It’s in My Wheelhouse

Hey, podcast listener. Even though you’re hearing this recorded show, you can still call us whenever you want.

1-877-929-9673. Our voicemail will take your call. Later, we’ll listen to it just as we listen to all of them.

And then there’s always a chance that we’ll decide to have you on the show to ask your question or share your story.

On with the show.

You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

Grant, have you been metagrobalized lately?

Yes, it was exciting.

I’ve never felt that way before.

I imagine you haven’t.

What is it?

I don’t know what it is.

It sounded kind of, I don’t know, naughty.

See, you are metagrobalized even as we speak.

That’s M-E-T-A-G-R-O-B-O-L-I-Z-E.

Metagrobalized.

The meta I can kind of get, but the grob is mysterious.

It’s mysterious because that’s what the word means.

It means to puzzle or mystify or confound.

I see.

Very good.

Our quiz guys are the metagrobalizers of the show.

When you come up with big words like that, I feel gruntulous.

Do you know gruntulous?

No, but I’d be gruntled to learn what it means.

It’s related to the word grunt.

It’s just you can describe speech as being gruntulous.

They’re just like, urgh, urgh.

Such a big word.

Gruntulous demands for another beer.

Urgh.

Gruntulous.

Do you know what gruntulous needs?

It needs a spokes.

I know.

S-P-O-X.

Do you know this word?

S-P-O-X?

Yeah.

It’s like a headline-y’s word for spokesperson.

Mainly British, but starting to appear in American newspapers.

Yeah.

Oh, that’s nice.

So you might say that the president’s ratings improved over the past week according to a spokes.

S-P-O-X.

I assume it’s spokes.

I think it’s written and not usually pronounced.

So it’s just a nice shorthand.

Spokes.

Yeah.

So gruntulous, an old word.

Spokes.

S-P-O-X, a new word, right?

Nice, nice.

And you’ve got to go fetch the old one sometimes.

And sometimes when you find the new word, you’re like, I’m going to embrace this.

I want to make this mine.

So spokes is my word of the week.

I like it.

Well, I’m going with metagrobalize.

And if a question about language has you metagrobalized, you know where to call?

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

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Bob from Forest Hills, New York.

Hi, Bob. Welcome to the program.

Thank you.

What can we help you with today, Bob?

Okay. Sometimes I think people just forget about the original meaning of words.

I’m an amateur musician. I’ve played in my share of pit orchestras for shows.

And the other day, a friend of mine who’s a retired music teacher and also played in his share of pit orchestras called me and said he was playing for a show.

And they had to vamp some music underneath some stage business.

And the conductor said, repeat those two bars four times.

And my friend said, so do you want us to play eight bars or ten bars?

And the conductor said, eight bars.

And to me and to my friend, if you repeat something four times, that means you play it five times.

Okay.

Okay, Bob, what do you play, by the way?

I play the clarinet.

And what was he playing, your friend?

I think in this case he was playing piano, but he’s a violinist as well.

Okay, very good.

And by vamp, you mean that they play just a little light music as things change, right?

Yeah, you just keep repeating a couple of bars until the stage business gets out of the way.

So you have a disagreement, and this is something that you really have to get right.

I mean, can the first time you play something be a repeat?

Aha! We are at the heart of the question.

Hey, Bob, you know what?

I put this question to a wonderful musician that Grant and I both know, Greg Pliska.

Oh, our quiz guy.

Yeah, he’s one of our quiz guys, and he does a lot of conducting.

He’s working on a Broadway show right now.

And he does it for commercials and movies and documentaries.

Yeah.

Okay.

So he’s a pro.

Yeah, and he gave me a very simple rule for this.

It’s just five words, but it always works.

I’m all in favor of simplicity.

Okay.

The conductor is always right.

That may be true, but that doesn’t answer the English.

No, it doesn’t.

Come on.

Well, here’s the thing.

In linguistics terms, and this is something I can talk about.

I know jack about music.

This is a question of pragmatics.

How is it intended and how is it understood?

There’s an entire field of linguistics.

People spend their whole careers studying pragmatics.

They write books about this.

I feel sorry for them.

No, it’s actually incredibly interesting because it is generally neglected

When people talk about music outside of that discipline.

Pragmatics is what is intended and what is received.

And in this case, we have a disconnect there.

But generally, I would say that the pragmatics of this situation

Probably could have been resolved when you first started to learn music.

I mean, this can’t have been the first time you encountered this.

Probably not.

But when you’re reading the music,

And they’ll put over, like, in a shorthand at times,

They might just write the number five over a bar

That’s telling you to play it five times.

And they have dots or something.

There’s like a repeat symbol.

There’s also a repeat symbol, which tells you to go back and play it once again.

Right.

But can we at least agree that in standard English, repeat means you’ve got to at least have done it twice?

I think we can agree about that in standard English.

But Grant was talking about pragmatics and all that.

I want to talk about the thesaurus.

There’s a way around this.

Never use the word repeat.

Use the word play.

No, seriously.

To me, there’s got to be a difference between playing it five times and repeating it five times.

But this is an incredibly common English word.

It’s like dropping and.

No, repeat.

I mean, this call is a perfect example of the confusion we’re having.

And seriously, I know musicians who say don’t use the word repeat at all.

Always use the word play.

