Keep Your Pants On (episode #1395)

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

And I’m Martha Barnette.

The finals of the annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament are always exciting. You have hundreds of people in a ballroom of a New York City hotel, and they’re all watching these finalists who are standing there at the front, in front of easels, trying to work these giant versions of an incredibly hard crossword puzzle. And they’re wearing these noise-canceling headphones.

Oh, right. I remember those movies. And Grant, you remember that, right? Because you did color commentary for them back in the day. And there’s other noise in the room, too. People are moaning if they see an error because you can see the solution, right? The contestants can’t see it.

But what I didn’t know until I read it in the blog of Deb Amlin, who blogs about crossword puzzles for The New York Times, I didn’t know that the white noise that they’re listening to in their noise-canceling headphones is a recording of hundreds of voices speaking in different languages at a United Nations cocktail party.

Whoa! Isn’t that crazy? Isn’t that crazy? So in case there was a real voice accidentally slipping through, it’s going to be completely disguised by the voices in the headphones.

Exactly. Isn’t that wild? Or, you know, when you were doing the color commentary, you would use the person’s name, right? This or that contestant, and that could be distracting. And I’m told that it sounds pretty much like white noise, but there’s something about the idea of listening to cocktail party chatter. I wonder if it’s distracting or if it’s successful as white noise.

Apparently it is. We should ask the winners. Now, these people are such great crossword players that they could probably solve these things hanging upside down from the bottom of an airplane, right?

In their sleep, yes. In their sleep. And they solve puzzles in about three to four minutes that would take me probably all day or maybe even a week.

Never for me. Staggeringly awesome talents. I’m thinking of Trip Payne and Tyler Hinman and people like that.

Yep. If you’ve got a secret about language that you want to share with the world, this is the place to do it. 877-929-9673 or send in an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hi, Grant. This is Zach Fix from Northern Michigan University in Marquette, Michigan.

Zach Fix? Like F-I-X? F-I-X. That’s my last name.

That is an awesome name, dude. That is great. Thank you. Thank you. You should be like a comic book character.

I know, right? With, like, spiky purple hair and a laser gun. Zach, how can we help you?

I have a friend, and he moved out to Portland. And he got a job working at a coffee shop, and his official title was barista. And he is a man. So I was kind of confused about that because I thought that a lot of the – barista sounds like a borrowed word from some romantic language. And normally those borrowed words that we have in English, we also take the gender that goes along with it, which is dependent on whoever is doing the occupation, whether it be a man or a woman, like actor, actress, waiter, waitress.

My question is, why isn’t he a barista? Yeah, well, you’re right that barista does go back to, I mean, it’s an Italian word. Italian, yeah. Barista, somebody who works at a bar. From the culture that perfected the quick delivery of coffee.

The thing is that there are a lot of words in Italian, Zach, and Spanish, for that matter, that end in ISTA, that take either gender. Oh. Yeah. So, for example, if you go to Italy, you will be referred to as a turista.

Okay. Even though you’re a man. Yeah. Even though you’re a man. You know, it’s il turista or la turista. And there’s the rub. So in the romance languages, we have the articles that go with the nouns that take the same gender, right? So la turista means a female tourist. However, if we borrow la barista into English, we don’t borrow the la. We only borrow the barista part. And also because we don’t have gender in that way in English, it’s stripped away. The article’s gone, the gender is gone, and we simply borrow the noun without a gender attached.

Yeah, and there are a lot of these words in those languages that refer to somebody who does something professionally, usually, or adheres to a particular belief. Like the Nicaraguan followers of Sandino were called Sandinistas, right? Even the male ones.

Yeah, or we talk about fashionistas, which is a fanciful English term. Nice. Good one. Yeah. But I do like, I’ve got to ask you a question, Zach. Barista kind of elevates the position. You’re something other than a coffee monkey, right?

Yeah, yeah, it definitely does sound a little bit more official, doesn’t it? Maybe coffee jerk instead of, you know, it’s a parallel with soda jerk. Coffee artist. Coffee artist. Yeah, if they do the weird foam, like the giraffe over the edge of the cup, you ever seen this one?

Oh, absolutely, yeah, there’s some great pictures on the web. Well, Zach Fix, there’s your answer. What do you think? Thank you very much. All right, take care now. Thanks for calling. Thank you very much. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

Yeah, it’s weird. There’s this whole class of nouns like that, and it goes back to Latin and Greek. That’s why they’re there. There is a really good explanation of what we’re talking about with the genders and the A ending and so forth at the site Tutorino.ca, T-U-T-O-R-I-N-O. This is a site for learning Italian. Just go to the site and search for the word gender, and you’ll probably come up with the entry that fully explains how this works in Italian.

Cool. 877-929-9673. Grant, did you hear this one about the person who had the password that went Mickey, Minnie, Pluto, Huey, Louie, Dewey, Donald, Goofy, Sacramento?

No. She had that long a password because it has eight characters and has at least one capital. That’s terrible! It’s a couple of puns, so I figured it was appropriate for this program.

877-929-9673. Email words@waywordradio.org. Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hi, this is Ashley calling from San Diego.

Hi, Ashley. Welcome to the show. Hello, Ashley. Hi, you guys. How are you?

