I’ll Be Sheep-Dipped

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, do you know the word annuent?

Annuent?

No.

A-N-U-E-N-T, something like that?

There are two N’s.

There are A-N-N-U-E-N-T, annuent.

Something related to years or rings?

I don’t know.

Those are very good guesses.

What are they?

They’re not correct.

No.

But I’m going to get back to that in a second.

The reason that I’m talking about this word is because it’s one of many very cool, obscure words that I have discovered and started learning thanks to the Omnificent English Dictionary in Limerick form.

Oh, the OEDILF.

Yeah, the OEDILF.

So this is the project where they’re taking every head word from the Oxford English Dictionary, only unofficially, and making a limerick for all of them.

Yes, yes, and it’s crowdsourced.

Anybody can contribute limericks to this.

So they’re limericks that illustrate the use of these words.

So annuant actually has to do with, well, let me read you the limerick that Chuck Folkers wrote for it.

Oh, bobblehead doll, you’re so annuant.

We got takeout Chinese in the van you went.

As I stepped on the clutch, you were nodding so much that you fell into the moogoo guy panuant.

That’s great.

That’s like a real professional limerick.

Yes, right?

We should have a limerick laureate in this country.

That’s a great idea.

Yeah.

So, annuit has to do with nodding.

In fact, the muscles in your neck that let you do that are annuit muscles.

No, super duper.

Isn’t that cool?

And so, you can search that website by obsolete words, and you can find all these really cool ones like that.

Google O-E-D-I-L-F, and you’ll find the site.

And you’ll also find out that they’re scheduled to finish in 2043.

Yes.

Yes, they’ve got big plans.

That means that hopefully the next edition of the Oxford English Dictionary will not come out before they’re done.

Their deadlines are shot.

We’ll share some more limericks later in the show.

Give us a call, 877-929-9673, or email us, words, at waywordradio.org.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, good afternoon, Martha.

This is Erin, and I am calling from Cambridge, Wisconsin.

Hi, Erin.

Welcome to the show.

What’s going on?

Well, I am calling today because I have a boss that I work with, and she is Southern, very Southern.

And in meetings, I have heard her refer to sheep dipping someone.

Typically, it’s used in reference to someone who doesn’t understand a process or hasn’t been introduced to something that we’re working on.

And she says things like, we are going to sheep dip you right down on in here.

And I just wondered where that came from.

It cracks me up every time.

So you’ve never worked on a farm?

I have not.

I live in Wisconsin, but I have never worked on a farm.

Sheep dipping, so it’s this chemical process where you get the sheep to wade through this disinfectant or insecticide to get rid of bugs, basically, to get rid of disease so that the animal is clean.

And so it’s become this metaphor in the business world.

It pops up in a couple business jargon dictionaries.

It’s become a metaphor for getting somebody over to the side of agreeing to do things the way the company wants to do them.

Kind of getting the drink, the Kool-Aid, more or less.

Is that the way your boss uses it?

Yeah, I think absolutely that sounds correct, just in the context that she has used it.

I just find it to be a very interesting metaphor, I guess, if you will.

Yeah, I mean, they don’t go head in, but basically their whole body,

You, sheep will, you know, they’re sheep.

They’ll do what you urge them to do.

So you channel them in.

You’ve got this big pool of chemicals.

They wade through it.

Maybe there’s a guy with a bucket pouring some on top or spraying or something like that,

And then they walk out the other end into the paddock or the field.

Yeah, and that’s the sense I always had of it was one after another.

I’ve heard people compare, you know, like we were just lined up like a sheep dip

Or something like that, you know, just one after another.

No, in Paul Dixon’s Dictionary of Americanisms, he has sheep dip,

And he says just a sales seminar.

But most of the uses that I find, for example, there’s a website called The Office Life

That defines a lot of business jargon.

It says a tedious corporate briefing where attendance is mandatory and recorded for all employees.

Sorry, required for all employees.

Erin, it sounds like you can relate to that.

I absolutely can.

So we’re really talking indoctrination, right?

We are.

No, I actually, I work for a remote company.

And so we, all of our meetings are remote.

So it’s a whole group of people around what’s even worse, right?

Speaker phones and cell phones and bad traffic and bad connections.

And so it certainly is an exercise in both patients and, I would say, wading through a vat of chemicals to come out the other side.

But you come out clean.

You come out, everyone comes out the same, and you come out free of bugs and weirdness, right?

You hope.

Yeah, I think your definition of clean might be a little bit different than mine.

There is one interesting little factoid.

There is a book of fiction that I read that suggests that in the intelligence community, sheep dip is when spies, like say CIA and SA, try to pass their employees off as regular folks or try to make it look like they work in the private sector, even though they work for the spying agencies.

And they call that sheep dipping to create this whole profile or dossier of this person so they look like a normal human being and not a super spy.

Interesting.

So are you suggesting that perhaps my boss is trying to pass herself off and she’s really inoperative?

You know what?

Look for grappling hooks in her handbag.

There we go.

Leather gloves.

Is there a red light flashing on the lipstick tube?

Well, thank you both so very much.

This has been really enlightening.

I’ve been in the business world for about 20 years, and I don’t know that until I joined this company I had not heard anyone use it in that way.

Okay.

Yeah.

Well, good.

Glad to help.