I mean, can you go over to someone who’s been standing mute in front of you for an hour and say, would you repeat that?

What was it, Philip Glass?

Bob, you have a point there.

I guess we’re not going to settle this to everybody.

But you win the call.

Let me just point out that you win.

You win at radio.

That’s nice.

We’ve rolled over.

We’re saying uncle.

All right.

Well, here’s the point.

Just to sum this all up, Martha’s got a great point.

Your conductor probably should have worded it differently, right?

Yeah.

And I want to know what he finally said.

Did he say eight or ten?

The constructor said it meant eight.

Okay.

Wow.

Very good.

Well, I love this whole idea.

Just avoid repeat if there’s going to be any kind of confusion.

Like if you were going to – if this was an army, right, and I want you to take that base and every hour on the hour I want you to fire the cannons.

I want you to repeat that ten times.

I mean there’s some confusion there.

And I want you to do it next Tuesday.

What Tuesday is it?

Yeah, you’ve got to be clear.

What Tuesday?

If you were giving orders to a bunch of people, they better be clear.

So I think the fault here lies not with English but with the conductor.

The buck stops there.

That’s right.

Use the word play, not repeat.

Fair enough.

Bob, this has been a blast.

Thank you.

Yeah, thanks, dude.

Okay, thank you.

All right, bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Call us and let us know what you think about repeat.

Does it include the first time that you do something?

877-929-9673 or put it all in email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Matt. How are you?

Hi, Matt. Welcome to the program.

Thank you. I’m calling from Encinitas, California.

Encinitas, hello.

Hello.

So I was listening to NPR on the way to work a couple weeks ago,

And they were speaking with an author who was writing about bromides in sports.

And my question is about the word bromides.

So the example that he gave, or one of the examples that I remember anyway,

Was in the fourth down to call a timeout to ice the kicker.

And I don’t know much about sports, but I came home and looked up the word bromide,

And it said a cliché or a platitude.

But my question is more about the evolution of the word,

Because from my background in science, I know that bromide is along the lines of chloride or iodide

That combines to form salts.

And I know from medicine that bromides were once a remedy.

And so I looked in an old Merck manual that I have at home from the 50s,

And it said that bromides were used as a sedative and a treatment for epilepsy.

So I wondered if and how it got from the sort of scientific use to the modern use in English.

We can help you with that.

So bromide is sort of a boring, dull platitude.

I gave 110%.

Right. I left it all on the field. Right. Our team came to play. Well, what else did you come for? Right. Right. That’s a sports bromide. And you’re right. It derives from the idea of potassium bromide being used as a sedative.

And the idea of bromides being boring platitudes is connected with the fact that there was a humorist around the turn of the century, early 1900s, named Gillette Burgess, who wrote a book called Are You a Bromide?

And in it, he talked about people who are really boring versus people who were exciting and interesting, like Grant and me.

I feel bromidic, actually.

And the bromides were the boring people and the sulfites were the lively people.

And he listed a whole bunch of bromides that were just boring platitudes that you might expect one of these mythological people to say.

Like, you know, 500 channels and nothing to watch.

So there’s expressions that sort of put you to sleep like the medicine.

Exactly. That’s exactly it.

Okay.

That’s pretty much it.

So surprisingly, the article that he originally published in the Smart Set, which talked about this, and the book became successful,

And were heavily written about in newspapers in New York at the time.

And it was just kind of a thing that caught on.

And the word lasted, but the meaning changed,

Because in the original use, bromide was the person who said these platitudes,

And then it kind of transformed into the actual platitude itself.

Interesting.

But it does go back to the, you were right on target,

It goes back to the sedative, potassium bromide.

Thanks for answering the question. I enjoy your show.

It’s one of the few places on the dial where you can hear something positive and fun,

Rather than about all the other things going on in the world.

Oh, that’s awesome.

I knew there was a reason that we wore clown makeup to the studio.

Thanks, Matt.

No bromides here.

Thanks.

Take care.

Oh, we have a few.

Yeah, we do.

One of the things we say all the time is give us a call, 877-929-9673,

Or send your language questions and email to words@waywordradio.org.

We often talk in this program about the rules of grammar, the rules of language,

And sometimes we talk about how it’s okay to break them in certain circumstances.

Well, there’s a word I found that I think applies.

It’s from theology, and it’s a little old-fashioned.

It even goes back to Plato, and it’s epikia.

And it’s the notion that you might prefer to obey the spirit of a rule or law rather than obeying it to the letter.

Does that make sense?

And so in theology, you could see how an edict from the church or an edict from God might sound very specific.

And yet there’s always these border cases where you’re technically breaking the rule and yet you’re actually doing only good.

The only thing that’s happening is the only product of your effort is goodness.

And so I would just think about sometimes we talk about language and we have epikeia happening here all the time, right?

E-P-I-K-E-I-A, epikeia.

That’s a nice word.

That’s a good one, right?

Greek, obviously, you can hear it.

Share your new words or your old ones.

You’re going back to Plato to words@waywordradio.org or give us a call, 877-929-9673.

A word quiz and more of your language questions, next on A Way with Words.

You’re listening to A Way with Words.

I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

And here with us today is Greg Pliska, our master quiz guy.

So in the downtime from your big music career,

You’re still writing puzzles in the margins of your sheet music, right?

