Imaginary Friends (episode #1661)

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 you know, Grant, I always look forward to each new edition of the newsletter from

Name developer Nancy Friedman.

It’s called Frittenancy.

And Nancy writes about names and brands and the language of commerce.

And I learned a new term from her the other day, which is stinge watching.

Oh, stinge watching.

Can I make some guesses or are you just going to tell me?

Oh, go ahead.

Make some guesses.

I love when you do that.

Just watching how cheap the next people at the table in the restaurant are.

Like they’re on a date and you just know he can’t really afford what she’s ordering.

Oh, that’s a good guess, but that’s not right.

What is it?

What’s Stinge Watching?

You’re going to appreciate this.

I have adopted this word because Stinge Watching is when you find a TV series that you really like

And you love it so much that instead of binge watching the whole season in a few days, you slow way down and you space out your viewing sessions to drag out the pleasure as long as possible.

Unfortunately, that means I sometimes never get to whole shows.

I know.

I stinge watched Orange is the New Black to such a degree that I never watched it.

Oh, really?

Because I set it aside because people were talking too much about it.

And I was like, there’s just too much chatter.

I don’t want them to ruin it.

Let me just put this aside for a month or something.

And then I never got back to it.

Oh, see, in our household, we still have episodes of Black-ish that we haven’t watched.

Because we don’t want to see the kids grow up.

We don’t want to see Rainbow and Dre send their kids off to college.

I can see that.

So they’re sort of in suspended animation for now.

Sting watching.

You enjoy a show so much that you don’t want to consume it all too fast.

That’s fantastic.

We’ll post the link to Nancy Friedman’s fantastic newsletter on our website.

But we would love to hear the new language that you’ve come across.

Call us, text us, toll free, 877-929-9673.

Or send your thoughts, stories, ideas, and questions about anything to do with language to words@waywordradio.org.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Elizabeth and I’m calling from New Orleans.

Hey, Elizabeth, we’re glad to have you. What’s up?

I think I’ve kind of noticed this evolution from using catchphrases to words to just sounds.

Like an example would be the very famous Matthew McConaughey,

All right, all right, all right.

It’s like evolving. People are saying it.

What about the accent and even knowing where it’s from?

And I think that’s kind of cool.

I also did it with Despicable Me.

Everybody’s saying goodbye, like Steve Carell does in the movie.

But I didn’t know that.

I just heard people saying it.

I thought it was fun, so I was saying it that way,

Without knowing it was from Despicable Me.

How does he say it?

I haven’t seen the movie.

Oh, I think you guys are going to ask me to do the voice.

It’s like, goodbye, just in a fun little way.

And I didn’t know what my siblings with kids knew.

I just thought that was really, goodbye, very fascinating.

There’s this Disney movie called Heavyweights where they say the word buddy in a funny way.

And my siblings and I and people we’re into summer camp with, because it’s a summer camp movie, we all said it that way.

And now my friends are saying it and it’s just kind of evolving.

So I was just curious about what that evolution is called or if it’s been done before, you know,

Or in a cycle where we’ll be in catchphrases and colloquialisms 20 years from now.

You know what I mean?

Yeah, you’re very perceptive.

You’ve noticed a thing that is an essential part of human connection,

Part of in-group behavior where we share these catchphrases and these,

I guess what we would call them is vocal memes or prosodic memes even,

As part of our peer group behavior to just kind of show that we belong.

So the classic one that you mentioned, the Matthew McConaughey’s, all right, all right, all right.

But that is from the movie Catch Me Up Here.

I honestly don’t know.

You don’t?

There we go.

I honestly don’t know.

But do I know the words?

Yes.

Do I know it’s Matthew McConaughey?

But as my sibling who’s 10 years younger, he has no idea.

And you don’t even remember the film.

And you probably don’t even remember where you learned them from, right?

Exactly.

So this is like a 30-plus-year-old movie, and we’re still kind of vocalizing this meme of it.

And these are known as vocal memes or prosodic memes.

And this continues a behavior that we’ve long had in English or any language.

People do this.

And it continues something that happened in the calls of vendors on the street when a vendor would be selling hot cross buns.

Or you go to the ballpark, and they’ll say, popcorn.

Hot dogs.

And you say it in a particular way.

You don’t say hot dogs.

You say hot dogs.

Popcorn.

Right?

Exactly, yeah.

A way that you have to say it because this is how you’re taught and you pass it on to somebody.

And you don’t even really need to hear the words to know what is meant.

And it’s about the conduct center.

And even Shakespearean performance has these traditions of certain lines being said in certain ways.

And obviously good performers will break out of these traditions and give it a new spin with a particular force.

But friends, Romans, countrymen, or a horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse.