All right. Doing well. What can we do for you? Okay. So the other day, I was getting ready to go on a little trip, and my roommate came home, and she saw a big bag of gorp sitting on the table. And I have no idea what gorp is. And so she continues to tell me, and she says it’s some sort of trail mix. And I wanted to know where that started from, because I’m a big backpacker. I’m from the Midwest originally, and I’ve never heard this word.

You’ve never heard of gorp? How interesting. No. So as far as you’re concerned, this is the kind of thing you have to sneak across the border with, put it in the wheel wells of your car. Exactly. It sounds like it. Doesn’t it sound like the slang name for some illegal drug?

It does. Gorp. Yeah. GORP. G-O-R-P, right? Right. Correct. So, Ashley, did she have any kind of information to give you about the name? No. You know what? She said her dad just always called it that. And she’s also from the Midwest. And she said she didn’t know where it came from either.

Well, we don’t know for sure. There’s an old word, GORP, that means to eat greedily. And I’m betting that that’s what it comes from. A lot of people will tell you that it’s an acronym for good old raisins and peanuts. But that’s hooey. It does not come from that. And I know we’re going to get emails from people going, but everyone tells you that. And you will find books and magazines and everybody saying that it does mean good old raisins and peanuts. But there’s a problem with that.

Tell me the problem. The problem is that early recipes include like 15 other ingredients. Yeah, yeah. Like powdered milk and coconut and M&Ms and chocolate and other things and not just good old raisins and peanuts.

Oh. So your acronym would be something like smergabobber. That might sound better. Yeah. So did it originate in the Midwest? Is that a Midwest word? It’s an American word. We know this for sure. So you’re less likely to find that people in the UK and Australia will know the term at all. It looks like it comes from the 1950s.

Definitely we know by the 1960s it was fixed very firmly in the lexicon of this kind of explosion of hiking and hikers.

A lot of the trails that we know and take for granted today really became well established in the 1960s.

So we don’t know exactly where it came from, but it seems to come from within the community of hikers and not from a commercial outfit, not from any kind of food producer or any kind of brand name or anything like that.

Okay. And so is it just another word for trail mix? Is it the same thing?

Well, I don’t want to bust open this debate, Martha, because people will argue for hours.

It’s like arguing about barbecue.

People argue for hours about what constitutes gorp or what constitutes trail mix.

Well, I tell you, the place I came across gorp first was in a wonderful essay by John McPhee.

Yes.

It’s called Travels in Georgia, and he describes traveling through Georgia with biologists who are analyzing roadkill and sometimes eating it.

And the first line of this whole essay is, I asked for the gorp.

And then he later describes the gorp as soybeans, sunflower seeds, oats, pretzels, wheat checks, raisins, and kelp.

Wow, that’s far from the gorp I know.

Yeah.

I’ve got a couple other recipes here.

Dry cereal, powdered milk, sugar, raisins, cinnamon, nutmeg.

And another one is grape nuts, sugar, powdered milk, cinnamon, and raisins with hot water.

And you serve it like a cereal.

Oh, really?

And that’s their gorp.

All right.

Well, Ashley, what do you take on the trail?

Well, I usually just have like the peanuts and the M&Ms and the raisins.

It’s just my typical trail mix.

Well, I tell you what, we’ll ask our listeners what their version of gorp is.

I’m hoping we hear from a lot of fellow hikers.

Okay, great.

Thank you guys.

Thanks for calling, Ashley.

Thanks.

Bye-bye.

Gorp.

Well, what’s your gorp?

Let us know.

877-929-9673 or send your answers in email to words@waywordradio.org.

Andy from Kenosha, Wisconsin has a question for us, Grant.

He says, my coworkers refer to double time pay periods as double bubble.

This happens during Sundays and during select holidays.

So you’re working something outside the normal shift and you get double pay.

Yeah, I guess so.

Oh, wow.

Double bubble.

Double bubble.

Yeah.

I thought that was, you know, bubble gum.

Yeah, it is.

There’s a bubble gum called double bubble.

What’s interesting about this is that he’s in Wisconsin.

I know this is a British term.

It comes from some of the traditional rhyming slang in the UK.

And there it literally means the same thing.

You get paid double pay for overtime, usually on the holidays or after hours, the overnight shift, that kind of thing.

There’s also a prison slang term, also British, which is if I loan you money so you can buy something in the commissary, you owe me double bubble, which is double back.

You have to, if I give you a dollar, if I give you a pound, you owe me two pounds back.

Okay.

So it’s just sort of rhyming.

And there’s a couple other slang meanings of double bubble, but really the bubble part isn’t important.

It’s the double part.

We do this in English with reduplication and rhyming terms like that.

Okay.

And he’s in Wisconsin, so elsewhere in the country it’s double water fountain, right?

Could it be?

If you use the term double bubble, I’d like to know about it, where you picked it up,

Because I think of it as being British, but maybe I’m just out of touch with what’s happening in the American workplace.

Let’s find out. 877-929-9673.

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

Small stories, big discoveries. Stay with us.

Thank you.

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

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

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

Hi, John.

Hi, Martha.

Hi, Grant.

It’s great to be here.

What’s up, buddy?

You know what?