And thanks for sharing.

We’ve got one more data point that it’s used that way by a southern woman in Wisconsin.

There we go.

Well, thank you so much.

Take care, Erin.

Yeah, keep an eye on her.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Don’t worry.

Bye-bye.

Have a good day.

Bye-bye.

Is there a word that’s come up in your office that you’re curious about?

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

Here’s another limerick from the Omnificent English Dictionary in Limerick Form.

This is about the word expuition.

Expuition.

Do you know this word?

I don’t.

E-X-S-P-U-I-T-I-O-N.

Expuition.

Okay.

Expuition’s an old word for spitting.

You can spit either standing or sitting.

Just how far you can spew your saliva.

If you hit my shoe, a faux pas, you’re committing.

Oh, nice.

That works.

So you’ll always remember that word, right?

877-929.

9-6-7-3. Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hi, my name is Daniel, and I’m calling from Dallas,

And have a question for you, not necessarily on what a word means, but more on the pronunciation

Of the word. All right, fire away, Daniel. Well, I was hanging out with my 94-year-old grandfather,

And he’s got a plaque on his wall that is for the logo of the Department of Defense,

And I looked at it, I’ve seen it a million times, and I read it out loud, and I read it as Department of Defense.

And when I read it as Defense, it just sounded really weird to me.

And I started thinking about defense versus defense.

And you never hear anyone say the Department of Defense.

You hear them say the Department of Defense.

And sort of, I guess, on the flip side of that, you never hear anyone chanting at a football game, defense, defense.

And so I wanted to call and talk to you guys and see what your intake would be on sort of the different pronunciations of that and why it is that way.

Yeah, really interesting.

Daniel, do you watch a lot of sports?

Enough.

You know, I’m not a rabid fan of any particular sport.

I’m sort of a homer, as we like to say.

So I support our Dallas area sports teams.

But that’s probably about it.

Oh, homer.

What were you thinking when you pronounced it that way from the plaque?

Why did you say it that way at that time?

I don’t know. I just, you know, it’s the word. It’s written that way.

You know, you can, it’s commonly said as defense. It’s, you know, read as defense.

You never hear someone say defense attorney. It’s a defense attorney.

Right. Good point. Good point. And you’re exactly right that the traditional pronunciation is that defense with the accent on the second syllable.

Same with offense. But yes, sports talk seems to have influenced the way that people pronounce

Those in certain contexts. And I think probably the reason, this is just a guess, and maybe Grant

Has a different idea, but I think it’s because you’re talking about two things in opposition,

The team on this side that’s doing one thing and the team on that side that’s doing the other thing.

And so you sort of contrast them by saying defense versus offense. It’s sort of like when we talk

About affect versus effect.

Right.

So it’s just sort of a sports lingo, you think,

That’s crept into our everyday vernacular?

Yeah, all of the authorities that I read

On this particular pronunciation

Emphasize that they believe it came from sports.

And in fact, if you look at pronunciations of this word

In news environments, you’ll have a newscast

Where the entire newscast may talk about, you know,

Rebels took the offense today in such and such country.

And then they’ll say, now Mike with sports,

And Mike will talk about defense.

And it’s really interesting to even have in that same context some people probably in the same community using these two different pronunciations.

So it’s very context-specific.

I wouldn’t call it wrong.

No, it’s almost accepted.

Yeah, but it’s accepted in sports with unremarked upon.

There’s an interesting thing.

Brian Garner, who we love to talk about, he’s got this great book, Garner’s Modern American Usage, has a language change index.

And he puts this one at a four out of five, meaning the change is almost complete, at least within sports contexts.

Very interesting to know. I appreciate it.

I was, you know, just thinking about it and again got the humorous thoughts of having people at a game, you know, chanting Duffin and having everyone look at you like you’re just completely out of place.

Right.

There’s no grammar in sports.

They’ve committed some kind of grammatical offense.

Exactly.

Great. Well, Martin Grant, thank you very much.

Oh, sure. Thanks for your call, Daniel.

Good to talk with you, Daniel.

Really appreciate it. Take care now.

Take care. Bye-bye.

Bye.

You know what’s happened to you?

You’ve been watching television, and you heard somebody famous or not so famous,

Maybe on a commercial, maybe on a show, say a word in a way that you just didn’t expect.

Well, this is the place to hash it all out, 877-929-9673, or email us, words@waywordradio.org.

Here’s another limerick from the Omnificent English Dictionary in limerick form.

This is for the word catalate.

C-A-T-I-L-L-A-T-E.

My cat Hattie went out on a date with a tomcat she wanted to mate.

But she dumped him in truth because she found him uncouth.

He would catalate, lick off his plate.

She’s got a second verse here.

This bad habit on Hattie would grate.

As a purebred of highest estate, she would never be seen licking dinner plates clean.

That’s the way she would say cattle ate.

Cattle ate.

That means to lick your plate?

Yeah.

Isn’t that great?

Who knew there was a word for that?

People who know really old Latin.

People who do that.

Yeah.

The uncouth.

Share your favorite limericks with us, 877-929-9673.

Or throw us a couple questions about language to words@waywordradio.org.

There’s a story behind your family’s funny sayings.

Try to stump us 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 Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

And on the line is John Chaneski, our quiz guy, direct from New York City.