I’ve got to make a living somehow.

What do you got for us?

Do you remember William Snakespeare?

Yes, I do.

How did we forget?

Yeah, once you’re William Snakebit, then it’s all over.

Well, he’s the guy who wrote a whole bunch of plays that have titles just one letter different from the titles of plays by William Shakespeare.

Right, the bird of Avon.

That’s the one.

Very good.

Martha, you’re in.

Since we’ve just finished Oscar season, I thought we’d look back at the Snakespear Oxcar Award for the best pictures.

Oh, no.

Great.

What I’ll do is describe a film that’s been nominated, and to find the answer, you take the name of a 2010 Best Picture Oscar-nominated film, change one letter to get the Snakespeare Oxcar nominee.

Okay.

Okay.

Let’s try it.

We’re ready.

Natalie Portman stars in this biopic about a rapper with a split personality.

First, he’s Puffy.

Then he’s Puff Daddy.

Then he’s Puff Daddy.

Then he’s Diddy.

So the movie that she’s in is The Black Swan.

So the Black Sean.

The Black Sean, yeah.

Very good.

Sean Puffy Combs.

Black Sean.

Here’s your next one.

All the acting buzz has been about Christian Bale’s performance as a cross-dressing boxer.

Oh.

The movie is The Fighter, right?

Yeah.

And so The Tighter?

No.

No?

You want to change a – yeah, Martha?

She Fighter?

She-fighters.

Oh, nice.

Tricky, tricky because you don’t expect the article to change.

Very good.

All right.

A lesbian couple wrestles with relationship issues, and as a result, their children get mediocre meals.

So the kids are all – the kids?

The kids M-R-E, all right?

No.

Oh, that’s very clever, but you’ve got the right word.

It is R you’ve got to change.

Really?

But not the first letter.

No, the kids ate all right.

That’s it.

The kids ate all right.

Yeah, it was okay.

It wasn’t great.

It ate all right.

Another one of my favorites, James Franco sits in a cave, cuts off six of his fingers, and counts to 508.

Well, the movie – one of the movies you’re talking about is 127 hours, right?

Yep.

So he –

Well, what happens when he cuts off six of his fingers?

He has four left.

It’s multiplication we’re talking about.

Yep.

127 fours.

Exactly.

That’s how you get 508.

Math!

Who knew?

Oh, no.

This is a word show.

Okay.

Jennifer Lawrence stars as Ree Dolly, a 17-year-old who has to care for her catatonic mother,

Raise two younger siblings, save their home from foreclosure, find her missing father,

And secretly work as a double O agent for the British Secret Service.

Quintus Bond.

Yes, Winter’s Bone.

Winter’s Bone.

The film itself is Winter’s Bone, of course.

Winter’s Bone.

Of course.

You just change one letter.

Wrong song.

Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon, Haley Steinfeld, and Colin Firth

Vie to be the most authentic citizen of the UK.

True Brit.

True Brit, exactly.

Based on true grit, of course.

And here’s yet another in the hit animated franchise

About headline news.

So it’s Toy Story 3.

Headline news.

Top Story 3.

Top Story 3, exactly.

Tonight’s Top Story.

That’s it.

And one more for you.

Angered at being rejected

By a college girlfriend,

A young programmer

Builds an interactive website

For paid assassins.

The anti-social network.

The social network?

That was social network.

Social wet work.

Social wet work.

Exactly.

Paid assassins.

When you kill, there’s blood.

People die.

Pink mist.

Brutal.

Brutal.

Pliska, thanks for the Oscar rundown.

I’m kind of chagrined how few of those films I’ve seen.

I’m chagrined that I didn’t see the ox car ceremony.

That would be great.

Seeing those people walk up to the stage.

No, they were walking up to the ox car just picking some apples out of the back.

They just ride their horses up and pick up a ward.

I’ll mumble like Jeff Bridges.

Great stuff, Greg.

Thank you so much.

It’s a pleasure.

Thank you.

And if you’d like to talk with us about grammar or slang or punctuation or words and how you use them or how we use them,

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

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Tracy Isley from Montana.

Hello, Tracy.

Hi, Tracy.

Where are you calling from in Montana?

The Bozeman-Livingston area.

Oh, very good.

All right.

And what would you like to talk with us about?

Well, I’m actually from Wyoming.

I grew up in Wyoming in a little town called Dubois.

And my father grew up in the high kind of plains of Wyoming in a town called Rock River.

And he had a lot of expressions that he used, but one in particular that he used.

That I have not been able to find or have never heard anybody else use was good leather.

Good leather?

Good leather.

Okay.

And he would use it like when we would work on something and it had the outcome that he was seeking.

So if you were engaged in a task and you completed it and it was just right, he would say good leather.

You know, like, that’s good.

And I have never, and so I’ve always used it, and I’ve never heard anybody else use it.

And when I say it, people are like, what?

What are you talking about?

And I was wondering if you guys have ever come across that expression.

Tracy, do you have any ideas about it yourself?

Does it conjure any images for you?

Of course, my father was very much into the cowboy kind of genre.

And he wasn’t a cowboy himself.

He was an electrician, but he loved the cowboy world.

And I suspect maybe from there.

Let me ask you about your father.

Was he into baseball?