I’ve decided that I’m not going to present the quiz this week.

Okay.

No?

Sure.

Instead, I’m going to introduce you to a friend of mine.

Okay.

Oh, he’s going to do voices.

Yeah, I’m going to do voices.

He’s a scientist with a strong interest in language.

His name is Dr. Word.

Okay, sure.

Here he is.

Say hi, Doc.

Hi, Doc.

Good morning.

Good morning.

How are you?

I’m Dr. Word.

I’m interested in things, specifically various evolutionary oddities in anthropology, more specifically modern anthropology.

These would be offshoots of the more commonly known Homo sapiens, or modern man of wisdom.

Now, of course, some people say that I unnecessarily obfuscate matters by using Latin names, but I say balderdash.

What is an academic like myself to do if not use more scientifically accurate names for my study subjects?

Now, for example, in the study of sociology, I’ve examined the role of homo optimus in modern mating rituals with a focus on bachelor party throwing and the delivering of bad or smarmy toasts.

That particular man is the best man, homo optimus.

Okay, got it.

Got it.

Very good.

Got it.

Homo optimus.

Now, allow me to tell you some more about my work.

In the world of organized crime, a very important role is played by Homo inflictus, who does a lot of the dirty work.

About hitman.

Yes, that’s what the commonly people call him a hitman. That’s correct, yes.

In the arts, I’ve found that many people don’t realize the importance of Homo rectus in many comedy routines.

Straight man.

Yes, very good. Straight man, yes.

In business, many captains of industry can get nothing done without homo dextra to handle vital tasks.

Right-hand man.

Yes, the right-hand man. Very good.

Now, on the other hand, homo itavero adds nothing to the progress of a business, but many CEOs keep him around anyway.

Yes, man.

Yes, that’s correct. Homo itavero is a yes man.

I’ve done a comprehensive study of Homo duchit in the field of film and television.

And as it turns out, he would be nothing without the work of Homo acrobaticus.

They’ve got the leading man.

There’s two there, yes.

Leading man.

And what’s the second one?

Acrobaticus.

Well, he would be nothing without the work of Homo acrobaticus.

Thinking high wire, tightrope, acrobaticus.

Stunt man.

Stunt man.

Yes, the stunt man.

Very good, Grant.

He’s going too literal.

In literature and film, I’ve become quite fascinated by the success of a character I call Homo ferrum.

Iron man.

Yes, Iron man.

It’s just a fascinating character.

Nice.

I’m quite fascinated by vanishing species.

Specimens of Homo lacteus are quite nearly extinct, and Homo glacium has not been seen since the advent of modern refrigeration.

The milkman and the iceman.

Yes, the milkman and the iceman.

And before I leave for work, of course, I check in with Homo Tempestus to see if I should wear my light lab coat or my warm woolen lab coat.

The weatherman.

The weatherman.

Your woolen lab coat.

That one I want to see.

Yes.

Very well done.

I’ll give you back to John Chaneski right now.

John, if you would.

Yes, thank you very much, Dr. Word.

You guys were fantastic.

Yeah, sure.

Thanks.

That was fun.

All right, John, we’ll talk to you next week.

Yeah.

Talk to you then.

If you want to talk about any aspect of language, call us 877-929-9673,

Or send your stories about language to words@waywordradio.org,

And we are all over Facebook and Twitter.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, I’m Weldon Adams from Fort Worth, Texas.

Hiya, Weldon. Thanks for calling. What can we help you with?

There’s a phrase that came to me the other day,

And I realized that it didn’t make a lot of sense in context.

It’s a phrase that people use all the time.

You’re in a hurry.

Someone’s at the front door knocking on the door, and you’re trying to get there, and you might say, keep your pants on.

And it occurred to me, what is it about those situations that make us afraid someone is on the front porch sans pantalones?

I thought you were going to say that to doctors, because they sometimes will say that.

Sometimes you’re not sure.

Do I need to keep my pants on, or is this an operation that requires that I drop them?

I don’t know.

That’s a good question.

Yeah, what good would it do?

Well, I’ve heard it also used when people are being impatient.

Oh, yeah.

Or even when they’re angry.

It’s like a full spectrum from impatient to angry, right?

Right, yeah.

Keep your pants on.

Keep your pants on.

It’s not that big a deal.

We’ll figure this out, right?

Right, yeah.

But it’s kind of one of those things you don’t stop and think about.

And then when you do, like Weldon did.

Well, there’s a bunch of these Weldon.

There’s keep your shirt on.

There’s keep your clothes on.

There’s keep your hat on.

There’s keep your hair on, which is my favorite of the bunch.

We don’t wear wigs much anymore.

But I can imagine a time when, like, when you get angry, you start waving your powdered wig about to make your point.

Well, you’re fighting.

And, you know, that expression, wigs on the green.

Oh, yeah.

There we go.

Yeah.

Wigs on the green.

Two people fighting.

Yeah.

But all of these together are really about losing your composure.

If you take your shirt off or your pants off, it’s because you’re no longer composed.

You no longer look like a respectable person.

Not hardly.

Right?

You’ve gone to some struggle here to make your point by stripping off your garments.

And this is connected possibly to these passionate moments in old books and even in the Bible.