Or to be or not to be, that is the question.

And all of these have a thing to them, right?

And my son had one of these.

He didn’t know where it came from.

He had no idea.

But he said, say hello to my little friend from Scarface.

And he had no idea that it was a movie with Al Pacino about a drug lord.

He had no idea.

So partly it’s about the catchphrase.

And partly it’s about the impact of this performance that we execute.

We’re imitating all the other people and their performances.

Or the one that I really love is that we’re going to need a bigger boat from Jaws.

Which now is what, a 40-plus-year-old movie?

Is it almost 50 years now?

And a lot of times people will kind of clone it.

And they’ll say, we’re going to need a bigger whatever.

It won’t be a boat.

We’re going to need a bigger whatever.

But it’s still in that same kind of tone that the phrase was said in the original movie.

Absolutely.

That’s fascinating.

But it goes back even further.

Classical orators did this.

They emphasized this voice modulation, this rhythmic delivery, particularly for certain kinds of speech.

So a lot of this, again, so there’s multiple facets here.

Some of this is about just catchphrases that catch on.

We say them because they kind of pass along like jokes and humorous things, but sometimes

Because they slot into a need to represent a moment with an emotion and a feeling and

These phrases and the emotions and the ways that we intonate with them fit perfectly into

That moment.

That totally makes sense.

Oh my gosh, it’s all fascinating.

Yeah, and there’s so much more, but my producer is going to, she’s going to chase me out of

The studio if I go much longer.

I understand completely.

Well, I appreciate you guys answering my question.

Like I said, I’ve been a long-time listener, a huge fan of you guys, and so thank you guys so much.

Elizabeth, we’re so glad that you called, and of course you have to leave us with one of those goodbyes.

Of course, I’d say goodbye.

Goodbye.

Goodbye.

Goodbye.

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

You have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Linda Dederman. I live in St. Augustine, Florida.

Hi, Linda. Welcome to the program.

Thank you. It’s nice to meet you.

My dad would always call cottage cheese smear case.

He said his mom would put milk in a pillowcase and hang it on the clothesline.

And he was a man who liked to embellish his stories a little bit,

So I’m not really sure if it’s true.

I don’t know where it came from.

There’s a few of those, you know?

So you and your dad are sitting on the couch,

And he just blurts out of nowhere about cottage cheese and pillowcases and smear case?

Well, we probably had it like my mom always cooked like a three-course meal.

So we always had a salad.

So sometimes she put like cottage cheese on a pineapple or something.

So he would say, oh, yeah, smear case.

Tell us a little bit about his background.

He was born in Ohio.

He grew up on a farm.

He became a self-made millionaire.

He started his own company and moved to New England in the 50s and started his own company.

And he did well.

And, you know, he just always reminded us about his farm years and growing up and how he’d walk two miles in the snow.

But he was lucky he had an older brother so he could walk in his footprints and stuff like that.

Okay. Okay.

Well, Grant and I are both perking up our ears about the fact that he lived in Ohio, grew up there.

And it sounds like he had a sort of, what would you say, corny sense of humor?

Yeah.

You’re talking cheesy jokes.

Yeah. So he told you that his mom would put milk in a pillowcase and hang it on the line.

And that’s how you got smear cased.

That’s how you got cottage cheese.

Okay.

Cottage cheese, yeah.

All right. And did you buy that or did you think he was pulling your leg?

Well, I always wanted to believe him.

So I did kind of buy it.

But, you know, why would he make it up, too?

But you never know. I never know with him.

Well, yeah, yeah. Maybe to be entertaining because when you talk about smear case, that is a food word that goes back to a German.

Part of that that’s throwing you off is the Käse in German means cheese.

And so it’s smear Käse in German, which means smear cheese.

And it’s a kind of soft cheese like cottage cheese.

And this was a term, schmeerkase, that was used in Pennsylvania Dutch and nearby areas like Ohio to mean cottage cheese.

It was kind of the forerunner of cream cheese.

And you see this term, schmeerkase, in a lot of places in the United States that are places where a lot of Germans settled,

Like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and also the hill country of Texas, where a lot of Germans settled.

Yeah, so it comes from German, meaning literally smear cheese, smear case,

Which the case part coming from the German word for cheese.

But we’ve got to get to the core of this.

Did people actually make it by using the pillowcase as a cheesecloth?

Not that I know of, but Grant, do you know anything about a recipe for that?

Yeah, yeah, you actually could do it.

Really?

Yeah, any cloth with the right weave could be used to make cheese and to use it as the cheesecloth.

It could be a pillowcase.

Well, I guess that’s true.

It could be any sack-like bit of cloth.

