back to us, we’ll know who started it.

Yeah.

That’s right.

Thank you so much for your call.

Thank you.

Thanks a lot.

Take care now.

Bye, Bob.

Bye.

Bye.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org or ask your question on Twitter @wayword.

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.

As a journalist, I’ve written a ton of nonfiction, but more and more I’m thinking about writing memoir.

Maybe not for publication.

But what about you, Grant?

Do you ever think about writing a memoir?

I do.

But I want to write the memories that involve certain other people.

Yes, and that’s an issue, right?

It’s about me being there in the lives of other people.

And are you concerned about being published and people being happy with what you write?

Well, back when I was a blogger.

I was a blogger in the early days of blogging, and I did that for like eight years or so.

And you can still find some of the old stuff out there.

A couple times I wrote about my relationships with people like roommates or an old high school friend.

They found it, and I went back to reread it.

And I felt that even though I was honest, they had taken it as an unkindness to even share some of those things about them.

Oh, that’s really interesting.

And so, yeah, I felt a little burned by that.

But I gather that you’re headed towards the larger point of memoirs, right?

I am indeed.

And it’s interesting that you say that because this comes up again and again in this book I’m reading called Why We Write About Ourselves.

It’s edited by Meredith Moran, and it’s 20 contemporary writers.

A lot of names will be familiar to you, like Sue Monk Kidd and Pat Conroy and Cheryl Strayed and Anne Lamott and James McBride.

And they’re all talking about the craft, the process, the challenges and rewards of writing memoirs,

And also the kind of thing that you’re talking about, because if you’re writing about yourself, you’re naturally writing about other people as well.

And that can be a real risk. And you can get surprising responses, as you just said.

They don’t appreciate your honesty or they don’t appreciate your perspective.

And then you start to wonder, what were the stakes when I wrote this? Was it worth it?

Did I get out of sharing this thing about them what I needed to get? Should I even have bothered?

Right, right. And that’s exactly what a lot of these writers are wrestling with in these conversations in this book.

And it’s interesting that you talk about honesty because that’s another big point that I keep coming across again and again in this book.

There was one section I particularly liked that was a conversation with Darren Strauss who wrote Half a Life.

He won the National Book Critics Circle Award for that.

And it’s a memoir about he wrote it when he was 36 years old and half a life before that he accidentally killed a girl when he was driving his car.

And so he had this struggle within himself.

He just felt like it was time to address that.

And he wrote with searing honesty about that pain.

The memoir turned out really well, I think, because of his honesty.

And in fact, he talks about the fact that there was a celebrated literary editor who was teaching a beginning memoir class.

And the assignment he gave the students was write about the most embarrassing thing that’s ever happened to you.

And he said the only criterion, the only rule is that you have to be completely honest.

Wow.

And, I mean, gosh, what a tough assignment.

I was trying to think what if I got that assignment.

Yeah, I don’t even know.

I don’t even know if I could pull it off.

I don’t know if I could either.

One of the things that Darren Strauss suggests doing is writing it in the third person.

And I was thinking, you know, maybe I could do that.

But his point there was that of the 15 people in that class, at least half of them got that essay published.

It was accepted for publication someplace.

Because of the honesty.

Because of the honesty.

Because of being honest about the pain.

I think you might enjoy this book.

It’s called Why We Write About Ourselves, 20 Memorists on Why They Exposed Themselves and Others in the Name of Literature, edited by Meredith Moran.

If you want to share a book with us or there’s something that you want to recommend, give us a call, 877-929-9673, or send the book information and the link to it to words@waywordradio.org.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Jen. I’m calling from Burlington, Vermont today.

Great. Welcome to the show. How can we help you?

So I was calling in because I was recently flying across the country. And as you know, in airports these days, outlets are a hot commodity.

Oh, yeah.

And a woman came up to me and asked if she could plug her phone in where I was sitting, because there was an outlet in the chair, and said she just needed a little juice.

And it got me thinking that that’s kind of a funny term.