There’s also a notion here, and you’ll find this often suggested for an origin of keep your shirt on anyway,

That it’s what happens when two people are about to fight.

Just imagine a scenario, say, Daniel Boone times two backwoods men arguing over who gets the prize turkey at a turkey shoot.

And then they come to blows.

But the first thing they do before they come to blows is they tear off their shirt because they don’t want to ruin their one shirt that they have to wear for the next six months, you know.

Now you take off your watch.

Yeah.

They put your phone aside and the whole thing.

There’s an interesting term here that I use a lot because I picked this up from my British friends, but most Americans don’t use it, which is related to all of these.

It’s directly related to keep your shirt on, and that is to be shirty.

And that is to act like you might be the kind of person who’s about to be upset or angry and possibly take off your shirt in anger or frustration or impatience.

Yeah, I know the expression keep your shirt on is much older than keep your pants on.

Oh, yeah, it is.

So maybe that has something to do with it.

This did not go where I thought it was.

Where do you think it would go?

The only situation that I thought that this would make any sense, I was thinking maybe it would trace back to lines at the privy.

Oh.

He aligns at the privy.

Oh, my.

That’s the only time the context makes any sense.

Yeah, you would be in a hurry then.

You would be, yeah.

Right?

Yeah, I can imagine the stagecoach stops somewhere in the mountains,

And you’ve got 10 minutes for a stop, and there’s 15 people in front of you,

And what are you going to do?

One last thing to say, Weldon.

There’s an older form of to keep your shirt on,

Which has kind of fallen out of fashion,

And this is to get your shirt out or to get someone else’s shirt out.

Like, he really gets my shirt out every time he comes late to the meetings.

Why can’t he be on time?

Oh, that makes sense.

So it’s kind of the putting it on another person rather than talking about yourself.

Well, taking it off another person.

I think I’m going to start using that.

Yeah.

Hey, Weldon, thanks a lot for calling.

Hey, thank you.

All right.

Have a good day.

Okay, take care.

Take care now.

Bye-bye.

You may be sitting at home in various stages of undress, but you’re free to give us a call, 877-929-9673.

Email us, words@waywordradio.org.

It’s radio.

Who cares?

I saw a lovely remembrance of somebody on Facebook the other day,

And the person who was memorializing her friend who died

Said that what that person would have wanted

Is for everybody to say with gusto,

Fill your boots.

Fill your boots?

Yeah, have you ever heard that phrase?

I never heard it.

I had to go look it up.

To gear up and get ready to do what needs to be done?

Well, it’s more like go after things with gusto.

Dig in and fill your boots means to eat as much as you like.

Like fill up not just your belly, but your boots too.

I see.

But it’s an expression that it looks like you hear more in Canada and the UK.

Fill your boots.

Eat life in large bites.

Yeah, yeah.

Embrace it with gusto.

Oh, nice.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Allison.

I’m calling from Somerville, Massachusetts.

Hello, Allison.

Welcome to the show.

Hi, Allison.

Thank you.

What’s up?

Thank you for having me.

Yeah, sure.

I just had a question about a phrase that I heard recently, actually, in a song on the radio.

There’s a song called Safe and Sound that’s been playing a lot.

Oh, yeah.

Capital Cities, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I love it.

So it just got me thinking about the phrase safe and sound and how, you know, I’ve seen it in books a lot, but mostly in the context of, like, parents checking in on their kids to make sure that they’re safe and sound.

But I was wondering kind of like where it came from

And if there was any other meaning,

Like perhaps safe meaning cautious

And sound meaning logical or something like that.

I don’t know.

So I just wanted to find out more about it.

Interesting.

Yeah, it’s a pretty interesting question.

We sometimes don’t break apart these kind of idioms at all, do we?

We just keep using them as a single piece.

Yeah.

Right, right.

Actually, usually I discourage people from breaking them apart

Because there’s not a lot of sense to be found there.

But this is probably a pretty good one.

So safe is pretty straightforward.

We know this comes to English from French for the sauf, S-A-U-F, right?

And it means literally the same thing in French as it does in English, which is you are uninjured.

Right, unharmed and hurt.

And it’s related to salvage and salvation and other words like that.

And in French, actually, they have sauf, which means healthy and safe, which is their equivalent of safe and sound.

What’s interesting is this expression shows in it the history of English.

Because the first word comes from French, but the second word comes from the Germanic languages.

Right, right.

So I love that.

Embedded in this three-word phrase is the history of English.

Yeah, and the sound there comes from the same root as gesundheit, which means health.

Yeah.

So gesund, right?

Gesundheit, yeah, is health.

But sound comes from the suind part of the German word, and it means hail, hearty, healthy, all of one piece.

Sound mind.

Yeah, all of one piece.

Yeah, exactly.

So there you have it. Safe and sound is English language embedded in three words.

Very interesting. Thank you so much.

So you think about that every time you hear the song, right?

Yeah. Oh, definitely. Definitely.

OK, well, thanks for calling.

Thank you so much.

OK, bye bye.

Bye.

Your questions are safe with us. 877-929-9673 or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Grant, I’ve been reading about barbed wire.

Barbed wire?

Of course, yes.

Because it never occurred to me why we call that spiral kind of wire on top of a fence.