And you could hang it on a clothesline or anywhere because you need to drain out the liquids and circulate the air.

Okay, but it doesn’t come from the case part of pillowcase.

Yeah, the case is just a coincidence.

Yeah, smear case.

That case, like you said, is just in German, it’s K-A-S-E, which means cheese.

And it’s just a coincidence that we have case and pillowcase.

Different case.

Got it.

I know, it’s just, no, I never wanted to eat it the way he described how they made it.

Oh, you don’t want to eat most of the foods that you eat if you find out how they’re made.

That’s the whole concept.

Schmierkasse.

That’s true.

That’s great information. Thank you so much.

Yeah, a pleasure, Linda. Give us another call sometime, all right?

Take care of yourself.

All right. Well, you too. Have a great week.

Bye-bye.

Thanks, Linda.

Bye.

Food and language, when you map them out, have a magical crossroads,

And that’s where we meet.

Call or text 877-929-9673 or check us out on the website.

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Does your family talk funny?

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 Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

And here he comes, walking down the middle of the crowd in his best costume, looking like a million dollars.

It’s our fashion designer, our number one man, John Chaneski, our quiz guy.

Stand aside. I take large steps.

Look at everybody.

Watch my couture.

Please, please watch my couture.

You know, one of my favorite game shows is Only Connect.

And now the primary game show on that show is similar to one we’ve played before, Common Bonds.

What do these things have in common?

But I’m a particular fan of the final round of that show, Missing Vowels.

It’s simple.

Take a famous phrase or title or name and remove the vowels.

For example, F-R-X-M-P-L is for example.

For example, yeah.

So we dis-em-vowel for example.

Dis-em-vowel for example.

Dis-em-vowel the answer.

Now, on the show, they re-space the consonants,

But we’re not going to do that here.

If you hear a space from me,

That’s a space in the phrase or title, okay?

I’ll give you a string of consonants.

You tell me the name, title, or phrase you would get

If you put the vowels back in, okay?

Okay.

H-R-W-G.

Here we go.

Oh, got it.

Here’s the first one.

M-C-H-D-B-T-N-T-H-N-G.

It’s Much Ado About Nothing.

Yeah, Much Ado About Nothing.

Very good.

Shakespeare comedy.

Very good.

C, nothing to it.

Let’s do the next one.

W-R-N-D-P-C.

W-R-N-D-P-C.

Something and something?

Perhaps.

Ooh, like that really big novel?

Yes.

Oh, yeah.

There we go.

War and Peace.

War and Peace.

Yes.

Classic.

Really big classic novel.

Very good.

Next one is S-P-G-H-T-T-B-L-G-N-S.

Spaghetti Bolognese.

Spaghetti Bolognese.

I’m doing the Italian hand gesture.

Boy, you got that very quickly.

You must be very hungry.

How about this one?

T-R-N-D-L-B-D.

T-R-N-D-L.

Isn’t that what’s on my gear shift?

That’s close, yeah.

T-R-N-D-L.

And then what was the last part?

B-D.

Oh, I see.

We’re just adding only vowels to it.

Now I get it.

Martha, you just say that.

You surely realized that before.

You’re just trying to make us laugh, right?

Okay.

How about trundle bed?

Trundle bed is correct.

Okay.

Now I get it.

Martha, three hours into the party, arrives with the drinks.

And with that, we move on to the final one.

Okay.

Bring it on.

W-Y-W-T-H-W-R-D-S.

Go ahead, Martha.

Well, wait a minute.

W-Y or W-I?

A Way with Words.

It is A Way with Words, yes.

I used the wiser fair game.

Yes, it’s Y.

A Way with Words.

I’m sorry as I wipe away a tear from my eye.

We’ll talk to you next week.

Give your family squeezes all around, all right?

Same for you.

Take care, guys.

All right.

Bye, John.

Thanks, John.

Bye-bye.

Well, as you can see, we always have fun when John comes on the show to test our wits, and

We’d love for you to do the same.

So give us a call, 877-929-9673, or send an email about any aspect of language to words

At waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

This is Lakita calling from Vermont, and I wonder if you might help me find the origins of the names of two imaginary friends I had when I was a very young child, and if there could be any connection between the two names.

The first name was Honey, not Honey, but Honey, and the other name was Diddle-Eye.

Honey and Diddle-Eye. How would you spell those if you had to write them down?

What I think, I’m looking at Honea’s H-O-O-N-E-Y, and I’m thinking Diddleye is D-E-D-I-L-A.

How old were you when you first remember having these imaginary friends with these names?

I’m assuming that it was between three and five I had the imaginary friends,

But it was later in my life, I think later, that I was told I had the imaginary friends.

I do not remember them at all.

