Keep Your Powder Dry (episode #1519)

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.

In 1759, a new head of the treasury was installed in France, and he had this daunting job of trying to rein in a spiraling deficit under the king, Louis XV.

And so he imposed all these austerity measures. He cut state pensions. He taxed luxury items, including doors and windows.

He taxed bachelorhood itself, and he ended public funding for the king’s gambling losses.

Well, all of this penny-pinching made him really unpopular.

And in fact, when people were doing things on the cheap, they would use his name.

His name was Etienne de Silhouette, and they would say,

I’m doing something à la silhouette, that is, on the cheap, you know, kind of shoddy.

And his name also gave us the word that we have in English for a dark outline of someone or something against a light background, silhouette.

There was a fashion during that time for making those kinds of portraits of people, just an outline of somebody against a light background,

Because, of course, that’s a whole lot cheaper than trying to hire somebody to paint a painting.

And so his name, silhouette, became associated with this cheap way of depicting people.

That’s amazing.

I wonder what he would think if he were alive today and knew that his name was still a verb, still a noun, used across languages around the world.

That’s amazing.

I know, isn’t it?

I should add that he only lasted eight months in office.

That’s terrible.

And what time period was he in office?

He entered office in 1759 and didn’t last that long.

That’s super interesting.

So Etienne de Silouette, the man, the administrator, the government official, gave us a word that has not much to do with him, really, right?

Yeah, right.

Just kind of a trend at the time became named after him because it was cheap, right?

Yeah.

So that’s what we call an eponym in the language world.

And I’ll share another eponym later in the show.

We welcome your calls, questions, and comments about language or anything you’ve heard on the show.

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Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Joan calling from Dallas, Texas.

Hi, Joan. Welcome to the show.

Hi, Joan.

What’s up?

The other day, my wife and I were discussing our New Year’s resolutions,

Or actually the lack of them.

She said hers would be the same as every year, just wing it and see what happens.

I think that’s originally from the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip.

And that got me wondering about the phrase to wing it and where it might have originated.

So here I am asking the experts.

Where did we get wing it?

Like to kind of make things up as you go along.

Right.

Yeah, you know, for the longest time, I thought it had to do with just sort of jumping off a cliff, you know,

Like just taking a flying leap and trying to get there on a wing and a prayer or, you know,

An aircraft that isn’t quite stable or something like that.

I was surprised to learn that actually wing it comes from the slang of the theater world.

Really?

Yeah, yeah.

I thought that might be the case.

Oh, you did?

Well, you were way ahead of me then.

Well, I just had this wild idea because my mom was a connoisseur of old, you know, 50s musicals and stuff.

And she would say, oh, that’s the such and such step and that’s the time step and that’s the buck and wing.

And I thought, well, maybe that has something to do with it.

Well, actually, it has to do with understudies who take on a part at the last second.

And so they’re in the wings and they’re studying the part.

You know, it’s sort of like they’re cramming for the test

And they’re either studying the part in the wings

Or they’re already out there on stage

And somebody in the wings is there ready to prompt them if they miss a line.

Oh, neat.

Isn’t that cool?

Yeah.

It’s such a visual.

You can just see being out there on stage.

So you’re out there winging it.

I didn’t think it would fit with like flying and pilots

Because I think pilots are being very straight-laced

And serious. I can’t imagine getting on your plane to go on vacation and the pilot comes in and says,

Hey, we’re going to wing it today. It would be scary.

But you can imagine before all these navigational tools, somebody doing a line of sight navigation

Or just kind of guessing the direction that they needed to go or using landmarks on the wing, right?

They might just do it as they go. And certainly the early days of aircraft were harem, scarem.

But yeah, the theater definition that Martha had, that’s the real source of it.

1850s, does that sound right?

Late 1800s, for sure.

Late 1800s, okay.

I wouldn’t have thought it was that old.

That’s really neat.

Yeah.

That’s cool.

Thank you for your call, Joan.

We’ll talk to you later.

Thank you so much.

I really enjoy your show, and I always learn something.

That’s what we need to do.

Bye.

Thanks, Joan.

Bye.

Hi.

Welcome to A Way with Words.

Hi.

My name’s Sarah from Dallas.

Hi, Sarah.

Welcome to the show.

What’s up?

I was calling to give you kind of an update because I was on the show a few years ago

With the question about preheat, and then I have a new question for you.

Okay.

My boyfriend and I at the time were having the discussion about preheat.

He’s the one from Russia.