No.

He wasn’t.

The only use of good leather that I know of that’s similar to that is in baseball.

It’s used to describe good defense or good fielding.

Wow.

Because you have the leather on your hand when you’re out there,

And you’re catching the ball and doing the thing that needs to be done.

And also the ball itself is covered in leather.

So all of the leather is doing what it needs to do in order to win the game.

I don’t know of any others, but I could totally see this coming out of cowboys and Western mythology.

Did he read fiction about the cowboy lifestyle?

Oh, yeah. He loved all that.

And he was really into Tom Horn, you know, the whole story of Tom Horn,

Because Tom Horn was a big legend down around that part of the country.

You know, any kind of Western figure that had real historical interest or even fictional was part of his life.

Yeah, for sure.

It’s descriptive.

I bet that even though people cock an eye when you say it, they all know what you mean.

I think so.

Sometimes I don’t think they do.

Okay.

Like, you know, I usually use it when I’m writing an email.

Like if somebody sends me an email and I agree with what they’re saying or we’ve succeeded in what we were trying to accomplish, I’ll say good letter.

And they’ll…

Yeah, maybe that’s a little opaque.

No, I’ve never heard it.

But hang on to it.

Hang on to it.

It sounds like a hand-me-down from your father.

It’s like somebody leaving you, you know, their favorite saddle, right?

Language is an artifact of the people who came before.

Hang on to it.

Yeah, for sure.

Okay, well, thank you.

I love your show.

It’s a great show.

I listen to it from my studio every Thursday night here in Montana.

Thanks, Tracy.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

What are your linguistic heirlooms?

We’d love to hear about them.

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

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi.

My name is Patrick.

I’m calling you from beautiful Vista, California.

Hello, beautiful Patrick from Vista, California.

Welcome.

Welcome to the program.

How can we help you?

Well, I have an interest in that expression nosiness.

My wife comes from a country that’s kind of nosy, and they have the expression too.

It just sounds funny to me that we’d use the nose as an instrument, like an investigative instrument.

And then I found it in other languages, and I’ve traveled around the world a lot.

And it’s in other cultures too.

A lot of people use the expression nosy or sticky beak or something like that.

Sticky beak in Australia and New Zealand, right?

Yeah, exactly.

I love that for a nosy person, a sticky beak.

Yeah, it’s funny because it sounds like the nose does all the investigating.

The five senses get these little side jobs, you know?

Side jobs for the nose.

But my wife, she’s from Bangladesh.

And one time I heard her using this expression called, well, she says,

And it means nose going.

I’m like, oh my God,

Did you guys use the expression nosey?

And she didn’t know what I was talking about,

So I explained it to her.

She says, yeah,

When somebody’s getting their business,

They’re curious as to what you’re doing.

And I think that’s really funny.

It’s all the different cultures.

Yeah, so they’re described as nose going?

Yeah, they say nose going.

That person is very nose going.

And in her culture,

Which, you know, I apologize to any Bangladeshi listeners.

I hope they get a laugh out of this.

It’s okay in that they’re very nosy people, kind of like,

I could be walking down the street over there and someone will ask somebody that I don’t even know,

Les, you know, where are you going?

I’m thinking, well, I don’t even know you.

You know, you never asked that.

Strangers?

Yeah.

Like, hi, how are you doing?

And they don’t respond back with, you know, fine.

They respond back with, where are you going?

What’s your name?

What’s your religion?

Wow.

Wow.

Really?

Yeah, that reminds me of when I traveled in South America, just kind of low-level travel, like buses and that sort of thing.

And I’d sit down next to strangers, and in the first minute, they would always say, are you married?

Do you have kids?

Right.

Do you at least have a girlfriend?

Yeah.

That’s very noisy.

Well, but it’s also like it’s the thing they most want to know.

So that’s their way of getting together with your brain and just finding a little bit more about you.

It’s only nosy to an outsider on the inside.

It’s like a cultural thing.

I’m interested in this nosegoing that the Bangladeshis have because there are other cultures, of course, as you mentioned,

Other cultures where it’s built into the language that something to do with the nose is about looking into business or looking into other people’s affairs.

Kind of intriguing.

The Italians have it.

I think the Spanish speakers have something along those lines.

I can’t think of anything like that.

I have heard one in Spanish.

I don’t know exactly what it is, but it has to do with it.

It sounds like olf.

Oh, yeah, olfatear.

Olfatear, right?

Yeah, I forgot about that one.

Well, cool.

Thanks for sharing your story with us.

I love these cross-cultural connections.

They come up so often in our shows, and it’s a bottomless mine of wonderful gold.

Patrick, take care of yourself.

Thanks.

Bye-bye.

He reminded me of the Spanish word olfatear, which is related to olfactory.

Oh, very good.

And it means to sniff, but it also means to pry into.

So that’s a great example.

Sniffing around other people’s business.

Yeah.

Interesting.

Yeah, good stuff.

Tell us about whom you’re married to, 877-929-9673,

And share the strange things they say to words@waywordradio.org.

We put the call out a while back for Proverbs, and a lot of people sent us some of their favorites.

Mel sent us a Native American proverb that goes,

The soul would have no rainbow if the eyes had no tears.

It’s true, right?

You take the good with the bad.

Yeah, yeah.