And I listen to you guys when I’m driving a lot and thought, oh, I should call and ask, why do we call charging stuff juice?

Yeah, it is a weird thought if you think about it, right?

Does it feel slangy to you?

Like, it’s just a funny slang for it.

And I was like, it’s kind of a funny term when you actually think about it.

It’s American slang mostly.

I mean, I’m sure it’s used a little bit in the UK, but it’s widespread in the United States.

And it’s still got a little bit of a slangy tinge to it.

And if you go back to the earlier days of electricity, I mean, electricity has been with us for a really long time.

But when we actually started to put it to steady, consistent use, like it started showing up as a regular feature in the household, there’s kind of this strange way that there’s always these verbs connected with electricity, which have kind of treat it like water.

That’s true.

We’ll talk about electricity flowing or electricity running or.

Current.

Yeah, current.

Yeah.

It’s coursing through the filament or coursing through the wire.

And again and again and again, we see all these verbs that can also be used with liquids.

And juice is one of those.

And in the kind of metaphorical way that you might explain electricity, you might describe it running through a circuit in the same way that you describe fluids flowing through, say, a plant, you know, coming up through the trunk.

Trunk, by the way, also exists in the telephone business.

You can have a telephone trunk and things like that.

So it was all these different kind of ways that sound vaguely natural, almost organic and plant-like.

And so juice is one of those, which is another one of those liquid-related words.

And also, juice tends to be heavy in sugar, and we tend to feel rejuvenated by it.

It’s long been associated with lots of vitamins and nutrients that the body needs.

And so the idea of adding juice to something means that you are giving it what it needs in order to make it do the thing it needs to do.

Okay, cool.

And it’s 100 years, at least 100 years we’ve been doing this.

Late 1800s, it shows up.

100 years been calling electricity juice?

Yeah, yeah.

It shows up in the Boston Herald referring to the trolley, like an electric trolley in 1896.

Oh, that’s cool.

Yeah, when I was trying to think of it, I was like, oh, I thought of the nutrient thing maybe, or maybe had to do with joules as a wattage.

And I’m like, oh, that doesn’t seem close enough.

And if you talk about juicing a motor or something, it’s like giving it get up and go.

Juicing a motor, yeah, juicing something up.

That’s interesting.

Yeah, something electronic.

Cool.

Thanks, Jen.

Yeah, well, thanks, guys.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Okay, keep that.

You’re answering my question.

Yeah.

Bye.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

You’re going to say keep that laptop charged?

I was going to say, yeah, keep that battery charged.

I’m one of those people that when I see screenshots of people’s phones where they’re trying to show me something that happened on their screen, I always look at the battery, and I’m like, what are you doing running around with a phone that has 7% charge?

Well, charge that thing.

Put that in.

Put it in low power mode at least.

Yeah, something.

Low power mode is my new best friend.

Yeah, low power mode will get you through the day, right?

Yeah, that really helps.

Because you do miss the flip phone days, right?

When you could go for like eight days on one charge, right?

Oh, I know.

I know, yeah.

On the other hand, my flip phone wouldn’t do all the wonderful things that my current phone does.

I know. There’s that too, right?

That big old screen here.

So when Tesla starts making phone batteries, then we’re all set, right?

Solar phones.

I’m all about solar phones.

Just put them in the windowsill and let them charge.

Well, we know somebody came up to you and said something that made you cock your head.

What was it?

Call us 877-929-9673 or send us an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello there.

This is William Quinn from Abilene, Texas.

Hey, William.

Hi, how you doing?

Doing great.

How about y’all?

All right.

What’s on your mind?

What’s up?

Well, I heard a program here a few weeks back about y’all had been discussing aunt and auntie as an endearing term for whether it is your aunt or not.

And it got me to thinking about calling it and mentioning that uncle was kind of the same thing.

I remember as a child we had different people in our family.

We actually had uncles, and we had friends of my mom or dad, and they would introduce us later as an enduring term for uncle.