Hi, it’s me, the quiz guy, John Chaneski.

Hi, guys.

Hi, John.

Now, I love Venn diagrams.

Do you guys like Venn?

Who doesn’t love a Venn diagram?

Yeah, the funny ones that show up on Reddit.

Sure.

Well, some people don’t, and some people do,

And then there are people in the middle who, you know.

Very nice.

In the intersection, people who can give or take.

Two or more circles in a Venn diagram represent sets of things.

The circles overlap, and in the overlap are the things that belong in both

Or more than one set.

For example, this circle is the set of men,

And that includes Grant Barrett.

And this circle is the set of women.

And that includes Martha Barnette.

And where the circles overlap represents?

A Way with Words.

A Way with Words.

Yes, very good.

That’s our basic Venn diagram.

But this puzzle is not about Venn diagrams.

Okay.

It’s about things that rhyme with Venn diagrams.

For example, if I had a map of some wetlands,

You could say that’s not a Venn diagram.

It’s a Venn diagram.

Oh, good lord.

So we’re just looking for something that rhymes with Venn only?

That’s exactly right.

Okay.

And here we go.

Okay.

If I had a floor plan of the specific room in my house that includes my favorite chair, my reading lamp, my bookcase, my TV stand, and my video game setup, it’s not a Venn diagram.

It’s a?

Den Viagram.

And it’s 1977.

It’s a Den Diagram.

Yes.

Very good.

This chart here shows how to classify eggs by size, weight, and color.

You could say, it’s not a Venn diagram, it’s a…

A hen diagram.

A hen diagram.

Cluck, cluck.

This chart seems to be the specifications for a famous child’s toy, specifically a male doll.

It’s not a Venn diagram, it’s a…

Ken diagram.

It’s a Ken diagram, yes.

This chart shows the migration patterns of a particular breed of small brownish songbird.

It’s not a Venn diagram.

It’s a…

It’s a Wren diagram.

It’s a Wren diagram.

Tweet, tweet.

W-R-E-N.

Yes, W-R-E-N.

I found this chart used in Tokyo at a currency exchange office.

It’s not a Venn diagram.

It’s a…

Yen diagram.

A Yen diagram, yes.

This map shows the elevation, or lack thereof, in a long, deep highland valley.

It’s not a Venn diagram.

It’s a?

Long, deep, highland valley.

Glen.

Glen.

Yes, it’s a Glen diagram.

Highland being the trigger word there for me.

Yes.

Now, this chart documents the usage of a common boy’s name in Scandinavia.

It’s not a Venn diagram.

It’s a?

Sven diagram.

A Sven diagram, yeah.

This map here tracks the evolution of a meditative school of Mahayana Buddhism in Asia.

It’s not a Venn diagram.

It’s a Zen diagram.

Now, finally, this instructional guide tells you how to change the nibs in ink on an old-fashioned writing implement.

It’s not a Venn diagram.

It’s a pen diagram.

It’s a pen diagram, yes.

Again, there are probably those out there.

You guys did fantastic.

I think you guys definitely fall in the intersection of the smart and the handsome.

So that’s you guys.

Why, thank you, John.

Yes.

That’s mighty kind of you.

Sure.

Thanks, John.

We’ll have another quiz from you next week, right?

I’ll see you then.

If you’ve got a question about anything related to words and language and speaking and writing,

Well, this is the place, 877-929-9673, or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Carolyn Dreyer from San Diego.

Hi, Carolyn. How are you doing?

Hi, Carolyn.

I’m doing well.

What’s going on?

I am a huge fan of words. I’m a huge fan of your program.

I am a former retired copywriter, so words are my life.

And one word I’ve never understood is why fancy tailored suits, like from Savile Row and so on, are called bespoke.

Do you have clothing like this, Carolyn?

A new.

Okay.

James Bond does, but I don’t.

So he goes in, James Bond goes into the tailor and gets measured, and they make a suit just for his body, right?

Right.

All the bust and the inseam and the hips and the whole thing, right?

Yeah, this word confused me when I first ran into it in print because I thought bespoke clothing.

I was thinking of spoke like the spokes on a bicycle wheel, and I thought maybe they put it on the hanger wrong, you know?

It was sort of punched out a little bit.

I didn’t understand it either.

It took quite a while to get it.

All I could think was spoken for, you know, like something was spoken for.

Well, Carolyn, you’re pretty much right.

It goes back to an old word, bespeak, the old sense of bespeak meaning to discuss or decide upon.

Well, there’s a sense of to order or even to arrange for something to happen.

Exactly.

It was used early on by tailors and in other professions where you make something to order.

And that’s what it means if something is bespoke.

And usually you hear it about clothing, but you can also hear it about computer software, you know, bespoke software, particularly for your business and your particular business needs.

I’ve even seen bespoke cocktail.

Bespoke cocktail?

Yeah.

What?

I’ll take a dash of each?

Yeah, you know, you go and you get a custom-made drink.

Oh, oh, oh.

But usually you see it in the context of clothing.

So the whole idea of the spoken there is directly related to our, you know, spoken language.

And so to bespeak in this particular sense was to request or order as if you’re ordering a service, ordering a good, right?

Ordering a product, right?

Exactly.

Yeah, the be here has an unusual sense in that it gives sort of a transitive force to the verb speak.