And you had asked for an update.

So just so you know, he still disagrees and he thinks that it should be two separate words, but he thinks English is weird.

So his argument is that pre and heat should be two separate words?

Yes.

He was the one that felt like there’s no point in saying the word preheat.

You should just say heat in a recipe.

Gotcha.

But I have a new dilemma for you, and I’m hoping that you can resolve it.

It’s another argument between my now husband and I over the word sandwich.

Basically, what defines a sandwich?

Because we have a running joke that he’ll tell me,

Woman, go make me a sandwich.

And I say, no, I’m a modern-day woman.

Go make your own sandwich.

And it’s just a joke.

Good for you.

But what that means is, though, I haven’t made him,

I’ve made him maybe five actual sandwiches in three years.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t make him things with sandwich ingredients.

I just don’t put them together.

And so I’ll do bread with mustard and vegetables and all the normal stuff,

But I leave it open-faced.

And I don’t call it a sandwich,

But he insists it is a sandwich,

And his reasoning actually goes to Russian,

Because he’s Russian.

In Russian, the word for sandwich,

One of them is butter bread,

But it’s basically butter bread.

And so anything that is bread,

That is spread with something,

Could qualify as a sandwich.

You’re avoiding open-faced sandwich then.

Yes, absolutely.

I’ve even gone so far as to call it a trencher,

A modern-day trencher.

Sure.

Version. That only works with stuff that’s not messy because it can’t put it on a plate

And call it a trencher.

So a trencher is a piece of bread where you’ve kind of pulled some of the bread out of the

Middle and lined it with ingredients, right? Like a small loaf or a long roll.

Right. Like from medieval times where they used to use them as plates.

Right.

That only works if I can hand it to them on a napkin. Otherwise, that logic doesn’t fly.

Okay.

So part of what’s happening here is that you’re avoiding admitting that you made a sandwich

Because you don’t want to give in to the joke,

Which is a joke about woman make me a sandwich.

And yet we all know even though it’s a joke,

There’s a lot of cultural baggage with that joke, right?

Right.

And so if you admit that you made him a sandwich,

Then you’re giving in to the stereotype that that’s a woman’s work.

Yes, but if I’m wrong and I have to admit it, then I will.

But then he will have to start making me more sandwiches.

Which he should do anyway.

He should be making you sandwiches.

So he makes other things.

So Sarah, is it your argument that it takes two to sandwich, like two slices of bread?

Yes.

My argument is you have to have two things on the ends that match, that are around a thing in the middle.

So they sandwich the thing in the middle for it to be a sandwich, in my mind.

And what if you have a roll that’s partially sliced and you stick the ingredients in there?

Is that still a sandwich?

I think it is, or it could be like a sub.

You could call it a sub sandwich, I think.

But what about if the breading goes all the way around like a samosa or empanada?

Well, I wouldn’t count that as a sandwich.

Like a, I want to say stromboli, but that’s not right.

But I wouldn’t count that as a sandwich.

I’d count that as a samosa.

I got to tell you, when it comes to what is a sandwich,

I have the same feeling about this as I do about religion,

Which each one of us, we find our own path to spiritual guidance.

Well, there’s one definition of sandwiches I really liked,

And it’s very broad and it’s got a lot of loopholes, but I still like it.

It’s a kind of protein-heavy food layered with a carbohydrate-heavy food

That you can eat with your hands.

So it’s got the carb component and the protein component.

Then it would include a hot dog.

It would include your hamburgers.

It would include things where you use cheese but no meat.

It would include breaded things as well as things made with bread.

You could argue that would also include dumplings.

And that’s not a sandwich.

It could.

But it will also include sandwiches made with donuts on each end and eggs in the middle, stuff like that.

But it has to have protein in the middle?

Typically a sandwich is a mix of carbs and protein and vegetable matter.

But the vegetable is often tertiary.

Well, for some of us, but I’ve had tomato sandwiches and cucumber sandwiches.

Right, but do you put hummus on there or mayonnaise or eggs or anything?

Cheese?

Nope.

No?

Mustard, maybe.

Mustard, maybe.

Maybe oil and vinegar.

So like I said, a lot of loopholes.

I got to tell you, so you’re never going to resolve this.

The world at large, how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?

I don’t know.

It’s unresolvable.

I will say this, that I love deconstructed sandwiches.

Frequently, I will make sandwiches for my wife and myself, and my son doesn’t want a sandwich, but I will give him exactly the same ingredients and put them separately on the plate, and he’s totally fine with that.