Mel also sent a Swedish one that goes,

Love me when I least deserve it, because that’s when I need it the most.

Oh, that’s nice and true, right?

I like that.

Yeah, and, you know, we talked about modern proverbs and what’s taking the place of some of those or lining up alongside those.

And I really like the one that Amy sent from Madison, Wisconsin,

Injustice Anywhere is a Threat to Justice Everywhere.

That, of course, is from Martin Luther King Jr.

Very nice.

Share your idioms with us or your proverbs, 877-929-9673, or send them an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Susan, and I’m calling from Redland, California.

And I was calling about a question I had about the acetabulum,

Which is something we were learning about in anatomy.

What’s the word again?

Acetabulum.

So that’s A-C-E-T-A-B-U-L-U-M.

Is that correct?

Yes, that’s correct.

Are you studying that for a profession or just to be well-rounded or what?

I guess both.

I’m in dental school, and it’s my first year.

And our professor always talks about the meaning of the word more to help us understand and memorize, you know, different parts of the body.

Excellent.

So what did your professor tell you about the acetabulum, and what is it, first of all?

It’s the type of articulation in the hip.

The head of the femur fits into sort of like, I guess, a cup, you know, in the hip bone.

It’s called the acetabulum, but in the other parts, it’s not called an acetabulum.

The acetabulum is the little hip socket, the little cavity there.

And you’re absolutely right.

It goes back to Latin, and it goes back to the Latin word for vinegar cup.

Vinegar cup.

Yeah, yeah, I love this.

I mean, Susan, you probably are learning this already about the mundane poetry of anatomy.

I mean, so many of those Latinate words that look so intimidating are really just kind of everyday things,

Like pelvis means bowl or basin.

But why do I need a word for vinegar cup in Latin?

Why do you need a word for…

Yeah, but I mean, why would it suggest itself to the people naming the parts of the body?

Excellent question.

The vinegar cup, the acetabulum, was something that you’d find in ancient Rome on your dinner table.

It was, you know, sort of like you order dressing on the side.

It’s a little thing that contains vinegar, and you dip your bread into it.

Oh, so we do this in some restaurants.

Maybe it’s a cup of balsamic with some olive oil, and you dip your country bread in there, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, but Susan, if you see a photo of one of these little things or a drawing, it looks exactly like a hip socket.

Very good. Very good.

So over time, it went from being a vinegar cup to just being a cup in general.

And even in antiquity, they were using the word acetabulum to mean hip socket.

But I can tell you something really cool about an acetabulum.

What?

In antiquity.

Your professors will love this.

Pliny the Elder, in his natural history, where he’s writing about all different kinds of things in nature and remedies and that kind of thing,

He recommends taking the acetabulum of a pig and burning it to a crisp and then mixing that up with resin.

And he says it makes a great toothpaste.

Oh, that’s horrible.

So take that back to your professor, and I’m sure you know something that no one else in your class knows.

Great. I’ll take that to him. I have a meeting with him later on this week.

Excellent.

But I think I’ll take the crest.

So it just refers to a cup.

Yes.

Happened to hold acid back in the day.

Yes, originally vinegar.

Okay, vinegar.

Yeah.

That’s right.

Okay.

Oh, well, that’s interesting.

It’s good to know.

Hey, Susan, thanks for calling.

Good luck with your studies.

Thank you so much.

Cheers.

Okay, bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

If you need help with your studies or you want to get some extra credit with a professor,

Give us a call and we’ll see what we can do to bring your grades up.

877-929-9673 or email us words@waywordradio.org.

We’ve talked before, and I know you remember this, about couth being the opposite of uncouth, right?

People just don’t really use couth except kind of in a joking way, right?

Right.

But did you know that there’s a Scots adjective, couthy?

Yeah, couthy means sociable, snug, plain, homely.

It’s just kind of like it’s the opposite of uncouth.

And it’s actively used.

I mean, it’s a little old-fashioned, but couthy is the opposite of uncouth.

It kind of sounds better than couth for some reason.

Couthy.

Kind of like truthy, right?

Couthiness.

Couthiness.

You’re agreeable.

You’re friendly.

You’re polite.

You’re couthy.

I like it.

How about that?

I like it.

Can I get the world to use it?

No.

877-929-9673.

Call me.

Tell me how much you love the word couthy or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

More language play as A Way with Words continues.

Support for A Way with Words comes from National University, where flexible online classes let you earn your degree or credential on your schedule.

Learn more at nu.edu.

You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

Grant, I’ve been having a blast lately on the website called Omniglot.com.

You’re familiar with this.

This is run by Simon Ager.

He’s from the U.K. He lives in Wales.

And like so many of us in the language trade, he is an autodidact.

He’s taught himself many, many, many, many languages, hence the name Omniglot, which of course means all tongues.

And the site is a lot of fun.

It’s kind of limited, but it’s limited to some interesting things.

If you ever want to know how to say my hovercraft is full of eels in a whole lot of languages, it has that.

That’s from the old Monty Python skit.

But one of my favorite pages on this site that I’ve been playing with lately has to do with those expressions like two sandwiches short of a picnic.

Oh, full deckism.

Oh, yeah, right, right.

Okay, that’s the word.

We talked about it on the show before.

And there are some great ones from all around the world that people have shared with him.