You know, you don’t usually think of speak as a transitive verb,

But in the same way that bewail and bemoan and belie have sort of a transitive sense because of that be.

It’s like you bespeak the clothing.

So you bespeak something.

Yes.

Okay.

Yes.

Like order clothing.

I’ll have to remember that next time I order a cocktail.

See what happens.

Yeah? What kind of recipe would you use?

I always get recipes of cocktails when I’m in a restaurant and I really like one.

I write down what’s in it, and then I come home and I try to do it myself.

Does it work?

Yes.

Oh, okay.

Yes, it does. Actually, it does.

I have bad luck with that sort of thing. I’m always missing something crucial.

Grenadine? Who’s grenadine at home?

Jalapenos, what?

Yeah, they always need strange ingredients, though.

Thank you so much for calling, Carolyn.

Well, thanks, Carolyn.

Take care now.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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

Or send it an email to words@waywordradio.org,

Or find us on Facebook and Twitter.

I have a limerick here about the word cataglottism.

Do you know this word, Grant?

Well, glott is something related to throat.

Tongue, yeah.

Yeah, it actually means French kissing.

Okay.

Would you like to hear this?

This is by somebody named Besswan Bird on the Omnificent English Dictionary and Limerick Forum site.

It goes, cataglottism, simply divine.

When we kiss and our tongues intertwine.

Though with you I’m obsessed, it’s my cat I love best.

But do that to my cat, I decline.

These are so great. You can find more of these.

Yeah, the best ones are funny.

So all of these limericks that we’re talking about on the show are at oedlif.com.

Yep, check them out.

And call us with your language questions, 877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi there. This is Donald. I’m calling from Newport, Kentucky.

Newport, Kentucky, right across the river from Cincinnati.

Indeed.

Hi, Donald. Welcome to the show.

So I’m a high school English teacher in Cincinnati, and we have a seven-period day, or days divided into seven class periods.

I’m not originally from Cincinnati.

One of the things I’ve noticed about kind of school nomenclature here, everyone here refers to the class period as a bell.

You know, you have a first bell class, a second bell class.

I’ve been to schools before where they have like a bell schedule, but they’ll still refer to it as first period, second period.

And I’ve never heard this anywhere else other than Cincinnati.

Kids will say, I have biology third bell and calculus fourth bell.

Or people will say, what time does this bell start?

What time does this bell start?

Oh, interesting.

And Donald, where did you grow up?

I grew up in Northeast Ohio in the Cleveland area, but we moved around a lot when I was a kid.

So I attended lots of different schools.

I’ve been to schools where I went to junior high in Oklahoma, and it was first hour, second hour.

And I think the class periods were actually an hour long, so that made sense.

But this bell thing, I’ve never heard outside of Cincinnati.

All right.

I’m going to give you a way to find out a little bit more about this, but you’re going to have to do your own primary research.

All right?

Okay.

What you need to do is take the phrase like fifth bell or sixth bell and combine it with the words school and schedule.

And just do a quick Google for that.

And what you’re going to come up with, as I did when I did something similar, is a bunch of schools around the country that use a very similar bell system.

You will find other schools in Ohio that do it, too, and even some schools in Canada.

It’s not that common, but you will find school schedules will say, you know, first bell is science and then a 10 minute break and second bell is whatever.

And so you’ll find other schools do this. So it seems to be just a different kind of way of sorting the day.

One thing that I noticed when I did it, and I don’t doesn’t sound like your school is quite like this.

This is why I asked how many bells you have. Some of them, a bell actually doesn’t demarcate a class.

It demarcates a time period where you might have a class plus another activity.

So a class plus a study hall or a class plus lunch or a class plus time to get to the other building, something like that.

Is that how it is in your school, Donald?

Yeah, pretty much.

I like how he said that the bell demarcates a period of time rather than the sound or whatever.

And I did the Google search for bell class period.

And a lot of schools will have a bell schedule, but, you know, I have yet to find anyone who refers to the actual period as a bell.

Right.

The cool thing about this radio show, Donald, is that we have a ton of listeners.

And so we’re going to ask everybody if they know this particular use of bells to refer to classes.

Do you go to fifth bell and it turns out to be a science class?

It’s really interesting to me.

I didn’t encounter it.

We just don’t have classes.

Yeah.

So give us a call if you use Bell in the ways that Donald’s school uses Bells, 877-929-9673.

Well, great.

I will be eager to hear what people have to say then.

Yeah, we’ll find out, right?

All right.

Good to talk with you, Donald.

Thanks so much.

Okay.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

So I see Bell usage is like that in Virginia, South Carolina, Canada.

Yeah.

And it’s very clear from the schedule that they’re referring to that it’s not just like

Three Bells clustered at the start of the day to stop tardiness.

It’s like throughout the day and the different kind of patterns going on there.

So I don’t know.

My school wasn’t like that.

We just kind of, it seemed ordinary to me at the time.

I know.

I’m thinking it was more like a buzzer at my school.

A buzzer.

No, we had the old—

First buzzer.

We had the old-fashioned, sounds like the bank’s being robbed.

That’s what we had.

Give us a call, 877-929-9673 or email words@waywordradio.org.

All right, so I’ve been digging around in the Omnificent English Dictionary in Limerick form.

Oh, yeah? Did you find some good ones or some of the wretched ones?