So part of a sandwich is a mental place that you are.

It’s where you are in your head.

A sandwich is a journey that you must take.

So I think that we’re going to just have to resolve it the way we resolve all non-resolvable arguments, which is with Nerf guns.

And I think that’s just the way we’re going to have to go.

Nice.

Nerf guns.

Oh, yes.

That is the relationship resolver right there.

You can’t be mad at someone when you’re shooting them with a foam dart.

Okay.

Really.

Hey, if that works for you, I think Grant’s right.

I think it’s like religion.

Well, I like it, and I think that we can both be right at the same time

And still argue about it for the rest of our lives.

So I appreciate it.

There you go.

It’s a proxy for the other things that are harder to handle.

Yeah, so Nerf guns and pillow fights.

I think you got it all figured out.

Hey, Sarah, call us again sometime.

I will.

I love you guys.

Thank you so much.

I’m going to try and find the next thing we’re going to argue about, and I’ll come to the experts.

Okay, best to your husband.

Take care now.

Congratulations on getting married.

Oh, thank you.

All right, bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

Email words at wewordradio.org.

I was at a gathering the other day when a woman said, do you know the word strubly?

Strubly.

Strubly.

She said, when I was growing up, my mother would say, your hair’s all strubly.

So it means, you know, disordered, messed up.

It’s a term that’s localized pretty much to eastern Pennsylvania.

It comes from a German word that means tousled.

Okay.

So strubly.

S-T-R-U-B-B-L-Y.

Strubly.

New one for me.

Me too.

877-929-9673.

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

I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

And we’re joined by our quiz guy, John Chaneski.

Hi, John.

Hey, Grant.

Hey, Martha.

You know, I’m years old now, and getting old is not easy, but there are unintended benefits.

For example, since I don’t hear as well as I used to, things become much funnier.

I’m always mishearing movie quotes, and I’ve got to say, I kind of prefer it that way.

For example, this is just an example.

If I say, oh, it seems that Rhett Butler refuses to provide shellfish for Tara’s annual seafood night, you might say…

Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a clam.

I don’t give a clam.

Very good.

All right, let’s do the first one.

Oh, now that’s nice.

Don Vito Corleone is going to make sure that the proposal he will make to his new business partner is simple and completely clear.

I’ll make you an offer you can’t confuse.

Very good.

That was very good.

That was very good.

I’m sorry.

Nice.

That was not bad.

That was great.

Well, here’s another chance for you to do your Brando, though.

Speaking of Brando, it’s so sad when he tells his brother that he never realized his dream of becoming a mixologist and working in a tavern.

Oh, I could have been a bartender.

I could have been a bartender instead of a bum, which is what I am.

It seems as if the warden of this Florida prison farm just wants a little appreciation.

He told the prisoners he didn’t get a single, good job, or way to go, buddy.

What we have here is a failure to congratulate.

That’s right.

What we have here is a failure to congratulate.

Cool hand Luke, of course.

Now, this film seems to be a mashup of a movie about sports management

And a Disney animated feature about a bear of very little brain.

What exactly is Cuba Gooding Jr.’s agent demanding?

Oh, that’s sweet.

Show me the honey.

Show me the honey.

Nice.

That was Jerry Maguire, by the way, if you know that one.

Yeah.

Finally, yes, yes, I agree with Patrick Swayze that a cup-shaped receptacle in which ingredients are crushed or ground is no place for Jennifer Grey.

Nobody puts baby in the mortar.

Mortar.

Nobody puts baby in a mortar.

Nobody puts baby in a mortar.

That’s terrible.

But I agree.

You’ve got to agree.

It’s true, right?

Sure.

You can’t put a girl, anybody really, in a mortar.

It’s bad practice.

All right.

So I’m going to go and mishear some more movie lines, and I’ll see you guys next week.

All right.

Bye.

And we’d love to talk with you about any aspect of language whatsoever, slang, grammar, word origins, linguistic diversity, and more.

So call us, 877-929-9673, or you can send an email to words@waywordradio.org, or hit us up on Twitter.

Our handle is WayWord.

Hi there.

You have A Way with Words.

This is Kathy from Evansville, Indiana.

Hi, Kathy.

Welcome to the show.

What’s up?

I have a question about the word verse, as in V-E-R-S-E, and when people use it as a verb, as to play or as to compete against someone.

Right.

To verse.

Can you give us an example?

I have 11-year-old twins, and we are sports people.