The other term that I was going to ask about is using uncle as a form of saying I give or cry uncle, say uncle.

Mm—

Yeah, there’s a joke behind that, William.

Our friends at the Dictionary of American Regional English have turned up a joke that was widely circulated in newspapers in the late 1800s that may have the origin of cry uncle, which is an Americanism.

So the short version is there’s a fellow who’s boasting that his parrot could repeat anything that you told him.

So he would sell the parrot to say this word and he’d tell the parrot to say that word.

But finally he said, just say the word uncle.

And the parrot wouldn’t repeat it.

And he said, say uncle.

And the parrot wouldn’t repeat it.

And he’s like shouting at the parrot, uncle, uncle, uncle, say uncle, just to get him to say any word at all.

And the parrot wouldn’t repeat it.

And so he’s just done with the bird.

And he shuts it in the chicken coop with the chickens.

And he comes out later.

And the parrot has killed all of the hens except for the last one.

And the parrot is standing over the last hen saying, uncle, say uncle, you bugger, say uncle.

So that’s pretty cool.

So the parrot was doing it.

So the bird’s what the man was doing to the parrot.

And so this joke apparently caught everybody’s fancy and was widely—I mean, it just appears so many times in all these different newspapers.

And we believe, we being people who study these sorts of things, that that is the origin of cryocole in the United States.

Wow.

Crazy, right?

Well, that makes a little sense, but it’s—being back in the 1800s, I figured it would be newer than that.

I wanted to ask you, given that you’re calling from Texas, if you have ever heard something similar, it has the same meaning, but to holler calf rope when you want to give up.

He hollered calf rope when I wouldn’t let him up off the ground.

Yeah.

Actually, I have heard that.

-huh.

Not near as many times as the term uncle.

I mean, actually, the first time in my memory was when I was 12 in a little schoolyard fight.

The guy that was on top of me said, cry uncle.

After a while, after I ate enough dirt, I said uncle, so he let me up.

Oh, you ate dirt.

Well, thank you so much for your call.

Really appreciate it.

Well, I appreciate y’all.

Thank you very much.

Thanks, William.

Take care now.

Well, have a good one.

You too.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

877-929-9673.

A friend of mine has a son going off to college this year,

And she went to the orientation session for parents,

And she said her favorite line from the whole session

Was when they were told by one of the staffers there,

We have helicopter parents who hover,

We have lawnmower parents, the ones who mow you down,

And then there are Black Hawk parents.

They hover too, but they’re armed.

And it’s a thing.

I look those things up.

Well, I knew helicopter parenting.

Well, yeah, that one’s been around.

But I love the variations on that.

Lawnmower parents are the ones that, you know, the administrators dread because they just come and intercede.

It’s always battle.

Everything’s battle.

Yeah, but the worst are the Black Hawk helicopter parents.

What’s that?

Do they come in on secret missions?

They just, they show up at the president’s office no matter what the deal is.

Right, yeah.

Love those variations on new words.

Call us with the ones you’ve heard, 877-929-9673, or send them an email.

The address is words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, hi.

This is Linda calling from Marietta, Georgia.

Hello, Linda, how you doing?

My pleasure.

Okay.

Long ago, I was fortunate enough to have an inspiring English teacher who gave us a puzzle

That she said it might take us the rest of our lives to solve.

The puzzle involved prefixes, N-I-N-U-N and M-I-N.

And she told us that generally the use of these prefixes reverses the meaning of the word it’s attached to,

Like possible and impossible and believable and unbelievable.

But she told us that there are five words that adding a prefix does not reverse the meaning.

And she gave us one.

Flammable and Inflammable.

And she says there’s four others, and she said, go find them.

Well, in the course of decades, I have only found one, Ravel and Unravel.

Oh, that’s a good one.

Can you tell me the others?

Linda, decades.

Decades.

Wow.

And what was your teacher’s name?

Mrs. Martha Hayes.

She was a beloved English teacher.

Oh, that’s great.

So Mrs. Martha Hayes has sent you out into the world.