There’s been a fair bit of work done on imaginary friends and imaginary companions.

And to a far lesser degree, unfortunately, work on the names of imaginary friends and companions.

But I’m thinking in particular about the work of Marjorie Taylor, who’s written a couple different editions of her book.

The second edition she co-wrote with Naomi Aguiar.

And this book is called Imaginary Friends and the People Who Create Them.

And there’s a section in there where they talk about the names of imaginary friends and imaginary companions.

Yeah.

And one of the things that becomes very clear is that there isn’t necessarily a consistent pattern.

So sometimes the names obviously come from people that the children know.

Like they might name them after a family member or somebody that they respect or that they, sometimes it’s even somebody they barely know.

Or they might name them after, say, a popular figure from cartoons or the movies.

But sometimes it’s just a silly little word that rhymes.

Or sometimes it’s just the sound that they like or a little bit of wordplay.

And sometimes it’s just the name of an everyday, like they might just say John or Juan or just an everyday ordinary name.

Because there’s this empowerment that comes with naming things.

There’s something fundamental in humans that we feel like when we name a thing, even an imaginary thing, it suddenly is imbued with strength and energy.

And children somehow instinctively understand that.

That’s really interesting.

But what I’ve tried to research is on honing.

It can come from honey.

But again, that’s just reading about it.

That doesn’t say what happened in my particular.

And then on the Delilah, the only guess I can have,

Because there was nothing Hebrew spoken or near me,

Is that my family was not churchgoers, but sometime neighbors took me.

And I wonder if I heard Delilah there.

What I’m proposing to you here, Lakita, is that I wouldn’t look for strong etymological sources for the names of imaginary companions.

Children will do what they like when they name those companions.

And there need not be any strong reasoning or sourcing of those names.

They can just be a momentary whim.

Laquita, I was going to say that my little brother Jim had a couple of imaginary friends, and one of them was named Boger Pack, and the other one was named Bagger Pack.

So he was really, really excited about these friends of his named Boger Pack and Bagger Pack, and I don’t think there’s any etymology to that whatsoever, except he liked the sound of the words.

-huh. Well, and really, that is really almost a melodic sound. You say, honi and diddala. It’s a very melodic sound, isn’t it?

Mm—

Mm—

Yeah.

Well, thank you. That really is insightful because I was trying to find a concrete origin.

Yeah. You know, children are mysteries, aren’t they, though?

Aren’t they? Aren’t they just? Aren’t they? Well, thank you. That is a great help, and I appreciate it.

Yeah, take care of yourself now and be well, all right?

Okay.

Thank you both.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

We got a book recommendation from Paul Maloon, who lives in Batavia, New York.

He says that he really loved this book called The Door-to-Door Bookstore by Karsten Henn.

And he read it translated from the German by Melody Shaw.

I haven’t read the book, but it sounds charming.

He says it’s a book lover’s book.

And it’s about a reclusive 70-something bookseller who carefully chooses various books to deliver to certain customers in the evening and forms friendships with them.

And Paul says you can find the plot online, but basically there are two main characters in it that you can cheer for.

And Paul shared a favorite quote from this book that I wanted to share with you because I think it’s pretty universal.

He said, one quote that touched me was,

Even when an extraordinary book ends at precisely the right point with precisely the right words,

And anything further would only destroy that perfection, it still leaves us wanting more pages.

I just thought that that was such a great way to describe the end of a great book.

You know, I still wonder how Demon Copperhead’s doing these days.

Oh, perfect.

We welcome your book recommendations, Martha, and I love to hear about what you’re reading.

Send them to us, words@waywordradio.org, or call or text 1-877-929-9673.

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

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Stephen Bly from Nahuaca, Nebraska.

Hello, Stephen.

We’re glad to have you.

What’s on your mind today?

Yeah, I have been reading a lot of newspapers from the late 1850s or 1800s doing family research.

And there’s lots of fun phrases.

And I found one that has me scratching my head a little bit.

The account I came across was my great grandpa had just returned from three years in the Navy during the Spanish-American War.

So it’s 1900.

And the account was he and his brother-in-law drove to town for the purpose of applying an ample coat of vermilion paint.

And after succeeding marvelously, they returned home about Steen o’clock.

And the Steen o’clock, I mean, from the context, I think it’s they were out partying until the early morning hours.

But I had never heard that, and I couldn’t find any research on it.

And I was just curious if that was a popular phrase, what it actually meant, when it got popular, or anything you could tell me.

I like the idea of applying a coat of vermilion to the town.

I’ve never heard it expressed that way.

Painting the town red, huh?

Yes.

Steen O’Clock.

Must have been fun guys.

So Steen, S-T-E-N O’Clock.