And, for instance, if they had a game this coming weekend and they weren’t sure who their opponents would be, they would ask me, who are they versing this week?

Right.

Or in the past tense, they would say, we versed such and such team last week.

Or when we versed them in the present tense, we always play well.

Right.

And I hate it when people use it.

And I’m a sports person.

I’ve been around sports all my life.

I watch lots of sports, and I never hear broadcasters or coaches or players ever use the word verse.

And it drives me crazy.

And I get on my girls every time.

And so I was just wondering, where has this come from?

Is there someone that used it on television or somewhere where some kids have heard it?

And why are they saying it?

Because it drives me crazy.

Oh, that’s too bad, because I feel like it’s a wonderful linguistic innovation.

I don’t know why, it just aggravates me.

And I think it’s because I cannot physically think of someone versing as a verb.

Right, that’s the crux of it, right?

So you’re getting to the heart of the why.

The why is people misunderstand when they hear versus, and it sounds like a conjugated verb to verse.

So the baboons versus the badgers sounds like they’re versing them, that there’s a verb in there, there’s an action taking place.

But really, it’s not that.

It’s a preposition that comes from Latin, ultimately, and it means toward or turn toward.

Against.

Against, yeah.

So it’s A against B or baboon versus badger.

Right, right.

And when I ask my girls, why do you say this? They will point to the schedule and say, well, it says right here.

You know, it’ll have their team name and VS with a period and then the other team.

Right.

And that’s their, you know, that’s their explanation.

And I just argue and say, but that’s not a verb.

You can’t verse someone.

It’s easy to misunderstand, right?

Because the full form maybe isn’t written out very often.

V-E-R-S-U-S just isn’t there.

Here’s the thing.

It isn’t new.

And it’s not only kids that do it.

No, no.

This is at least 30 years old.

I have evidence going back a little over 30 years old.

I’m quite certain it’s older than that.

It’s in two dictionaries that I know of.

The American Heritage Dictionary thinks it’s common enough to record.

And the Collins Dictionaries.

It is slangy.

It’s not formal at all.

You won’t find it used in the Supreme Court arguments at all.

Right, right.

But it’s in the U.S., in Canada, the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, and probably other English-speaking countries.

You hear people use it.

I heard it.

I don’t listen to sports radio very often.

I heard it on sports radio.

I heard it now.

Really?

Yes.

Okay.

It was very clearly a conjugated verb that they were doing and not the preposition V-E-R-S-U-S.

Okay.

All right.

So as for your reaction, you get your skin crawls or your hair stands up in the back of your neck or it’s like fingers on a chalkboard.

My advice to you is to try to record all the times that you hear this and begin to gather the data.

It sounds like you’re well on your way to that.

And when you turned it into an intellectual exercise, a lot of the frustration with the newness of things disappears.

And you start to become fascinated with the why and the who and the where.

And you become the expert on versus.

You kind of become the person in your group who knows the most about this new verb that came out of this preposition.

Okay.

You’re telling me it’s been going on for 30 years.

I have to just give up and say, okay, I’ve got to let it go.

You’re close.

What has given it popularity is the rise of head-to-head gaming culture, where the video games that you’re playing aren’t just you and a controller, but it’s you versus either an NPC, which is a non-player character, or you versus somebody else on the Internet playing you through the Internet, you at home, them at home, and you’re playing head-to-head.

So where you’re versing somebody is incredibly common in eSports, where people gather to play video games in these big competitions.

And so they will use it.

You can actually hear it.

You can see tons of videos on YouTube that use it.

Okay.

Thank you for giving me the permission to accept that it is okay and not to have to get aggravated when I hear it.

All right.

We’re glad that you were able to get it off of your mind.

Sure.

Thank you so much.

I appreciate it.

I take care.

Bye.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Well, when it comes to language, is there something you’ve been noticing around you?

Give us a call about it.

877-929-9673 or send your emails to words@waywordradio.org.

The word strumple is an old word that means the fleshy part of a tail when a horse has had its tail docked.

And in some dialect dictionaries, you’ll find the expression cocked my strumpels.

Does that mean to?

Turn a cold shoulder or take a fence or what does it mean?

No, it means to sort of perk you up or, you know, you notice something out of the corner of your eye and it sort of startles you.

So it’s using strumple to mean to your buttocks then.

Yeah, you know, it just, you know, the way a horse will respond to things, you know, cocked my strumples.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, I’m Cody Gable.

I’m calling from the Great Smoky Mountains in Tennessee.