I did. Here’s the one for the word flu.

A wretched subject, but good Limerick.

Okay.

You will writhe on your bed all night through.

You will groan on wet sheets.

You will mew.

You will finally flop and will beg me to stop, which I’ll do when I’m through.

I’m the flu.

That’s perfect.

It is perfect, right?

That’s really true.

Because you’re not getting out of the flu until it is done with you.

Give us a call, 877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Kate.

Hi, Kate.

Where are you calling from?

Los Angeles.

Welcome to the show.

How can we help you?

Hi, I had a question about the word crestfallen.

Crestfallen?

Yes.

Okay.

Meaning what?

Someone who’s sort of disappointed or let down that things didn’t go.

Well, the reason I was asking about it is because my coworker and I work on a TV show,

And we read it in a script that said one of the characters was crestfallen.

And she said, what does that mean?

So I defined it for things had fallen the way the character wanted them to go,

And so now he was crestfallen because he was disappointed.

Okay.

Yeah, that’s it.

And my coworker was asking, hi, I wonder where that word comes from.

Great.

What TV show do you work on?

I’m not sure they’d want us to say yet.

Okay.

Okay.

Because it hasn’t premiered yet.

Ooh, nice.

Those super secret stuff.

Will you let us know after the fact?

Yeah, I will.

Okay.

There are a couple competing theories about the origin of crestfallen,

And the one that I prefer has to do with the comb of a rooster.

They’ve got the red comb across the top of their head,

And after a while it just flops over, and they look kind of defeated.

And the reason I think this is probably what most people refer to

Is the earliest use that we find of crestfallen

Dates from 1589 in a particular work,

Which was basically a tirade against people

Who had different religious views.

There was lots of competing pamphleting

And editorials in the newspapers at the time.

And anyway, he talks about one of his opponents.

And he describes this person literally

As being crestfallen,

That their comb has fallen down toward their beak.

And he mentions it very clearly there in a way to demonstrate that this person is defeated and out of sorts and doesn’t have the energy to fight, to be their good opponent.

However, another theory is that it comes from horses because there is a disease of horses where their hair kind of doesn’t stand up at the mane anymore.

They no longer look attractive and ready for the parade ground.

And their crest, another name for their mane, particularly if it’s cut all to the same length, literally falls down instead of standing up perkily.

I kind of like the rooster theory because of all the other terms that arise from cockfighting.

Yeah, it’s far more likely because it’s older, first of all.

Yeah.

Okay, yeah, and that was the other reason I wrote in because I did a little bit of research on my own, and I had seen both theories.

And one said it was from the horses and not from the roosters.

And the other one said, oh, no, it’s from the roosters.

And there’s nothing to do with the horses.

Yeah, the dating is not very good for the horses.

It comes up roughly 100 years after it’s used to refer to a human being looking like a rooster.

So the first use isn’t always like the definitive source for something.

The word takes on its own life.

And certainly in the horsing world, crestfallen is used with a little bit of frequency to refer to horses whose manes are not standing up.

So maybe your own particular crestfallen comes from horses.

Maybe it comes from roosters.

But either way, it still means looking a little less than perfect, a little peaked maybe, kind of sad.

Okay.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Yeah.

Okay.

Well, good luck with the television show.

Okay.

Thank you.

And I’ll let you guys know once it’s on the air.

Oh, yeah.

Please do.

Sure.

That’d be fantastic.

Yeah.

Drop us a line.

Okay.

Good luck.

Bye, Kate.

All right.

Thank you so much.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

You know, there are all kinds of terms that come from cockfighting.

Like what else?

As I mentioned.

Well, if not originating in cockfighting, battle royal was early on used with cockfighting.

Well-heeled may not directly come from cockfighting, but it was used early on.

To refer to the spurs, the attach.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I’ve also heard a British expression, oh, no cock’s eyes out.

What’s that mean?

Which means, you know, it’s all right.

Nothing big happened.

It wasn’t so bad.

Oh, I see.

The English language is a great record of all the terrible things we’ve done to animals.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

Okay, because these are too good.

I’ve got one more limerick for you.

Oh, great.

I mean, we could spend all day on this thing, right?

I write.

This is O-E-D-I-L-F dot com.

The word is dub, D-U-B.

D-U-B, okay.

The king could but scarce hold his mirth

As his sword touched a squire of great girth.

It can be no surprise that because of your size

I dub thee circumference of earth.

And a terrible pun to boot.

Oh, wow.

Circumference.

That is good.

Yeah, it’s okay, right?

That is good, yeah.

We love limericks.

Write your own.

Send them along.

words@waywordradio.org

Or hey, share them on Facebook and Twitter

Or read them into the phone, 877-929-9673.

More stories about what we say and why we say it.

Stay tuned.

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

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

One of the loveliest aspects of old Anglo-Saxon poetry is the use of what we call kennings.

That’s K-E-N-N-I-N-G-S, kennings.

And granted, as you know, these are combinations of words that are usually two nouns,

And they’re put together to form a word that has a new meaning.

And it’s usually poetic.

It’s like watching a metaphor being born.

There are a lot of wonderful ones in Old English poetry.

You also see it in Old Norse poetry.

For example, in the Old English poem The Seafarer,

The poet uses all these different kennings for the ocean.