Oh, I was thinking about Pamela Anderson.

You’re talking about the fence.

Yeah, you know, the concertina wire that’s sort of spiral and it’s on top of a fence.

Yeah, the razor wire?

Yeah.

You know what they call it, concertina wire?

This never occurred to me until yesterday.

No?

Because you know what a concertina is?

It’s sort of a little accordion-like instrument.

And this was an innovation in World War I that they started using wire that was coiled and sort of kept that round shape so that it was sort of like it.

It sort of expands to fill the space.

Yes, yes.

Travels well and can be expanded easily.

Yeah, yeah.

So it’s like an accordion.

Never occurred to me, concertina wire.

I thought it was like from some kind of musical instrument like the wire strings.

Maybe it was a brand name.

I had no idea.

Call us with your stories about language, 877-929-9673,

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

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Howdy.

This is Jeremy, originally from Connecticut, but I’m calling from Arcata right now.

Howdy, Jeremy.

Arcata, California?

Yeah, that’s right.

I’m actually traveling down the coast.

I’m in the middle of a bit of hitching right now.

Oh, wow.

You’re hitching.

How long are you going to go?

Yeah.

How far are you going to go?

Well, the goal is San Francisco right now, but my sign says Antarctica, so we’ll see what I got.

Yeah, it helps.

That’ll get you some attention, right?

People will stop just to hear your story.

That’s the hope.

I’m traveling with a buddy, too, who’s got a little bit more stage sign.

We’re hoping the combo works out well.

Yeah, I hope one of you has nice legs.

Oh, yeah.

Well, we’re wearing pants, but they might be able to see through.

Keep your pants on.

What can we help you with, Jeremy?

So I was listening to the news a little bit back, and the subject of Edward Snowden and the NSA came up,

And I noticed that Snowden himself and some other folks had been dropping the article,

The, when referring to the NSA and other three-letter agencies,

Saying things like, at NSA we do this, or NSA does this, or FBI, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And that seemed a little strange to me.

So I was wondering what was going on there.

Oh, wow.

Great question.

We get this pretty regularly.

So there’s a lot of people who are probably going,

I want to know the answer to that too.

Yeah.

And it’s super hard to Google too.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, really Google articles very well.

Let me give you and everyone else a word that you can Google that’s unusual enough

That you’ll probably only come up with academic articles about this very subject.

And the word is anarthrists.

A-N-A-R-T-H-R-O-U-S.

And that basically means without a definite article.

The an is the negative there.

So Arthras is with the definite article, and Anarthras is without the definite article.

And you’ll come up with a ton of stuff, including some really, really fantastic posts on Language Log,

Which is like the big blog on the internet to talk about all things linguistic.

Any case, we have a couple patterns here when it comes to whether or not we use the definite article,

The in front of an initialism or an acronym.

So the first rule that we know for pretty sure, let’s say 80% of the time,

If you can pronounce it as a word, you’re probably not going to use the definite article.

Okay, like NASA.

NASA, right?

So generally you’re going to do that.

That’s not always the case, but most of the time.

A little less often, but almost as often.

If it’s an initialism, that is you say the letters and don’t pronounce it as a word, you’re more likely to also not use the definite article.

But only if you’re really familiar with it or it’s very distanced from its original source.

For example, CBS.

Last night on CBS, I watched a great new show, right?

And I don’t say the CBS.

Or I could say I went down to KFC and got a bucket of chicken, right?

I don’t say I went to the KFC and got a bucket of chicken, right?

But that’s not always true.

Like HBO or other things like that.

Very good. HBO is a great example.

But it gets tricky after that because then we have this whole huge set of initialisms and acronyms.

Again, acronyms are the ones that we pronounce as a word.

Initialisms are the ones where we say the letters.

There’s a whole group of them that have their own customs and traditions attached to them.

And the only way you’ll know whether or not you can use or should use the definite article is to hear other people who are in the know.

And so you kind of inherit this.

And this is where we get a really interesting circumstance like Edward Snowden using NSA without the in front of it because he’s an insider.

And insiders tend to drop the definite article more than outsiders do.

Inside FBI, they say FBI and not the FBI.

Inside CIA, they say the CIA and not the CIA.

At the Oxford English Dictionary, at Oxford University Press, where I used to work, outsiders almost always say the OED because it’s short for the Oxford English Dictionary, right?

Insiders say OED.

Will you look this entry up in OED and see if it matches?

So there’s a relationship to the word that matters according to the speaker.

If you are highly familiar with it, you are highly likely to drop the definite article.

Yeah, you know, that’s interesting.

I was wondering if I had also noticed that in some of the debates I’ve seen on TV or on the radio that people who tend to be defenders of the NSA or other such organizations seem a little bit more likely to drop the article, which would kind of go along with folks who are insiders, part of these organizations, all that.

Yes, exactly. That’s a really good observation that you’ve made. That’s exactly what I’ve seen as well.

All right, cool. Well, that went a long way to dispelling a number of conspiracy theories in my own head.

So that’s what you think about when you’re standing there on the side of the road.

Well, I think about all sorts of things. I think that specific one may have been a shower thought, but you know how it goes.

Yeah, a shower thought.