Ooh, nice.

Welcome to the show and welcome to the Smoky Mountains. What can we do for you?

I had a question about if there is a word, a single word to say if you’re going to invite someone over to your house for dinner and you were to feed somebody and provide them with drink.

Is there a word to provide somebody with a drink other than water?

I mean, I know you water a plant and you water an animal, but can you water a person?

Good question.

So eat is to feed as drink is to what?

You’re looking for a single word where we might ordinarily use a phrase.

Why the single word?

Why is the phrase not good enough?

It simplifies it.

You know, it’s just, it’s hard to describe, but it’s just something that puzzled me.

And then I think other people have probably been puzzled by before.

Yeah, we’ve had this question.

Why there’s not a single word.

Yeah, you’re looking for a transitive verb for providing a drink to somebody.

And, you know, we do talk about feeding and watering animals, but it doesn’t feel the same, right, to feed and water a person.

But I don’t think we have one single word for that.

The word drench has been used a long time ago, but it usually means to give somebody liquid forcibly, like a medicine or something like that, to feed and drench.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

You might talk about feeding and drenching your animals, your goats or something.

I think they do still use that.

In veterinarian circles, you drench a horse.

You hold the jaw open a certain way to pour the medicine down.

Yeah.

Yeah.

With animals.

But I don’t think there’s a really good word for that.

I’ve seen the word embeverage suggested, which I like a lot.

But that’s just because we don’t have a good word for it.

I’ve seen hydrate.

But most people think of that in sports context or exertion.

Like, don’t forget to hydrate yourself.

Yeah.

But you don’t hydrate guests at a party, right?

You hydrate your skin.

You hydrate plants.

You hydrate a room.

And if you’re giving them alcohol, you’re dehydrating them.

Kind of.

So what do you think about imbeverage?

Somebody just made that up.

I think it’s kind of lovely.

Yeah, maybe we can get that to catch on.

Or maybe imbibe instead of imbibe.

Come to my house.

I will feed and imbeverage you.

I like it.

I mean, it’s kind of self-conscious and performative.

But other than that, Cody, I mean, we have not come up with a single word that substitutes for that.

Yeah, and the English language, there’s so many words, and it’s just kind of unfathomable to think that there isn’t a word for that.

I know, right?

There are a lot of those lexical holes in English because it’s not a design language.

It was accreted, so it lacks parallel constructions often.

When words are coined, people don’t necessarily also coin its opposite or its companion or its parallel.

Each one comes up on its own, has its own life.

Yeah, it’s just so odd, though, because it’s such a common thing.

It’s not like this weird esoteric thing.

Well, in many cases, when you feed, we fed our guests, it also implies drink.

Well, that’s true.

That’s a good point.

Because they go hand in hand, except in forms of punishment.

You typically provide food without some kind of liquid to drink.

That’s true.

Yeah.

Well, tell you what, Cody, we think there’s a hole here.

We agree with you that there probably isn’t a good word, but maybe in beverage we’ll catch on.

And maybe there’s something that we missed, you, me, and Martha, that our other listeners know.

And if we find out, we’ll share it to the world, all right?

Sounds great.

Thank you for your call.

We really appreciate it.

Well, thank you for having me on.

I listen every week.

Oh, thank you very much.

Take care now.

Thanks, Cody.

Take care.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

If you’ve got a word for Cody, a single word that means to provide drink to somebody, give us a call, 877-929-9673, or email words@waywordradio.org.

Apparently in China, they have an expression which translates as, equipped with knives all over, yet none is sharp.

Oh.

Right, to refer to the generalist rather than the specialist.

And apparently in Estonia, there’s an expression that goes, nine trades, the tenth one, hunger.

Ooh.

I just love those, right?

Yes.

But I don’t know, different cultural approaches to the idea that you might be really good at a lot of things versus cultures where you focus your attention on one particular thing and become the absolute master of that.

What’s the Chinese one again?

Equipped with knives all over, yet none is sharp.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Well, hello. It’s my pleasure to have A Way with Words.

This is Tommy Hursant from Carlsbad, California.

Hi, Tommy. Welcome to the show.

Hi, Tommy.

I was born in northern Wisconsin back in the old, old days.

And my mother used to have a term that she used when I would be focusing on something.

You know, Tommy, clean up the counter of the sink.

And I would be just working away, getting all those last little bits out of the corner.

And she’d, oh, Tommy, you’re briggling again.