And you can go there and share your own if you know some.

How about these?

This one from Portuguese.

He has monkeys in the attic.

Same thing for a full deckism.

Or he’s a rotten garlic head.

That’s new.

I love that.

Also Portuguese.

Yes.

Yes.

In Serbian, you’re crazy as electricity.

Isn’t that a great image?

Oh, yeah.

That’s great.

I like that a lot.

In Czech, it’s splashing on his lighthouse.

Now, what in the world is that?

It’s splashing on his lighthouse.

And that means crazy or just a little off balance or something?

Yeah, a little bit off.

A little bit off.

I see.

And in German, you ask someone, are you still ticking on time?

Oh, yeah.

I bet it sounds better in the original German.

Yeah, probably. Probably.

Another one that I really like is from Cantonese.

Something as unclear as a leather lantern.

That’s great.

Isn’t it great?

Because you can’t see through a leather lantern.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love that.

And finally, there’s a long expression from French that translates as,

He understands quickly, but you have to spend a long time explaining things to him.

Nice.

So there are all kinds of great things on that website.

So that’s Omniglot.com by Simon Egger.

Check it out.

We take your questions about words and language, any aspect of it, grammar, punctuation, slang, books, literature, poetry, rhymes, puns, you name it.

877-929-9673 or send it all in email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Jill.

I’m calling from Bayview, Wisconsin.

It’s part of Milwaukee, and I like to listen to the podcast as I walk along Lake Michigan.

Oh, wow.

Well, Jill, what can we help you with?

Well, thanks so much for taking my call.

It’s something that I’ve been curious about for a while,

And I don’t even know if I would start researching it.

It’s about how children acquire spoken language.

So I’ve anecdotally noticed that my daughter and my friend’s children start with nouns.

So the first word that they’ll speak is often a noun.

For my daughter, it was a cat.

And I think mine was juice, et cetera.

And then I think maybe verbs would be next.

But I’m wondering if this is a pattern across languages, across time, even maybe across geography,

That as children acquire their spoken language, they tend to start with a noun and then progress through other parts of speech.

Interesting. I did that.

This is wonderful. This is something I could talk about for hours, even though I’m no expert whatsoever on it.

I’ve seen it in my own son, just as you’ve seen it in your daughter and your other relatives.

It’s wonderful to watch the language come in.

You got a couple questions there to answer them all kind of in one big blow, and then I’ll do a little kind of breaking it down.

Nearly everyone who is not impaired, that is if they can hear and their vocal cords are functioning, their tongue is there, will speak in pretty much the same order no matter what.

No matter where they are in the world, no matter what language they speak, they will almost always master the parts of their language spoken around them in the same order.

It’s really interesting.

And they start a little earlier than the nouns with practicing the sounds that they hear.

There’s a great FAQ, a frequently asked questions list, at the Linguistic Society of America website, lsadc.org.

You can find it there.

But they summarize this so perfectly.

They just make it plain that as long as you are talking to a child, they will pick up language.

You do not need to instruct them.

There are no lessons required.

So they start with these sounds.

They repeat the sounds that they hear around them, the vowels.

There are some vowels that are common to all languages, but the consonants and whatever.

And then, like you say, they’ll pick up some nouns, things that are incredibly common to them, to their environment, and interesting.

So that’s why mama and papa, or mommy and daddy, are often the first words they say.

But cat is a really common one, and dog is a really common one,

Because these animate, really interesting creatures just attract their eye and their omnipresent.

Yeah, yeah, mine was spatula.

She was fond of the kitchen.

Not really.

Not really.

What was yours, Grant?

I don’t know, actually.

I don’t know.

You don’t know your first word?

No, I don’t know what my first word was.

Mine was bird.

Was it bird?

Bleh.

And what was yours, Jill?

Do you remember?

Mine was juice.

Juice.

Oh, yours was juice.

Okay, yours was juice.

Okay.

Very good.

Anyway, to make a long story short, then they move on.

They don’t use the complex words for a while.

They’ll move on to a little more complicated verbs.

The verbs appear almost when the nouns do.

Oh, really?

Easy verbs like see and run, or even something general like do. And by the time they’re in

Kindergarten, say about five or six, they’ve really mastered all of the grammatical functions

Of English naturally. They do make mistakes. They do need some refinement, but generally all the

Rules are there. They just simply need to be guided to use the right rules at the right time.

It’s really kind of incredible. There are many theories about why humans all generally learn

Language in the same way. Some people believe it’s hardwired in us, the same way that birds

Might be hardwired to migrate or to understand the songs of other birds. And other people believe

That it’s just that the human brain is so impressionable that we could learn anything

As a child as long as there were people around us who were doing it so that we could emulate it.

It’s really interesting stuff. I will link to this FAQ on the Linguistic Society of America site.

There’s so much literature about this, though. There are people who devote their careers to

Language acquisition. It’s more than I could say in this few minutes.

So Jill, does that make sense to you? It sort of jibes with your experience, right?

It does totally make sense. And my daughter’s kind of in the irregular verb phase right now,

Where she conjugates everything the same way, you know, socially. I put that on the table.

How old is she?

She doesn’t understand that. She’s three right now.

Oh, she’s three.

This is the reason we have this show, Jill. Language is the most remarkable thing that

Humans do.