Yes.

Yes.

And is there an apostrophe in front of Steen?

The newspaper did not have an apostrophe, no.

And what year was this?

This would have been 1900.

Okay, good.

The timing’s very good.

It was never a common expression, but it does exist.

You can find it well back into the, oh, 1880s.

I think the earliest I know of it is 1881, but it falls into a class of expressions called hyperbolic numerals.

And these are expressions of numbers that are inspecific.

So we have zillions or gazillions or umpteen.

And actually umpteen is related to steen.

And so when we talk about steen o’clock, we mean an indeterminate, probably either very late or probably very early hour.

Steen almost always is used with o’clock and referring to time.

And again and again and again, if you look in old newspapers and old journals, particularly dealing with teens or the military or colleges, you’ll find it having to do with people coming in after a carousing or partying or after a sports match or something like that.

Oh, how fun.

Yeah. So the stein part may be a clipping, a pretend clipping of the 24-hour representation of 16, which in a 24-hour clock would be 4 in the afternoon.

It’s kind of like 11-teen. It’s just an hour that doesn’t really exist.

Sometimes you’ll see S apostrophe teen.

And I asked about the apostrophe before steen because some early versions will indicate that to mean that they believe it’s an abbreviation or a clipping of a longer word, like 16.

I’ll see if I can help bring that term back.

Yeah, it’s weird because it kind of faded out by the 1930s.

So between the 1880s to the 1930s, you’ll find some use of it.

And then it just kind of peters out.

But now we have things like beer o’clock and dark 30, which kind of carry on the same tradition.

Yeah, wine o’clock.

Wine o’clock.

Well, I sure appreciate all the help.

Yeah, I’m glad that you’re carrying on the linguistic tradition, if not the partying tradition.

Or maybe you’re doing both.

Notice how he didn’t answer.

Oh, yeah.

I heard the smirk.

All right.

Take care there.

Yep.

Thank you.

Bye.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Well, you can call us and leave a message any time of the night or day, even Steen o’clock.

The number is 877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Tiffany calling from Lexington, South Carolina.

So I have a love of Mary Roberts Reinhart.

So America’s Agatha Christie.

Yeah.

Which in turn of the century, murder mystery, kind of the Butler did it kind of things.

Well, I’ve exhausted the majority of her work, so I’m currently reading a similar setting, Murder Mystery, but it’s British, and it’s by Patricia Wentworth.

And I come across a word that she used to describe one of the other characters in the novel.

And the protagonist is a young, very forward-thinking, modern-for-the-era woman, young lady.

And she doesn’t seem to have a lot of patience with what she is calling a DREEP, a D-R-E-E-P.

And she calls out several people in the book for this and calls them either A-DREEP or DREEPY, like D-R-E-P-P-Y.

At first I thought, well, maybe it was some sort of British term that we turned into drip or drippy.

For the context of the story, she almost inevitably uses it to describe another woman.

They’re more hysterical than what I would think of as like an American drip or nerd, if that makes any sense.

Yeah, it really does. Do you know the year and the title of the book you’re reading?

I do. This particular one is Patricia Wentworth’s The Case is Closed. Copyright is 1937.

Well, Tiffany, I’m a little surprised that she was describing behavior that you would describe as hysterical because the words drip and drippy are indeed Scottish dialect versions of drip and drippy.

And since the late 19th century, the term dreepy has meant soft, ineffective, spiritless, droopy.

I’m looking at a line from a 1927 edition of the London Observer in which somebody is described as having a weak, drippy, drippy sort of face, obviously belonging to a man with about as much personal force as there is in a penny worth of suet.

I saw that line, Martha.

If you didn’t quote that, I was going to quote that.

Oh, wow.

So hysterical is not quite the word, though.

I mean, you’ve got the one example from this book here.

And the author seems to be using it just for this one character.

But in the larger aggregate use of Drip and Dripie, it is really about someone who is spiritless or insipid even or gormless.

They just have gotten no they don’t stand up for themselves.

Well, there you go, Tiffany.

That is fantastic. Thank you so much.

That helps me put it into better perspective. So when I read more of this author.

Well, Tiffany, we are delighted. Thank you for sharing your reading with us and sharing the

Word DREEP and DREEPY. Take care of yourself. Thank you so much for taking my call. Y’all

Have a wonderful day. Happy reading. Take care. Thank you. Bye-bye.

I saw a post on social media from a friend who said, oh, it’s Molasses Monday.

I’m moving so slowly.

And I had never heard that expression before, but apparently a lot of people use the term Molasses Monday to talk about having a hard time getting going at the beginning of the week.

And that got me to thinking about, you know, what are nicknames for other days of the week?

