Alright, alright, alright! How do some catchphrases become part of the larger vernacular—to the point where people don’t always know the original reference? And the island of Ocracoke off the coast of North Carolina has a distinctive dialect all its own. A new book shows how tourism is changing how the locals talk. Plus: Are you binge-watching or stinge-watching? If you’re stinge-watching your favorite TV series, you’re savoring it over a long period of time. Also, smearcase, names for imaginary friends, a disem-voweled puzzle, steen o’clock, the rocky origin of cloud, dreepy, nicknames for days of the week, bag raising, and how to pronounce the word mobile when it refers to that toy that hangs above a crib.
This episode first aired July 19, 2025.
Stinge-Watching
Nancy Friedman is a naming and branding expert with a fantastic newsletter about language, Fritinancy which recently covered the neologism stinge-watching. It’s the opposite of binge-watching, and refers to the act of spacing out viewings of a favorite TV show or streaming series to savor it over a longer period of time.
Catchphrases are Language That’s All the Rage
Elizabeth from New Orleans, Louisiana, is pondering the way catchphrases such as Matthew McConaughey’s Alright, alright, alright catch on and get passed around. These vocal memes or prosodic memes get repeated and passed around in a way that speakers show that they belong to a particular in-group. There’s also an element of performance when the speaker alludes to the original use of the phrase and reapplies it in new situations.
Smearcase, Schmierkäse
In parts of the United States, cottage cheese is called smearcase, from German Schmierkäse, a combination of schmieren, “smear,” and Käse, “cheese.”
Vowels Pried Loose Word Game
Quiz Guy John Chaneski has spent days prying vowels out of words. They’re now lying in a pile on the floor, and your job is to put them back where they belong. For example, what vowels need to be added to the incomplete expression FR XMPL?
Naming Imaginary Friends
A Vermont caller has been told that when she was a young child, she had imaginary friends named Hooney and Dedilae. How do children choose names for their imaginary friends? As Marjorie Taylor and Naomi Aguiar show in their book Imaginary Friends and the People Who Create Them (Bookshop|Amazon) there’s no one way that children come up with those names. They might use the names of relatives, or invent names using wordplay, or simply cobble together rhyming or otherwise pleasing sounds.
A Paragraph that Perfectly Ends a Book
Paul in Batavia, New York, recommends The Door-to-Door Bookstore (Bookshop|Amazon), a novel by Carston Henn, translated from German by Melody Shaw, which includes a wonderful description of a book with a perfect final paragraph that you nevertheless don’t want to end.
Steen O’clock, That Inderminate Late (Or Early) Hour
A Nebraska listener came across his great-grandfather’s account of going out carousing and then returning home at steen o’clock. The context suggested that he meant he returned home extremely late. Although never that common, the expression steen o’clock or ’steen o’clock was used as early as the 1880s to suggest an indeterminate hour during the night, probably very late or very early. As such, steen o’clock is part of a class of expressions known as hyperbolic numerals, or terms suggesting non-specific numbers, such as gazillion and umpteen. The steen part may be a clipping of sixteen, which on a 24-hour clock, suggests the number 4, and thus the idea of returning shortly before dawn.
Dreep and Dreepy
Patricia Wentworth’s 1937 mystery The Case is Closed (Bookshop|Amazon) includes a character who disparages others as being dreepy or a dreep. These words are Dreep and dreepy are Scottish dialect versions of drip and drippy and have to do with someone who’s ineffective, weak, soft, or otherwise gormless.
Molasses Monday
Molasses Monday is a slang term for that first, slow-moving day of the workweek. Other nicknames associated with days of the week include Sunday Scaries, Humpday for Wednesday, Little Friday for Thursday, and of course, Taco Tuesday.
The Distinctive Dialect of Ocracoke Island
The distinctive dialect of Ocracoke Island is lovingly explored in the new book Language and Life on Ocracoke: The Living History of the Brogue (Bookshop|Amazon) by North Carolina State professors Jeffrey Reaser and Walt Wolfram and fourth-generation Ocracoke resident, Candy Gaskill.
Bag-Raising, a Dialect Feature
A caller who grew up in Wisconsin says his spouse, who’s from Florida, teases him for such things as pronouncing bagel like “BEG-el” and dagger as “DEG-ger.” They’re just products of his isolect, the regional variants from his particular dialect of American English. In that part of the United States, there’s a lot of what linguists call bag raising and beg raising, so that bag sounds more like “beg” and milk sounds like “melk.” When such pronunciations and patterns are used extensively by lots of people in a particular area, it’s not a mistake, but rather a feature of dialect.
Cape and Fascinator
Gay in Tucson, Arizona, remembers her grandmother inviting guests in with take off your cape and fascinator and have a seat. Originally, a fascinator was a kind of scarf that held one’s hair in place and added an air of mystery, and thus fascination, to one’s appearance.
“Cloud” and “Clod” Share a History
The word cloud comes from Old English clūd, meaning “rock” or “hill,” making it a relative of the word clod. The sense of a “hill” or “mass of rocks” was later applied to those vaporous hills in the sky.
How Do You Pronounce Mobile? City, Dangler, or Phone?
How do you pronounce the word mobile, as in the toy that hangs above a baby’s crib? In the United States, that kind of mobile is pronounced MOH-beel, but in the United Kingdom, it’s MOH-byle. In the early 1930s, the American sculptor Alexander Calder was living in Paris and experimenting with kinetic sculptures that hung suspended from the ceiling and moved. When Calder’s friend Marcel Duchamp observed Calder’s hanging sculptures gently moving on currents of air, he called them mobiles, from French for “moveable.”
This episode is hosted by Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett, and produced by Stefanie Levine.
Books Mentioned in the Episode
| Imaginary Friends and the People Who Create Them by Marjorie Taylor (Bookshop|Amazon) |
| The Door-to-Door Bookstore by Carston Henn, translated by Melody Shaw (Bookshop|Amazon) |
| The Case is Closed by Patricia Wentworth (Bookshop|Amazon) |
| Language and Life on Ocracoke: The Living History of the Brogue by Jeffrey Reaser and Walt Wolfram, and Candy Gaskill (Bookshop|Amazon) |
Music Used in the Episode
| Title | Artist | Album | Label |
|---|---|---|---|
| Beautiful Brother of Mine | Curtis Mayfield | Roots | Curtom |
| Mystical Brotherhood | Karl Hector & The Malcouns | Sahara Swing | Now-Again Records |
| Ancestros Futuros | Cochemea | Vol III: Ancestros Futuros | Daptone |
| Black Classical Music | Yussef Dayes | Black Classical Music | Brownswood Recordings |
| Mellow (Version) | Karl Hector & The Malcouns | Sahara Swing | Now-Again Records |
| Hole In One | Delvon Lamarr Trio | I Told You So | Colemine Records |
| The Other Side | Sure Fire Soul Ensemble | Step Down | Colemine Records |