I think so.

Did you do that?

I knew you two would have the answer for me.

But we’ll link to a lot of resources.

We’ll try to find some summaries of the topic,

And we’ll see if we can find some books to recommend

That won’t overwhelm with a lot of academic talk,

And we’ll kind of just express the joy that we feel

When we talk about language acquisition.

Oh, I would really appreciate that.

Thank you.

Thanks for calling, Jill.

Okay, thank you.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Give us a call, 877-929-9673,

Or send your language questions and email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Tony. I’m in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Hey, Tony.

Hi, Tony. Welcome to the program.

Thanks.

What can we help you with today?

Well, I’ve been hearing a word that, an expression that I find interesting,

Which is right in our wheelhouse, right in my wheelhouse, to mean that something is,

You know, perfectly calibrated for my skill set or our skill set.

It seems to be sort of used in the plural, like we as a group.

You know, this is perfect for, this is in our wheelhouse.

And I wanted to know, you know, I understand the meaning of it, but I wanted to know where it came from.

So you hear this when you’re running the steamboat paddlers on the Mississippi?

That’s right, when I’m wearing my steamboat Willie hat.

Because they’re blowing the whistle is the fun part.

Apparently I hear it when I put on my Yogi Berra hat, too.

Well, there we go. It sounds like you’ve done some of your own research. What have you found?

I have done a little bit of research.

Well, tell us about it.

Well, I’m a translator, and so I’m pretty used to trying to pin down the way that words work and what their context is,

You know, all the baggage that comes along with them when I’m trying to do my research.

I’ve got to tell you, that sounds perfect. You can fill in for me if you want.

So I did a little bit of research online, and it seemed to me, I mean, I was attracted by kind of the sound of it.

It kind of sounds like you’re in your dungarees with a heavy wrench, and you’re real competent when you’re in your wheelhouse.

Oh, nice. I like that image.

You know, kind of the steamboat thing.

But then I looked at it online, and it seemed to kind of transform or evolve over time, like it came out of baseball.

But I couldn’t find anything prior to baseball.

So it seems to me like it came out of steamboats, went to baseball, and then kind of migrated to the executive suite.

So the people in marketing and the media say, that’s in our wheelhouse.

We can do that.

Yeah, that sounds like the arc that I know for wheelhouse.

But the baseball connection is really interesting.

Did you find Paul Dixon’s baseball dictionary?

No, I didn’t.

I found a quote from Joe Torre.

Okay. Paul Dixon, really, this is the definitive work of baseball language.

And if you read this work, and I should just say, for a matter of record, I was a consultant on it and contributed to it.

It’s great. It is probably, it’s such a very American book. It’s not even funny.

And you will be surprised how much of regular baseball language is now in your own vocabulary, even if you don’t care a whit about sports or baseball.

And in there, Paul and his team of researchers, they quote a fellow by the name of Peter Tammany.

And he’s well-known in language circles as a guy who accumulated language.

He would just hear it or see it and would write it down.

And there’s a gigantic collection of his notes at the University of Missouri, Columbia, in Columbia, Missouri, called the Tammany Collection.

And in that collection is information about wheelhouse.

And Peter Tammany says he believes the whole idea is that the wheel part is about swinging the bat.

And it’s similar to roundhouse.

It’s literally about the action of turning your torso as you swing the bat, and I’m doing it now, as that ball comes across the plate.

So the wheelhouse is, so the house is the home because you’re at home plate, and the wheel of the roundhouse is the place where you actually make the physical wheel shape of your body.

You are turning a wheel when you’re in there.

And the thing is that maybe it sounds too simplistic, but it’s not a bad explanation.

And certainly, as you’ve found, most people can’t antedate it in this particular use prior to baseball.

Of course, as we were joking at the beginning of your call, there is a wheelhouse that refers to part of a ship or a boat.

It just depends what kind of boat it is or what era you’re talking about or even what country.

But there are a variety of different structures on top of boats that can be called wheelhouses.

Yeah, that’s so interesting.

I would have assumed it would have been that, you know, the sort of central part where all the boat gets, you know.

You know, it could be, but we don’t really find this term pop up in American English until the early 1960s.

So we can’t really antedate it prior to baseball in terms of referring to something being your specialty.

Anyway, this is great.

How interesting.

Thank you so much.

Yeah, wheelhouse.

Thanks for the question.

It’s wonderful.

Baseball has contributed so much to our language, and this is just one of those terms.

Great stuff.

Thanks, Tony.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye, Tony.

Yeah, in Dixon’s dictionary, he compares it to the crush zone or the kill zone.

So to have something in your crush zone is where you can really wallop it.

Oh, that’s interesting.

You can just knock it, right?

I like that one.

Yeah.

In my crush zone.

Well, language questions are in our crush zone, and slang is in Grant’s wheelhouse.

So give us a call, 877-929-9673, or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

So, Grant, in this country, if it’s really raining hard, we say it’s raining cats and dogs.

Do you know what they say in Greece?

It’s raining granite monuments.

Close.

Close.

They say it’s raining chair legs.

Oh, nice.

Yeah, look out.

Help.

It’s raining pillars and caps.

Call us or email us with your thoughts about language, 877-929-9673,

Or send those emails to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Anne. I’m from Dallas.