I’ve got a list of those. I’m also to the point where I need a waterproof marker for the shower.

Put this stuff down for later. Can’t really Google in the shower.

Yeah, well, Google’s always coming up with new stuff.

Maybe they’ll come up with Google Shower.

I think that would be a winner.

Don’t you think?

Nice.

But what kind of pictures would they be taking?

Hey, you should patent that before they get their hands on it.

Okay, well, we better go, Jeremy, in that case.

All right.

Well, y’all have a good one.

You too.

Take care now.

Okay, have a good trip.

Thank you.

Bye.

877-929-9673.

An old new word that I came across, quiddler.

Do you know this one?

Quiddler.

Oh, I have a lot of quiddlers in my life.

Q-U-I-D-D-L-E-R, quiddler.

Sounds like quibbler.

Somebody who wastes his energy on trifles.

Really?

Yeah, so quiddler.

It’s just somebody who fools around and doesn’t get on task and stay on target.

Yeah, it sounds like fritter and all those kinds of words.

Frittering quiddler.

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

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.

We got an email from Sean Clark, who says that he’s recently started a new job at a small manufacturing facility

That employs about 250 people.

And about half the people there speak English as a first language,

And the other half speak Spanish as a first language, but they all work together.

And Sean writes,

What has surprised and even inspired me is the fact that instead of seeing division or resentment between these two groups,

Or even just a lack of effective communication, they’ve instead developed a sort of shorthand.

In some cases, even creating entirely new words and phrases to describe products or processes.

He says that seeing this kind of rapid language evolution on a small scale is making him wonder if perhaps it’s happening on a large scale as well,

Or if it could happen on a global scale.

He writes, what is the possibility of a one world language in the future, not as a result of imperial expansion or military invasion, but instead from peaceful cultural migration and the shared human experience?

What are the chances that we could develop one language because we all become a little more like each other and willing to accommodate each other’s differences?

Yeah.

Wow, it’s a great question.

Well, we could go back to the story of the Tower of Babel, in which case, supposedly, everyone spoke one language and then they didn’t because they’d done wrong and they were divided by God, right?

We could also look at invented languages like Esperanto, which have come from a whole cloth.

And yet they also have had their divisions.

Slang has appeared in Esperanto and been stomped down.

If you speak Esperanto in Finland versus speaking it in Italy, you’re probably more likely to use some words and avoid other words because of your native language kind of informing your understanding of Esperanto and your use of it.

No kidding.

So they’re like dialects of Esperanto?

Kind of.

Not really full-on dialects, but some languages have split off from it.

Most of them haven’t been very successful.

But clearly there’s been a conscious effort and sometimes unconscious effort with these invented languages to do something different, even though this language was supposedly perfect from the start.

But I have read that if we ever got to the point where we all spoke one language, it would last for about a minute until a new slang word was created that only a few people knew.

Or somebody moved away and kept the old words that everyone else abandoned or needed new words for new plant life or new ideas.

And there’s just almost no chance that we’ll ever all speak alike.

Yeah, that makes sense to me.

And there’s a couple things happening in his letter, which I love.

And one of them is I wonder if that workplace isn’t so accommodating to these differences because they feel like they have a shared experience.

And we’ve talked about this on the show, for example, in the military or in many different kinds of workplaces, when people have a shared mission and vision, they tend to create their own in-house language, their own jargon or slang, and use that because it helps unify them and make them feel like one people.

But I’ve seen construction sites that work this way where you have English-speaking and Spanish-speaking workers, and sometimes they’ll just adopt the Spanish word for a tool or a practice just because everyone likes it more.

Or it’s the custom.

Or the guy who’s best at that particular job is the one who is teaching everyone else how to do it.

So his language prevails for that task.

Yeah.

Well, I would love to hear stories about that.

You can call us at 877-929-9673 or send them to us in email.

The address is words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Good morning.

Good morning.

Who is this?

This is Michael Rogers calling.

Where are you calling from, Michael?

Pretty much near you.

I’m out in Fletcher Hills.

Oh, we’ll walk right over.

We’ll do this in person.

How can we help you today?

Well, I saw the movie Winter’s Bone, and I was sufficiently interested to find out where that expression came from, and it’s derived from like a dog after a winter’s bone, which really didn’t clear anything up for me.

Who said that?

From what I was told is supposed to be an expression that is unique to the Ozarks.

Who knows how valid that is, but that’s what I read.

The term Winter’s Bone was a title of a movie starring Jennifer Lawrence.

Right.

And it was about a girl who’s tenaciously trying to find out what happened to her father in an attempt to save the family home.

So I’m assuming that expression has to do with tenacity, but I’m not sure.

And so it’s cold and grim.

They’re in the Ozarks, and there’s methamphetamine involved and all kinds of grim stuff like that, right?

I mean, I’m thinking that part of the challenge here is how we talk about the book and the movie without giving away any spoilers, right?

Exactly.

Exactly.

You haven’t read the book by Daniel Woodrell.

No, I haven’t.

It’s interesting.

In the book, which he describes as country noir.

That’s great.

Isn’t that nice?

Yeah.

That’s great.

He actually has a Q&A at the end of the book.

I’m not sure why.

Maybe this is the edition that came out after the movie.