Like instead of the sea, the poet writes about the swan road or the whale way.

Or a ship is a seaganga, a sea walker.

Ooh, a seawalker.

Yeah.

A seaganga.

Yeah, isn’t that nice?

And I always enjoy coming across these because you have this moment of recognition, you know, when you’re trying to figure out what it means.

And all of a sudden it clicks into place.

And you realize that when the poet is talking about a sky candle, haelfunkandel, what they’re talking about is the sun.

The sun. Right.

So it’s purely for poetic purposes? This isn’t the way that they spoke on a day-to-day basis?

Well, I think we speak that way on a daily basis.

It seems so ordinary that we just don’t remember anymore.

Right. I mean, think about a term like rugrats, you know?

I mean, they’re not really rugrats.

You have to take those two words and put them together in your head and realize that you’re talking in a joking way about children.

These are amazing compounds.

I see that Wikipedia has a pretty decent list.

Yeah, yeah, they do.

So, kennings, K-E-N-N-I-N-G-S.

Now, is there any language that still does this as far as you know?

That’s a great…

I wonder if the Icelandic…

I was going to say.

I would bet Icelandic, but I’m not sure.

Well, these are beautiful, Martha.

Do you have other examples?

One of my favorites is word hoard, which is…

Word hoard.

Yeah, yeah.

A book, dictionary.

Well, in Beowulf, they talk about Beowulf unlocking his word hoard.

You know, it’s like…

Bringing forth his speech with a passion.

Speaking your heart, the words that you’ve hoarded.

I’m looking at a list here of kennings.

I Googled this real fast.

And for sword, the kenning is wound hoe, H-O-E.

Like the implement that you would use in the garden.

Yeah.

Wound hoe.

Yeah, there’s some pretty gory ones.

Yeah, yeah.

I think there’s one for battlefield that’s something like gore cradle or something.

Gore cradle.

For this field of motionless bodies.

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Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, how are you?

Hi, I’m doing fine.

Who’s this?

This is Len.

It’s good to talk to you, Martha.

I’m a big fan of your show.

Oh, yay.

Yay.

And where are you calling us from, Len?

I’m calling you from Philadelphia.

Philadelphia.

Welcome to the show, Len.

How can we help you?

Hi, well, I’m calling about a word.

I thought it was everywhere in Philadelphia,

And I’ve now run it by my family.

Never heard of it before, but everybody I went to high school with is familiar with it.

I was in the car, and it’s extremely hot that day,

And I was getting a ride to the train station from my dad,

And he had a cold bottle of water.

And I said, are you going right back home after this?

And then took the bottle of water and I said, Brody.

And he looks at me and he goes, what does that mean?

And I go, that just means when you kind of pilfer something, you take it, but it has to be something pretty insignificant, like a pen or a lighter.

No one would say, you know, I brodied, you know, I got my car brodied.

You would say, oh, somebody brodied my pen.

And I’m wondering where that comes from.

So it’s kind of like a yoink, right?

Yes, that would be another good word for it.

Exactly.

Yoink.

Yoink.

And Lynn, when you do it, do you announce it?

Do you say brody as you’re taking it?

Yes.

No, yeah. As I picked it out of the cup holder, I went, Brody, and he goes, what the hell is that?

So your theory is that this use of Brody occurred only in your high school.

Well, no, because I went to a high school that’s not a local high school.

It kind of brought people in from all around the city.

So I’m thinking it must be from a specific part of Philadelphia.

Could be, could be.

I have a couple things to tell you about this term.

No firm answers, but listen to this.

First, it shows up with three different spellings on Urban Dictionary and on this website called the Online Slang Dictionary.

These are both dictionaries where people contribute their own slang.

And almost all of them, except for one, come from people in Philadelphia.

So there’s some evidence there that it’s Philadelphia-centric.

We kind of have an evidence problem here.

We can’t say for certain that it isn’t used anywhere else, but it is telling that there are no other citations from other places.

As far as what neighborhood, there’s not enough evidence on any of these.

I do find it popping up in hip-hop lyrics.

Go to Rap Genius and search for a variety of spellings of Brody, B-R-O-D-Y, B-R-O-D-I-E, B-R-O-A-D-I-E,

And you’ll find it popping up in a bunch of songs.

I was just about to say, Grant, I don’t think I’ve ever seen it written down, but I know I’ve heard it in songs.

Yeah, and it’s really interesting.

And they’re almost all, as far as I can tell, Philadelphia hip-hop artists.

Almost all of them.

Their name will be like Philly Star or something like that.

We’re coming to you live from 215.

Nice.

I don’t know exactly how this came about, but I’ve got another theory.

And bear with me.

This is pure speculation, and I’m probably wrong, but I’ll share it with you anyway.

Brody is also sometimes used as an extended form of bro, meaning brother.

So he’s my brody, right?

And you have this relationship with your bros, with your brodies,

Where you’ll do things like bum a cigarette or borrow the lawnmower

Or he’s got a hat that you really like, you’re all going out,

You’re going to wear it, something like that.

And so maybe when you brody something from somebody,

You’re treating them like a bro.

You’re just assuming because they’re such a good bro, you can snag it.

I’d never heard that. That’s a good theory, though.

Yeah, probably wrong, but there you go.

That makes sense.