And so when I would focus on something to the point of going above and beyond the call of duty to get something clean or orderly or whatever, I was Brigholene.

Now, I’ve looked it up, and I found, and this is probably something that you may know more particularly, Grant, an American slang expression that I would never associate with my saintly mother.

And so I thought I’d go to people like you who had a clue as to what the origins of Brigholene might be.

Can I gather that you found Urban Dictionary on a search and were horrified at the definition you saw there?

Yes.

That’s why I knew you would know.

The Urban Dictionary is one of those things, when it’s right, great. When it’s wrong, boy, it really goes off the rails.

There’s more to say about this, though, than you can easily find online.

And you’ll be relieved to know that Briggle does appear in the Dictionary of American Regional English, and the definition there is to fuss about ineffectively and to potter about.

And it may go back to a Scots term, breckel, which if you look at the Scots National Dictionary online, which is a wonderful resource, the first definition is a term expressive of the waddling and bustling motion of a person of small stature.

Well, that does fit. I was just a kid.

Oh, there you go. Yeah.

And it may be related to a Northern England dialectal term, braggle, which means to poke about in a hole with a stick.

And just keep at it.

So it’s sort of, you know.

She used another term when she would catch me briggling and say, oh, you are so persnickety.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Is that kind of consistent with that?

Persnickety has a different definition these days, doesn’t it, Martha?

Yeah, it’s a different word that just means particular, right?

Yeah, yeah, specific or kind of obsessive about detail.

Fastidious.

By the way, not only is there the verb to briggle, but there’s an adjective, brigly, which basically means a restless or kind of erratic.

A brigly child is a common use of it.

And even you’ll find it in fiction here and there, but it’s not that common in everyday speech in the United States.

Well, yes.

My mother actually was the only one in the family tree who came out with that.

I haven’t heard any of the other aunts or uncles use it.

She comes from like a bohemian area on the mother’s side.

And I thought maybe Scott here, the fact that it’s got a Scott origin, is a surprise to me.

But I guess language gets around.

Well, it does.

Most of the instances I’ve seen of that word occur in the Midwest, Indiana, Ohio, places like that.

Yeah, one dictionary has it in western Pennsylvania.

Mm—

So it doesn’t really surprise me.

Oh, my goodness.

But it’s never been that common.

It does not occur very often at all in print, so which means it probably doesn’t occur that often in speech either.

But the good news is that your saintly mother wasn’t saying anything naughty.

Oh, I am so comforted to hear that.

Thank you.

You can sleep at night, Tommy.

Tommy, thank you for your call. I really appreciate it.

Well, thanks again for your good service, my friend.

Our pleasure.

All right, Tommy.

Take care.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

I got to say, I really like Urban Dictionary and all the wonderful—

It records tons of stuff that you can’t find anywhere else.

And at this point, it’s been on the internet long enough that you can get some historical perspective on some of this thing.

Sure.

But probably 90, 95% of it is inserted rubbish that nobody ever said except the person who typed it.

And even then, it’s probably fake.

Right.

It’s crowdsourced, right?

I mean, anybody can put a definition on there.

People put things into the show off or to try to start a word that never actually was used.

And it’s best to look something up that you already know rather than to learn new language.

Right, right.

But in this case, there are some definitions that are terrible.

Do not go to Urban Dictionary looking up Burkle.

Call us, 877-929-9673, or send your family stories about language to 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.

In the early 20th century, seven brothers emigrated over time from Italy to California.

They started in Southern California picking oranges, and then later they moved north.

And in 1915, they opened a machine shop in Berkeley, California.

And they manufactured a lot of different kinds of things like propellers.

And they also designed water irrigation pumps and produced them.

One of the brothers was named Candido, and he got married and had four children.

And the youngest of them, Kenny, was almost two years old when he contracted strep throat.

And unfortunately, that led to rheumatic fever, and that led to juvenile rheumatoid arthritis.

This was a very painful condition.

It limited the boy’s mobility.

And he was treated a couple of times a week at physical therapy in these big stainless steel hydrotherapy tanks.

But his mom didn’t like them because he had to share them with other people.

And so she spoke to her husband and asked if he could come up with something that they could put in their own bathtub at home, some kind of little water pump to recreate that kind of motion.

And so his dad ended up making a pump for their home bathtub.

And it worked so well that their company began selling them.

And then the next generation included a family member named Roy, who realized that you could put those kinds of pumps in a freestanding bathtub and market them to the public.

And so you can probably guess the name of this Italian family.