Hi, Anne. Welcome.

Thank you.

What can we help you with?

Okay.

This is a phrase, high as Cootie Brown.

Older African-American people in the Midwest would say if they were talking about someone who had been drunk, they’d go, they were high as cootie brown.

And where in the Midwest?

I’m in Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois.

Is that where you’re from?

Yeah, yeah, I’m from Nebraska.

So do you use it yourself?

Well, yeah, you know, I have.

And the thing is, is I moved down to Dallas and I was talking to someone and she was African-American.

She’s African-American.

And she said, oh, yeah, he was, hi, it’s Cootie Brown.

And I just started busting out laughing.

I was like, oh, my God, who is this Cootie Brown?

Because you didn’t know that anyone else used it?

No, no.

Nice.

No, not at all.

It just cracked me up.

There’s got to be a Cootie Brown at some point.

Cootie Brown.

That’s even fun to say.

It is.

Who is Cootie Brown?

That’s fantastic.

I have a little bit of data for you.

I don’t have the ultimate answer.

The ultimate answer, the one that you came for, I don’t have.

And that is, who was Cootie Brown?

Oh, darn.

I know.

It’ll be a mystery movie at some point in the future.

Watch for it on PBS, I’m sure.

But you might be interested to know that most people actually say Cooter Brown and not Cootie Brown.

Yeah, have you heard that one?

No.

No, I haven’t.

So you’ll have a little better luck searching the Internet or book archives or newspaper archives with Cooter Brown.

You’ll find them both.

And the earliest that I know that this was used was in the 1930s in an Atlanta newspaper.

So we know that it’s got some roots.

And as it appears in the 30s and 40s and 50s, it’s almost always in Black English.

So this is an expression that is mainly exclusive to Black English and is not really used by white folks.

Okay.

Yeah, interesting, right?

And it’s so prominent that in Langston Hughes, in one of his collections of works called Simple Speaks His Mind,

You know, Langston Hughes had all these stories about a character called Simple.

These are dialogues of a fellow in Harlem.

He uses that phrase, and it first appeared in one of his short stories in 1944.

So pretty quickly after it first appears in the newspaper, Langston Hughes is already using it in such a way that he’s able to spread it to his audience.

I’m sure he must have had some influence of popularizing the term.

So it means somebody who’s really drunk.

Yeah.

Well, it’s not just drunk.

That’s the thing.

So people say drunk is cooter brown or high is cooter brown.

But they’ll also say as dead as cooter brown or as fast as cooter brown.

And I’ve even seen it as fertile as cooter brown.

No way.

Which is strange because we don’t usually call men fertile.

That’s great.

So Cooter Brown has become this metaphorical fellow who is all sorts of extremes, right?

Drunk and fertile and dead.

Yeah.

Well, if he’s drunk and fertile, he’s got a lot of kids.

That’s why he’s dead.

Which is why he’s dead.

Yeah, that’s why he’s dead, exactly.

A number of exes got a hold of him and let him have the business end of the gun.

Oh, man.

But we don’t know enough about Cooter Brown, frankly.

I think Cooter Brown is a story waiting to be told.

That is, it is definitely a story waiting to be told.

If I ever, I’ve got to tell you, if I ever find the true origins of this fellow, if I found out his roots, I’ll let you know.

Please do.

And if I don’t find it, maybe I’ll just make up a story.

And we’ll put that one around as if it were true.

This is great.

Interesting stuff, right?

Well, thank you guys so much.

I love the show.

Oh, we’re glad to have you along, Anne.

Thanks for calling.

Okay, bye-bye.

Take care of yourself.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Interesting.

If you know anything about Cooter Brown or Cootie Brown or if it’s something that you say or your grandpa says, give us a call, 877-929-9673.

Or tell us the story in email to words@waywordradio.org.

If you’re listening to us on the air, you know that we are broadcast.

But, Martha, if people are listening to us by podcast, we are in silico.

I beg your pardon?

We’re in silico.

It’s the digital or computer equivalent of, say, in vitro.

You run computer simulations in silico to test them out.

They might be biological simulations, say, how will a cell react to a drug?

And you put in all your components and your magical software just kind of runs some trials for you without actually having live bacteria there.

How cool is that?

Interesting term, right?

Yeah, I like it.

Share the language that you find wherever it happens to be with us, words@waywordradio.org,

Or call us 877-929-9673.

Things have come to a pretty path.

That’s our show for this week.

Don’t forget you can leave us a message even when we’re not on the air.

Call us at 877-929-9673 or email us.

The address is words@waywordradio.org.

Stay in touch with us all week on Facebook.

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Stefanie Levine is our senior producer.

Our technical director and editor is Tim Felten.

And Tim also chooses our music.

We’ve had production help this week from Josette Herdell, Mark Kirshner,

Jennifer Powell, and James Ramsey.

A Way with Words is independently produced and distributed by Wayword, Inc.,

A nonprofit organization.

The show is recorded at Studio West in San Diego, California.

Thanks for listening. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. So long.

Take care.

And I say either, you say neither, and I say neither.

Support for A Way with Words comes from National University,

Where flexible online classes let you earn your degree or credential on your schedule.

Learn more at nu.edu.

Hi, it’s Martha.

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Go to waywordradio.org, click on membership.

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