You know, it’s funny. There are a lot of other brodies in slang.

Like there’s brody, which is a jump from a high place.

There’s a Brody, which is any kind of stunt that happens from a high place, especially if you fail.

There’s Brodies, which are donuts, like when you’re in a car and you’re driving around in circles.

And police have Brodies, which are not donuts, but they’re really fast U-turns, usually with the tires squealing, so they can turn around quickly and go in the other direction.

Oh, that’s a Brody, too.

Yeah, that’s a Brody.

I’ve never heard that one.

I’ve heard it used as just an inconvenient situation, like we walked all the way to the wrong end of the subway station and it turns out that door is locked.

Brody.

And turn around and walk back.

That’s really cool.

That’s a really slow U-turn.

I’ve never heard that one.

But anyway, there we go.

A little bit of evidence showing that the Brody meaning to yoink or to take something small and insignificant probably is from Philadelphia.

All right.

Well, hey, thanks a lot.

I really appreciate it.

I’m a big fan of your show.

Thanks for calling.

Thank you.

Thanks, man.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Well, call goes out to Philly.

What can you tell us about this particular use of Brody?

Give us a call, 877-929-9673, or email us, words@waywordradio.org.

I really like this new word that I learned from OEDILF.com.

It’s cunctator.

Cunctator.

That’s familiar to me somehow.

I know it was vaguely familiar to me, too.

I don’t know.

I’m afraid it describes me.

Let’s see if you can guess what it is.

Consider the wretched cunctator, a promptness and timeliness hater, punctuality’s foe who exemplifies slow and prefers to do everything later.

So it’s a procrastinator.

Pretty much.

Nice.

It comes from a Latin word that means.

C-U-N-C-T-A-T-E-R-O-R.

Yeah.

It comes from a Latin word that means somebody who delays.

Cunctator.

877-929-9673. Email words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, how are you doing today?

Great. Who is this?

This is Bobby from Indianapolis.

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

Hi, Bobby.

Well, I was looking on Facebook the other day, and a friend had mentioned that she had some spring cleaning to do.

And specifically, she needed to clean out the cobwebs in her house.

But it occurred to her that she didn’t know exactly why the dusty old spider webs were referred to as cobwebs.

And it occurred to me that this friend can’t really do a proper job of spring cleaning if she doesn’t understand the terminology.

Well, you’re exactly right.

So my question is, why do we call them cobwebs?

Well, it’s pretty straightforward.

Cop or cob is an old word for spider in Middle English.

C-O-P-P-E or C-O-P is simply a word for spider or round thing.

And it’s connected to some cognates and some other similar Germanic languages.

And so Cobb, it’s pretty much the only place in English where that particular meaning of

Spider still exists, right?

That word for spider, right, is in Cobb Webb.

So it’s a kind of an archaism that lasted longer than it should.

You know how sometimes they find these deep sea fishes that are throwbacks to millions

Of years ago?

Cobb is kind of like that.

That’s a great analogy.

And I have seen people refer to cobwebs as sort of used spiderwebs.

They’re not active anymore.

Oh, interesting.

So it’s not just any old spiderweb.

It’s the one that’s kind of fraying and coming apart.

Yeah, left behind.

Now, have you read The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien, Bobby?

Yeah, it’s been a while.

I’ve, of course, seen all the movies, but it’s been a while since I’ve read the book, but I have.

In the book, and I don’t think it’s in the movie, I might be misremembering,

There is a part where Bilbo is fighting giant spiders in the forest.

And to taunt them, he’s wearing the ring, I believe, that makes him invisible.

To taunt them, he starts singing a song, a poem.

And in the poem, it’s got the words, Adder Cop.

Adder Cop, Adder Cop, won’t you stop?

The cop in Adder Cop is the same as cob in Cobweb.

And Adder means poison and cob, cop means spiders.

Poison spider, poison head.

So a lot of modern people will only know Addercobb from the Tolkien poem,

But it’s the only other example I have that the modern person might have found

That relates back to that cob for spider.

I can’t think of any other ones.

Well, I’ll have to go back and look at that passage in the book and enjoy that again.

But I didn’t know if it had something to do with corn cobs or corn cribs,

Places that could be dusty, but it sounds like it’s just an old word

That we still have a vestige of.

Yeah, exactly.

That’s good to know.

Well, now we can do our spring cleaning and do it with a clear conscience.

You know, I recommend you sit down with a glass of iced tea first,

Maybe read a magazine or something.

Just have a break.

You deserve it.

It does sound tiring.

I think I’ll just pull out a book like the Hobbit or something.

There we go.

Yeah, there you go.

Thanks for calling, Bobby.

Really appreciate it.

Thanks very much.

Bye-bye.

I have a great quotation about cobwebs from 1557.

Laws of men may be likened to cobwebs, which do tie and hold the little flies fast,

But the great flies breaketh firth and escape.

Breaketh firth and escape.

Yeah.

And I have the rest of that Tolkien poem here, if you’d like.

Oh, yes, please.

Old fat spider spinning in a tree, old fat spider can’t see me.

Attercop, attercop, won’t you stop, stop your spinning and look for me.

Old Tom Noddy, oh, big body, old Tom Noddy can’t spy me.

Atterkop, Atterkop, down you drop, you’ll never catch me up in your tree.

How about that?