There’s Hump Day.

There’s Sunday Scaries.

Yes, the Sunday Scaries.

I had never heard this until just recently.

What’s your understanding of Sunday Scaries?

Well, the Sunday Scaries are just like this trepidation you have about the coming week and all your to-dos.

Yes.

Like this looming calendar, professionally and personally, of all the obligations.

Yes, yes.

I had never heard that term, but it’s a really good one.

And then, of course, Wednesday is hump day, you know, the day right there in the middle of the week.

And I have friends who talk about Little Friday being Thursday.

But what about Tuesday?

Taco Tuesday, Martha.

Get with the program.

What am I thinking?

Of course, Taco Tuesday.

It does have a nickname.

Well, any day of the week, you can call us.

Every day is A Way with Words day.

Toll free, call or text 877-929-9673.

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

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

Just off the coast of North Carolina lies a long, thin barrier island.

And at that island’s southern end is the tiny village of Ocracoke.

Now, Ocracoke is a charming place.

It’s accessible only by boat or private plane, and it’s home to one of the most distinctive dialects of American English.

The longtime residents there call themselves Hoytoiders.

That’s the local pronunciation of high tide.

And they pronounce the word sound as seined and down as dane and fish as fiche.

And especially if you hang out with the older O’Cockers, that’s what the locals call themselves,

You’ll hear some distinctive vocabulary.

The word hammock there, for example, means a small hill, not something that’s swinging between two trees.

And something that’s messed up is said to be mommicked.

And their distinctive way of speaking is called the brogue.

And if O’Cockers leave the island and they travel abroad, they’re often mistaken for people from Australia or Ireland.

And the dialect and culture of this isolated area is the subject of a new book by three authors,

Jeffrey Reeser and Walt Wolfram of North Carolina State University,

And Cindy Gaskell, who is a fourth-generation resident of Ocracoke.

And the book is called Language and Life on Ocracoke, The Living History of the Brogue.

And it’s a charming volume.

It’s really a love letter to the island and its residents.

And the authors say that they wanted to write a linguistics book that you could deem a great beach read.

And so to that end, each of their chapters is pretty much self-contained.

It’s almost like a magazine article.

So you can start anywhere in the book and skip around to chapters with titles like,

How is the Brogue Changing?

And that’s a key point because, as the authors put it, the Brogue is now being washed away

With the ever-rising tide of tourism and other changes along the Outer Banks.

And those changes have to do with the fact that there are just 900 residents on the island

Year-round, but in the summertime, you might find 12,000 people there.

And so there are people who are settling there from other places and bringing their own ways of speaking,

Whether they’re snowbirds from the north or native Spanish speakers from Latin America.

And so what I love about this book is that it documents the dialect of Ocracoke at this moment in time,

As well as its history, because these professors have been going back there for years.

And it’s a vivid, really readable example of how no matter who you are or where you are, your dialect is changing all the time.

It’s not just a static thing.

That sounds like a fantastic read, Martha.

I’ve been tracking the work on that island for a long time.

They’ve been studying there for decades, haven’t they?

They have, and they’ve been making audio recordings.

And that’s one of the other cool things about this book is that you can link to these audio recordings online that illustrate a lot of the points in the book.

Fantastic. And the book title again is?

Language and Life on Ocracoke, The Living History of the Brogue.

And the authors are?

Jeffrey Reeser, Walt Wolfram, and Cindy Gaskell.

And of course, as always, we’ll link to this book from our website in the episode description at waywordradio.org.

If there’s something you’ve been reading that you think we should tell everyone about, let us know.

Call or text 877-929-9673 or email words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Paul Hebing from Memphis, Tennessee.

Hey, Paul, we’re glad to have you. What’s up?

All right, so I have a question about accents and mine in particular.

So I am originally from Wisconsin, but I haven’t lived in Wisconsin for over 20 years.

My wife is from Florida, and she makes fun of me a lot for the way that I speak with just some words in particular.

So, for example, I don’t allow myself to say that that food, the round food that’s bready, that you put a schmear on because it often comes out weird.

Or at least that’s what I’m told.

It sounds normal to me.

So, B-A-G-E-L?

That would be the word, yeah.

Because I say it, bagel, and that sounds perfectly acceptable to me.

But every time I say that, she gives me a funny look and says, what was that?

What is that thing?

B-A-G-E-L, you say?

Bagel.

Say it again?

Bagel.

Okay.

And what else do you say?

The knife, a small knife, a dagger is how I say it.

Let’s see.

Snag.

Bag.

Yeah, mostly those A words.

And then O words.

Yeah, I’m told I say snow funny as well.

Oh, I love it. I love it.