Have you talked to any of your fellow students about this?

Well, no, I haven’t been back there in so long, but I’ve asked many, many friends,

And no one can come up with anything.

Sounds like the hero’s journey, the hero’s quest to capture the crystal

That can take back to the palace to release the princess.

And it just dawned on me, the very ones will be Martha and Grant.

Well, yeah.

My Martha has a glint in her eye right now.

I think she knows.

Have you got it, Martha?

Well, I’ve got a couple of them.

I mean, how about loosen and unloosen?

Okay.

You loosen your stays and you unloosen them as well.

You can unloose the dogs or loose the dogs.

Yeah, yeah, okay.

Loose the dogs.

Unloose the dogs.

Yeah.

Gotcha.

And the other one that I’m thinking of is valuable and invaluable.

Oh.

Oh, yes, ma’am.

That one I love because both of those words are usable words, valuable and invaluable.

How about peel and unpeel?

Unpeel and orange and I peel and orange?

Yes, yes.

Now I see it because it would be, I could see you using either of those words, couldn’t you?

Here’s another one.

It doesn’t fit your prefixes, but it’s the same story.

You can bone a chicken or you can de-bone a chicken.

Oh, beautiful.

Yes, being a cook, yes.

So now we’re over five, aren’t we?

Yeah.

Aren’t we up to six?

Yes, absolutely.

But you know my favorite is valuable and invaluable.

That’s a good one, right?

Wait, did we do thaw and unthaw?

That is so much like flammable and inflammable.

Yeah.

Oh, thank you so much because I was running out of time to complete this quiz.

Well, we just bought you some time, I guess, then, huh?

Now you’ve got a new mission.

What’s your new mission going to be?

Give us another puzzle on the air sometime, a long one.

Okay.

All right.

Linda, thank you so much.

Well, I’m glad we could offer valuable information or invaluable information.

Every week you give me valuable information.

Oh, thank you.

And bless Mrs. Martha Hayes’ heart.

Oh, indeed.

Take care now.

Bye-bye.

Thanks, Linda.

Bye-bye.

Yeah, we did talk about thaw and unthaw not too long ago on the show.

Is that six of those we picked up?

That’s several.

Did you count bone to bone?

Yeah, yeah.

Language is curious.

Each word kind of stands on its own, doesn’t it?

And takes its own path and doesn’t necessarily fraternize with its etymological kin or etymological family, right?

Yeah, well, in the case of the in and the un, sometimes they’re, or the in anyway, it’s an intensifier rather than a negator.

Yeah, because there’s several different kinds of prefix that are spelled exactly the same, but they have different roots and different meanings.

So what’s the thing that you heard decades ago and you’re still wondering about?

Grant and I can try to help.

Call us 877-929-9673 or send those emails to words@waywordradio.org.

I love what E.L. Doctorow had to say about writing.

He said, it’s like driving at night with the headlights on.

You can only see a little ways ahead of you, but you can make the whole journey that way.

Mm—

Isn’t that the truth?

Yeah, sometimes I just, I write to find out what I’m thinking, as Joan Didion said.

I agree with that. That’s very insightful.

877-929-9673.

Want more A Way with Words?

Listen to years of past episodes at waywordradio.org or find the show on any podcast app or on iTunes.

Our toll-free line is always open, so leave us a message at 877-929-9673.

And we’ll take a listen.

We’d love to get your messages at words@waywordradio.org

Or hit us up on Twitter @wayword

And look for us on Facebook.

This program would not be possible without you.

Grant and I are out to change the way we listen and think about language.

And you’re making it happen.

Thanks also to senior producer Stefanie Levine,

Director and editor Tim Felten,

Director Colin Tedeschi,

And production assistant Emma Kelman in San Diego.

In New York, we thank quiz guide John Chaneski

And that master of keeping it real, Paul Ruist at Argo Studios.

A Way with Words is an independent production of Wayword, Inc.

From the Recording Arts Center at Studio West in San Diego, I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

So long.

Bye-bye.