The book club edition, maybe.

Okay, maybe that’s it.

All right.

Yeah, and he says, of course, the winter part is obvious because it’s cold and grim.

And the bone part, he says, has to do with the idea of, oh, throw her a bone.

You know, sort of, he says the season knows she’s earned it.

Oh, interesting.

So it’s personifying the season as a living entity that you’ve got to somehow appease.

Yeah, and yes, exactly.

That’s a good way to put it.

And so Winter is tossing her a bone.

It’s the idea that she earns something.

Oh, interesting.

It sort of makes sense even if you don’t know what the author intended.

You know, I mean, even if you look at the trailer for that movie, it’s just so cold and harsh.

I would agree that this is one of the better titles of a book or a movie that I’ve come across in a long time.

Yeah, just sort of bare and spare and nothing left.

Sort of like that hardscrabble life that they’re living there.

Suggested without being too literal.

I agree.

It’s sort of like some things paint a picture rather than actually work on in your left brain.

Just paint an internal picture for you.

And Winter’s Bone just did that for me.

That’s a great way to put it, Michael.

Michael, thank you so much for calling today.

Thanks for your time. I appreciate it.

Take care. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Has a word or phrase caught your ear?

Let us know about it.

877-929-9673.

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

And we’re all over Facebook and Twitter.

On our Facebook page, Gabrielle told us about a dialogue with her third grader who said, that sign is wrong. There should be a comma before that last item.

And Gabrielle said, I agree. That last comma is called an Oxford comma.

Her kid said, why?

And Gabrielle said, well, Oxford is a famous school in England.

And her third grader replied, and their mascot is the comma?

And so she says, now my family is imagining the bitter rivalry between the Oxford commas and the Cambridge apostrophes.

Well played, commas, well played.

And at halftime, there’s quite a pause.

That’s great.

We’re having all kinds of discussions like that on our Facebook page, so come over and find us.

Check us out on Twitter, and you can always call with your language questions, 877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Yes, this is Noah Muthart from Elk Rapids, Michigan. How are you guys today?

Doing well, Noah. How are you?

Noah, welcome to the show.

Thanks. I had a question about the word couple.

I recently came up with my dad. I was talking to him, and I said, you know, I had a couple of things to do before I could help him out with what he needed help with.

And he was confused why I had more than two things to do before I could help him out with his project.

I think that the word couple has, over time, has evolved into meaning more than simply two objects or two things.

And I was wondering what you guys thought about that.

What’s his argument that it only means two?

Yeah, it only means two things.

If you say a couple, a couple has a very narrow definition, and it means that there’s only two things.

When you tell your father, give me a minute, I’ll help you when I’m done with this, does he think a minute is exactly 60 seconds?

That’s a good question.

I guess I’d have to ask him.

Yeah, or give me a couple minutes.

I mean, sometimes I hear what I want to hear, I think.

I totally hear what I want to hear.

Give me five minutes.

That’s a half hour.

Yeah, there we go.

What are you talking about?

There are a lot of these approximated times and quantity designations in English that cause a great deal of difficulty for even native speakers.

If you look at transcripts of natural speech where people don’t really know that they’re being studied for linguistic features, people will spend something like, I forget what it is, some staggering amount of time in any conversation in clarifying and disambiguating and trying to figure out what the other person met.

I mean, a huge amount of speech is only disambiguation and clarification.

And so this is one of those classic cases.

But Grant, what if I said, you know, Grant, you owe me a couple of dollars.

Oh, well, dollars I’m going to be particular about, right, because it matters.

And where the couple stops mattering and stops having to be exactly two is when the outcome isn’t much changed by whether or not it’s actually three or maybe even four, right?

Another question to ask your father, besides if he thinks a minute is always exactly 60 seconds, is how many is a pair?

Because pair in almost everyone’s speech is completely precise.

It means exactly two.

Unless you’re talking about a pair of underwear.

Oh, interesting.

Well, a two pair of underwear holds is how I think about it, right?

One for each leg, right?

Yeah, yeah.

I always have a problem with that.

Like when I’m writing sometimes, you know, I don’t know, say like a pair of shorts or a pair of pants.

Because really, I mean, it’s only one article of clothing.

Right, pair of scissors. How many scissors do you want?

Right, exactly, yeah.

Let me equip you with a couple other things to go back to your father with.

Or anyone else who’s arguing about this.

Because believe me, this is like the two spaces after a period conversation.

It can go on for years with people.

Couple is highly context-dependent.

And when you talk about the meaning of couple, you have to talk about the sentence that it appears in.

You cannot only talk about the word standing by itself, or you’re basically being intellectually dishonest.

You just have to talk about it in the context.

So that’s really super important.

The second thing to go to your father with is to point out that when we talk about a couple of and then some time period, like a couple of minutes or a couple of days, we have a problem of not knowing when exactly we’re starting the counting.

So if I say, Martha, in a couple of days I’m going to go to Paris, you don’t know if I mean exactly 48 hours or after the rest of today and all of tomorrow and then I’m going, or do I mean after two midnights when we actually traditionally separate two days on the calendar, right?

So we have these three possible meanings and all of them have a different length of hours.