Oh, you’re so much a product of your, your isolect, of your, your regional, your regional variants.

You’re, you’re a great example of the place that you’re from.

You’re, you’re like the archetype of a speech pattern. It’s perfect.

And your wife makes fun of that?

Yeah, she has a master’s in linguistics.

So I think she thinks that makes her the standard bearer of how things should be said.

But what kind of linguistics?

Like computational linguistics?

I don’t know.

It’s been a while since I’ve looked at the degree that she has hanging up on the wall.

Well, it seems like malpractice to me, Paul’s wife.

It could just be her affectionate way.

Yeah, it’s true.

What if she moved to Wisconsin?

Yeah.

Wouldn’t people be—

We’ve talked about that.

And she said that she might lose her mind listening to all my family speak the way that we speak.

Oh, no.

Oh, for heaven’s sake.

No, no, no, no, no, no.

She’s probably already picked up some of your speech ways and she just doesn’t know it.

That could be.

One can hope because I think it’s a perfectly fine way to say words.

Although I will say I have friends that I grew up with in Wisconsin who also have moved away.

And they also confess that they never say that B-A-G-E-L word aloud because that is the one that people make fun of the most, apparently.

Wow.

All right.

So let’s just talk about this a couple of different ways.

One is I want to just, Martha and I often say this, but it bears repeating.

Sometimes these little polite bickerings that we have about language allow a couple to let off some of the steam of a relationship without it building up and coming out in ugly ways.

So we just kind of have these little polite kind of frictions about unimportant languagey things.

And they’re good for the relationship.

And then they don’t mean anything and they’re not really serious.

And this bagel bagel pronunciation argument might be one of those things.

And maybe you just let it continue because it’s doing a good job for the relationship.

It is.

It is something that she gets to consistently point out and bring up because apparently I’m never going to change.

Try as I might.

But the other thing I want to say about it is when we have a speech way like this, a dialect feature like this that belongs to a huge pattern that we can map and show that millions of people do it.

It is not a mistake.

And her uncomfortableness with it is something she’s allowed to express,

But it doesn’t mean that she’s correct if she ever wanted to say that it was wrong.

And it doesn’t sound like she’s saying it’s wrong.

It sounds like she’s saying she’s uncomfortable with it.

Oh, no, she’s told me it’s wrong.

Oh, she needs to give back the linguistics degree.

So in the dialect region that you represent, there’s something called bag, beg raising.

That’s what linguists call it, where these vowels do change.

So bag and beg can swap places.

So bagel can become bagel.

I’m exaggerating.

And milk can sound like milk and a variety of other things.

But all of these features are part of this dialect region.

And they belong to this region.

And they’re noted and notable.

Just because somebody notices something doesn’t mean the noticeable nature of it makes it wrong.

It isn’t wrong just because you notice it.

That is correct.

And I should bring that up to her.

I was about to say very true.

But in addition to having a master’s in linguistics, she is also a philosopher.

So I cannot say things like very true because there are no degrees to true.

There’s no such thing as greeted true.

Oh, no.

Tell her that she’s a very unique woman.

She is. She is. And I love her very much, even though I can’t say bagel in front of her.

I hope that you get good bagels wherever you live, Paul.

And I appreciate you taking the time to tell us about this.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

What are the little linguistic disputes you have in your house?

We’d love to hear about it. 877-929-9673.

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

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Gay Gilbert.

Hi, Gay. Where are you calling us from?

Tucson, Arizona. Well, I just wanted to get your help about a phrase that my grandmother used to use.

When we would go to visit her in San Antonio, Texas, she would say, take off your cape and fascinator and have a seat.

I always thought that the fascinator was a fan. And lately, I’ve rellowed with Google’s help, have learned that it’s a hat.

But anyway, I was just interested if you knew more about where that phrase came from.

So you arrive at somebody’s home, at her home, and she welcomes you in the door and says,

Take off your cape and fascinator.

Is that it?

Yes.

Okay.

And she’s motioning you over to a chair or something like that?

Right.

-huh.

Yeah, it’s a funny little phrase.

I don’t know that the phrase itself has any history, but there was a time when women did

Wear capes and fascinators, but the fascinator that we’re thinking of isn’t the hat fascinator,

Not the kind that you would see in church on an Easter Sunday where there’s this wild

Confection of feathers and lace that kind of just really draws the eye to the head and

Kind of shows off some wonderful millinery, you know, just this really cool thing.

But the older meaning of fascinator was a scarf of a kind, usually triangular shape

And made of lace that would just, you’d fasten over your head to keep it warm or hold your hair

In place. And so typically before, say the 1920s, if you read or heard someone talk about a cape and

A fascinator, they meant take off your cape and then take off that scarf, that particular kind

Of scarf. Yeah. So there was the older meaning of it that’s kind of been lost to time here.