That’s very musical.

I like it.

Yeah, well, Tolkien did a lot of poems, and actually we have recordings of him singing some of the stuff that he wrote.

Oh, that one?

That would be so cool.

He wrote the whole universe.

He built it.

Songs, music, styling, everything.

Language.

It’s all in there.

Well, this is a show about language, not just history of language, but the way language is actually used today.

Give us a call if you’ve got questions about that.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Julianne.

I’m calling from San Diego, California.

Hello, Julianne.

What’s happening?

Well, I have a question for you.

I was driving home from the beach a couple of weekends ago listening to your show.

And Martha made a reference to things that you would want to have on a desert island.

Oh, what did I say?

I don’t remember the context, but you were just talking about things and a desert island.

And I thought, now, wait a minute.

I know of a deserted island, but I’d never – well, in the last couple of weeks, I’ve heard this reference to a desert island.

And I’m sort of thinking, what is a desert island?

To me, that sounds like it would be an oasis.

And I’ve always heard it referred to as a deserted island.

So that got me thinking.

Yeah, and so I’m thinking, well, you know, I’d like a dessert island.

That would be fabulous.

I’ll join you.

Yeah.

So anyway, I just thought I’d check in with you to see if I’m missing something

Or if I actually caught a little bit of a boo-boo there.

Interesting.

Cupcakes on palm trees, that’s what I’m thinking.

Cupcakes on palm trees.

Falling down, hitting your head.

I don’t know.

That’s nice.

Yeah.

You know what? Actually, Desert Island is far more common than Deserted Island, if you look at the corpus.

They’re different, though, right?

No, not necessarily. I mean, the desert in Desert Island refers to just…

Climate, right?

No, no. Well, originally, desert was just any kind of wasteland, a wilderness where it looked abandoned, even though somebody might not have been there before.

It’s just a wilderness.

Grant, don’t you use desert island rather than deserted?

They’re different.

Deserted island means no people.

Desert island refers to the climate and the dryness.

No, no.

And so you can have a deserted desert island.

With dessert.

I like the dessert part.

Me too.

No, desert in this part is like if you look at the Swiss Family Robinson, the title page for that book.

It’s the adventures of the Swiss Family Robinson, blah, blah, blah, blah, on a desert island.

But it’s not actually desert because there’s tons of lush greenery, right?

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

Interesting.

I take it in the context of the deserted island, you know, which is always that story that you say, what are the 10 things you’d like to have on a deserted island and that sort of thing?

And then this desert island.

Oh, right.

I love this.

We all have these different readings of this.

And for me, it’s always been like, oh, it just means it’s, I mean, I’ve probably even encountered things like the title page, This Was Family Robinson, and just kind of got what they meant.

Yeah.

But always have preferred in most contexts where the context wasn’t clear to assume it meant dry.

Yeah, yeah.

You think sand dunes.

But when I picture a desert island, I picture a desert island from the comic strips, you know, with one palm tree or something.

Yeah, the one rock.

Right?

Trying to make help in the sand.

Right.

Yeah.

But there’s usually water around it, which would be, to me, I always think of the word island as being, you know, a piece of land popping up out of the ocean.

Yeah.

Right.

So what would you take to your desert island?

What would I take to my desert island?

I would take my dog.

I would take a complete set of all the Robin Williams movies and performances.

I miss him terribly, and that would make me laugh while I was alone on a desert island with my dog.

Nice.

Well, you’re allowed to say deserted if you want.

You got a good friend, something to keep your spirits up.

That’s pretty good.

That’s right.

That’s right.

And, of course, I’d have all the dessert I wanted.

Right.

Right, I’m still thinking about that palm tree.

Yeah.

Red velvet cupcakes raining down with the cream cheese icing.

Yeah, yeah.

Absolutely.

Hey, I’m with you.

Julianne, thank you so much for giving us a call.

Well, thank you.

It was fun.

Take care now.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

You have a good day.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

And you know, we didn’t even talk about just desserts.

Oh, nice.

Yeah.

Just desserts.

One S or two?

Two.

No.

What?

Oh, well, for you it would be desserts.

I’m thinking what I’m owed.

I’m owed the sweet things.

My wife rolls her eyes at my sweet.

I’m like, sweet things.

Right, right.

Key lime pie.

I know.

If you want to make this man happy, send him a key lime pie, right?

Yeah.

Right?

But just desserts.

It’s one S.

Yes, one S.

And it refers to?

To what’s deserved.

What’s merited.

So it’s a different dessert altogether.

Yes.

Desert altogether.

Yes.

Nice.

Exactly.

A form of dessert.

How about that?

The thrill of English.

The thrill of English.

The agony of getting it wrong, which happens to all of us every day.

Call us and tell us how English did you wrong, 877-929-9673,

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Things have come to a pretty pass.

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The show is coming to you from the Recording Arts Center at Studio West in San Diego, California.

Thanks for listening. I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett. Bye-bye.

So long.

I like tomato, potato, potato, tomato, tomato.

Let’s call the whole thing off.

But oh, if we call the whole thing off, then we must part.

And oh, if we ever part, then that might break my heart.

So if you like pajamas and I like pajamas, I’ll wear pajamas and give up pajamas.

For we know we need each other, so we better call the calling off.

Let’s call the whole thing off.

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