So I would go back to your father and say, are you greatly injured by the fact that I actually had three things to do instead of two?

Well, yeah, he was waiting on him.

I mean, that’s the thing, right?

He probably was hearing what he wanted to hear.

Two things.

Yeah, exactly.

He does that a lot.

Oh, he does that a lot.

Okay.

Yeah, he likes to hear what he wants to hear.

I think that’s the human condition.

Isn’t it the human condition, though?

We all want everything our own way.

Yeah, yeah.

I guess we can’t blame him too much.

One more thing, Noah, to take back to your father is that if he’s looking for logic in English, then he’s got a problem.

Because couple, like so many other words in English, has more than one meaning.

And it’s an informal meaning, and it’s a slangy meaning, but couple has long often met more than two.

Okay?

Yep.

I mean, in many, many, many situations in the writing of our best speakers and in the speeches of our best speakers.

So I’d say you’re off the hook, Noah.

Good.

Thanks a lot for calling.

Yeah, thanks for talking to me.

All right, take care.

Now let us know how it turns out, all right?

Yeah, I will.

All right, cheers.

Okay, bye-bye.

Yep, bye.

Well, if you have a couple of things you want to say to us, call us 877-929-9673 or put them in an email addressed to words@waywordradio.org.

Grant, here’s a word I didn’t know until yesterday.

Yarek.

Yarek? Alas, poor Yarek.

No, this is spelled Y-A-R-A-K. Yarek.

I have no idea.

It probably originates from the Persian word for strength, and it’s a term in falconry that means a state of prime fitness in a hawk.

Ooh, so you could extrapolate and say, extend it and say the Yerrick of a man.

That’s what I was thinking. That’s what I was thinking.

I’m looking at a citation from 1855.

It requires about 10 days to get this hawk into Yerrick.

And if you’re really, really first rate, you’re said to be in screaming Yerrick.

Screaming Yerrick.

I mean, can’t you just see this hawk swooping?

Right, coming down at 100 miles an hour or more.

Yeah, you do not want to be the rodent in that case, right?

No.

I’ll hide my toupee.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Grant.

Hi, Martha.

This is Tyler calling from West Bend, Wisconsin.

Hi, Tyler.

Hey, what’s up, buddy?

My question is about the word secreting, as in to hide something away.

Last year, I was listening to the audiobook of Gone Girl, and the reader pronounced it secreting.

And I thought that sounded awful, but I also thought it was probably just a mistake.

But then last week, I was listening to Morning Edition with my wife, and a reporter also pronounced it secreting.

And since NPR is our gold standard, I kind of thought, wow, maybe I’m wrong here, and maybe that’s a legitimate way to pronounce it.

So I thought I’d ask you guys because you’re also my gold standard.

Oh, thank you very much.

He’s a copper.

So this would be like secreting somebody’s will in a roll-top desk or something like that.

Secreting an envelope in your overcoat so nobody sees it, that kind of thing.

Yep.

Yeah, it does sound really weird.

It sounds right to me.

I know.

It sounds right.

Yeah, I have to tell you.

Oh, really?

So that’s just because I’ve always pronounced it secreted, you know, as in keeping a secret.

Oh, yeah.

You’re not the only one, dude.

Including me, Tyler.

I did the same thing until just very recently.

Here’s the story here.

So a verb secrete, one meaning has to emit a fluid, right?

Bees secrete honey.

The second meaning means to hide away.

And that second meaning comes from the word secret, but isn’t pronounced like secret in any of its forms, including when it’s conjugated or inflected.

So it is always secreted.

It’s secrete.

You secrete the letter in the floorboards.

She secreted the letter in the floorboards.

She is secreting the letter in the floorboards.

I think that just sounds gross, don’t you, Tyler?

And here’s the thing.

Absolutely.

The verb to secret something once existed in English, but it is archaic and obsolete and isn’t used.

Yeah.

But I can tell you why you made the mistake.

When you’re reading, when you see the word secreted, you can’t tell that that E in the ED actually comes from the root word.

It looks like the root is secret.

And so it’s a really logical mistake to make.

Okay.

I made it all my life.

My mother was an English teacher, and she would always talk about this or that being secreted away.

Well, yeah, and it just seems like, you know, to secret something away, but secrete is to, like, bring something forth, you know?

Yeah, good point.

I mean, that’s what I always took it as.

So, wow, it’s not just that there are two pronunciations, it’s just that I’ve always been saying it wrong.

Yeah, English pranked you and you fell for it.

Oh, no.

Well, I appreciate your help.

Yeah, Tyler, I’m afraid we’ve been punked, you and I.

Well, I guess I will just, I’ll probably just stop using that word.

All right, cool. Thanks for calling, dude.

All right, thank you.

Bye-bye.

Bye, Tyler.

We will reveal the secrets of language to you.

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

Things have come to a pretty pass.

That’s all for today’s broadcast, but don’t wait till next week to chat with us on Facebook and Twitter.

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A Way with Words is independently produced and distributed by Wayword, Inc., a nonprofit supported by listeners and organizations who believe in lifelong learning and better human communication.

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

Thanks for listening. I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett. So long.

Bye-bye.

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

Let’s call the whole thing off.

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

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

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

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

Let’s call the whole thing R.