And the reason it was called the fascinator typically has to do with this older meaning

Of to fascinate, which was to basically to put a little mystery or modesty in the appearance

Of a person.

And so it’s this idea of to fascinate, like they say that certain types of snakes fascinate

People by hypnotizing them with their eyes.

It’s that kind of fascination, you know, that kind of like just drawing the eye in a weird

And wild way.

So I guess both kinds of fascinators will do that.

Yeah.

If your garment is that fascinating, you’ve done something amazing, I think.

That’s right.

Gay, thank you so much for spending some time with us.

We really appreciate it.

Well, thank you.

I really enjoyed it.

And you gave me some new things to think about.

Take care of yourself now.

You too.

Bye now.

Bye, Gay.

We think of clouds as light and vaporous, but the history of this word is really fascinating.

The word cloud comes from the Old English clude, which means a mass of rock or a hill, like a giant clump of earth or mound.

And it actually shares a common ancestor with the word clod, which I never thought about.

But now whenever I look at clouds, I think, oh, that’s just a big clod.

A clod of humidity.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But, yeah, as late as the 15th century, the word cloud could mean a mass of rock.

That just came to my mind.

Oh, interesting.

It’s just a clump of droplets.

Right.

A clot of droplets.

Right.

Give us a call, 877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Grant.

Hi, Martha.

This is Constance from San Antonio, Texas.

So my 17-month-old over her bed has a decorative structure, I guess, that hangs from a string and spins around, you know, when touched or when there’s an air current.

So she is deep in the stage of pointing at things and asking, what’s that?

And every time she asks me and points at this thing and asks, what’s that?

I never know if it’s a mobile or a mobile or a mobile.

And so she told me, you know, mom, it sounds like you need to call A Way with Words to find this out because this is getting ridiculous.

I’m hearing a discrepancy there.

A child lying on their back watching a mobile does not have that kind of fluency in English.

Mom, are you putting words in her mouth?

A little bit.

A little bit.

Good for you.

Yeah.

And so I even asked, I even have a group of friends kind of from all over the U.S., pulled them, and everybody had a different answer for me as to what they call it.

What’s your instinct?

Like, if you weren’t to think too hard about it, what would you say first?

I would say either mobile or mobile, I think.

Actually, I think mobile is my first instinct.

Mobile.

Okay.

Yeah.

So I hung a over the bed.

A mobile.

A mobile.

Okay.

And then I correct myself to mobile instinctively.

It’s really between those two, I think.

Or you could just say sculpture.

There we go.

Well, yeah, the word has a really interesting history because since the 15th century, the adjective spelled M-O-B-I-L-E was around meaning not stationary or movable.

And it came from French. And in the UK, it was pronounced mobile. And then later in the United

States, it was pronounced either mobile or mobile. Now, that’s the adjective that means

It’s not stationary. In the early 1930s, Alexander Calder, this sculptor, was fooling around with

Kinetic sculptures, you know, exactly like you described, you know, pieces hung suspended

From something that moved around in really random but pleasing ways. And Calder lived in Paris at

The time. And the story goes that there was another artist, Duchamp, who visited his studio

There in Paris in 1931, saw his abstract sculpture that moved around and called it a mobile, which

In French means movable. And so that was the original pronunciation of these works of art.

They were mobiles. And then when the crib toy came along years later, people were calling it,

By that time they were calling it mobile in the U.S., but the pronunciation is kind of mobile

Because it’s pronounced mobile in the U.K. And it’s further complicated by things like your

Mobile phone and all of that. But in the U.S., if you want to go by the dictionary pronunciation,

It’s mobile, which I think is what you were saying. Yeah. Yeah. I would correct myself to

Go to mobile. I would land there eventually. So. Yeah. I do the same thing. You know, I wouldn’t

Worry too much about the pronunciation, but maybe, yeah, just settle on that one and put that word

In her mouth and many, many more

As the years go on.

That’s perfect. Yeah, I hadn’t considered that.

My family is actually from France.

Real French from France.

And I hadn’t made that connection this whole time.

So thank you.

That totally makes sense.

Well, thank you guys so much.

I love your show and I appreciate

You guys having me on.

Well, we appreciate you, Constance. Thanks for calling.

Take care of her.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

A Way with Words senior producer is Stefanie Levine.

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

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

If you have a language, thought, or question, the toll-free line is always open in the U.S. And Canada.

1-877-929-9673.

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

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

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

And special thanks to our nonprofit’s volunteer board.

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

Thanks for listening. I’m Grant Barrett.

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

So long.

Thank you.