It must have been Jacuzzi.

It was the Jacuzzis.

Yeah.

But I thought that that was so cool that the thing that you’re going out, you know, the hot tub that you’re going out to with your plastic cup and a drink, it was for therapy.

It was for therapy.

It was a father’s effort to ease his son’s pain.

I can’t imagine being that young with those kinds of conditions.

Yeah.

You know, Kenny ended up living to a ripe old age.

He only died a couple of years ago.

And he worked in Italy for the Jacuzzi Company.

And then later, he was the director of the Office of the Americans with Disabilities in the state of Arizona.

How about that? That’s perfect. What a great story. So Jacuzzi has a family name, family history.

Yeah, another eponym.

Give us a call, 877-929-9673, which is toll-free in the U.S. and Canada, or you can send us email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, yeah, I’m Bob Peterson. I’m from Rockford, Illinois.

Hi, Bob. Welcome to the show.

Well, thanks. I’m happy to be here.

We’re glad to have you. What’s on your mind?

Forty years ago, I was in the Navy.

And, you know, the Navy has all kinds of nautical terms and stuff, but this is a little different.

I was in nuclear power school, and the amount of information you get presented is really pretty overwhelming.

So some of the instructors would help us out, the students out a bit.

They’d stamp on the floor if they were presenting some information that was particularly testable.

You know, really, oh, yeah, you need six-factor formulas, startup rate equations, things like that that we really had to know long-term.

They’d stamp on the floor.

Now, we referred to this as horsing up the students.

When the students would get together after class and study, and we’d throw questions at each other, we’d call them horse sessions.

And actually in civilian nuclear power, when I went through reactor operator license training, we had these large format notebooks we called horse notes.

So I was just curious if you’ve ever heard of this term for tutoring or studying or whatever it was we were doing.

So your instructors would do a Mr. Ed and intentionally stamp the floor like they were conscious that they were doing it, and that was the clue that you really should pay some attention to what they’re saying.

Exactly. This was really important. You needed to know this.

Your horse notes there at the end plugged into a theory that I started working on as soon as I heard your question.

Did you ever have those big pads of paper, we’re talking like three feet by four feet, that were on easels in the front of the classroom that the instructor could write on?

Yeah, they had those.

And the horse notes we used were large format that we made up.

And they were 11 by 17 notebooks.

The reason I ask is because those big pads of paper used for presentation and display in front of a class or a group are sometimes known as horse blankets.

Really?

They’re as big as a horse blanket. Yeah. And so the theory that I’m working on is that the stamping, like a horse, came after the slang for horse blanket because you’re not putting everything on the horse blanket. You’re putting the outline or the bullet points. And so it’s kind of, it’s the high points, the summary of what you really need to know. And so I’m wondering if the stamping was either not directly connected to the idea of a horse or it’s coincidental, or it came after the notion of the horse blanket, which goes back as far as I can tell, at least to the 1930s in military slang.

That’s interesting, because I was actually a Navy instructor later on, and then in the civilian world, after I was an operator, I was an instructor.

But by the time I did it, we had whiteboards and then PowerPoints.

There are other older, different meanings of horse up, or to horse something or someone up, but they’re so different and far afield from what you’re talking about. I don’t think that they can be related. But for what it’s worth, one of the dictionaries that I checked has an entry for horse up is to put material between the planks of a ship like oakum or something else in order to seal it tight. And that’s called horsing it up. And then in leather making or tanning of leather, there’s a part of the process where you horse up the wet or treated leather, which means put it on a sawhorse so that it can drain or so the chemical treatments can finish doing their work until you move on to the next step. But other than that, the only other thing I can think of, there’s a lot of uses of to horse meaning to use extra speed or to use extra strength or put a lot of energy into something. But again, it doesn’t really sound like this classroom. So my speculation is, is all a play on that original slang of a horse blanket referring to the thing that you put your big notes on, the important stuff.

Yeah, that would make a lot of sense because the instructors did do a lot of writing.

That was 40 years ago.

That was back before PowerPoint and even whiteboards.

Right.

Well, Bob, the great thing is that we have a lot of Navy folks who listen to the show.

We do indeed.

And they might call us and provide some more input.

Yeah, well, actually, my son’s in the Navy currently, and I’ve never asked him that.

Oh, well, there we go.

There we go.

I’ll have to ask him next time I see him.

If you find out more from your son, send it along, all right?

I certainly will.

Bob, thank you for your call.

We really appreciate it.

Well, thanks so much.

I appreciate it, too.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

All righty.

Bye-bye, Bob.

Yeah, we’ve got Navy retired and active on both coasts and stationed in various places around the world.

And so if you’re in the Navy and you know more about the expression to horse someone or something up, referring to, I guess, the way of emphasizing what’s important in a course of study or in, I guess, an exam prep or something like that, let us know.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org or talk to us on Twitter @wayword.

In English, we say, don’t cut off your nose to spite your face.

In Russian, the equivalent is, don’t freeze your ears off to spite your mother.

Oh, because she wants you to wear your hat and you refuse.

Right, right. You ever done that? You know, you go out without a jacket. She’s like, take a jacket.

I’ve never been that. My son is totally that.

Oh, is he really?

I love the boy, but he’s the first to refuse to do a thing just because you want him to.

Guthrie, don’t freeze your ears off to spite your dad.

Fortunately, San Diego, not much of a problem.

Oh, that’s true.

Talk to us, 877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Bill Raisley calling from beautiful Bo Verde, Texas.

Bo Verde. With a name like that, it must be beautiful.

Welcome to the show. Glad to talk to you.

Yeah, thank you.

Kind of something that’s puzzled me, I guess.

Most of my life, my family grew up in South Bend, Indiana.

So I have a couple generations of family back over there.

But my dad decided in 1955 he would pack us all up in a car and move us off to Denver, Colorado, which is where I grew up.

Out there, just growing up, I always didn’t think too much of it.

But, you know, if I was sitting at the dinner table and I had a bottle of ketchup there and I was trying to, you know, it was almost empty and I was trying to shake it and get the ketchup out, my dad would say, just go Wabash it.

And I would go, what?

He would say, just go over to the sink, put a little water in there, shake it up a little bit, and it’ll come right out of there.

So I did, you know.

So that was sort of a saying that my family used, you know, wabashing things, you know, just to add a little bit of water to send something out, like leftover food or something in a jar or those kinds of things.

And here I am sitting here all these years later, and I’m wondering where did that phrase, you know, come from, wabashing things?

I was kind of hoping that you all might be able to add some insight.

Well, Bill, what does Wabash mean to you besides that process?

Does it mean anything else to you?

Not really, no.

I mean, I know there’s a Wabash River in Indiana.

Yeah.

And I don’t have any other connection with that word.

Was it just your family, or did others around you, other families, say it?

Well, back in South Bend, I don’t, you know, we’d go back there for Christmas and holidays and things, and people back there would say it.

I don’t think it’s that common at all.

And my first thought was that you’re holding the ketchup bottle and bashing it with your hand.

And then I was thinking, well, maybe it has to do with the folks back home, you know, doing it like the old folks at home in the Wabash area since you’re from Indiana.

The only other thing that I can think of is that the Wabash River, when it enters Indiana, sort of meanders and has to, and they have built canals to help the flow of the river because it is so windy there where it first crosses the border into Indiana.

But I don’t know.

So you’re thinking that the liquid added to the ketchup bottle is kind of like the Wabash River kind of sluicing through those channels?

That’s the process of Wabashing.

Yeah, that’s the only thing that I can really think of.

I’m not aware of other people using it.

Yeah, I’ve never heard this term before you at all, and I don’t have any information on this.

The only theory that I have is that perhaps at one point it was a joking term, washing with an extra almost pig Latin syllable added, kind of like the same way you might say edumacate instead of educate, so wabashing instead of washing.

Wabash.

Because people goof around with language, and it kind of cots is a family word.

I don’t know.

So outside of your family, you’ve heard other people in South Bend, Indiana use this?

I have.

Okay.

Wow.

That’s a long time ago.

Okay.

And they say Wabash like the river, not Wabash, right?

Correct.

Yeah.

Wow.

Correct, yeah.

That’s fascinating.

That is very fascinating.

You know, I was up in Denver just last week.

My father is up there, and he’s 100 years old now.

And so I got the opportunity to say, Dad, do you remember Wabashing things?

And he goes, oh, heck, yeah, I still do it.

And I said, well, what can you tell me about that?

And he said, well, that word, you know, used that way came from Indiana.

And I said, tell me more.

And he started to say, well, you know, things were pretty tight back then, you know, when I was growing up in Indiana.

And then he said, but I just can’t remember.

And I was going, oh, no, tell me more, you know.

So I assumed that maybe it had to do with stretching something.

Oh, that could be.

That connects because there is a slang word to wabash something, which means to cheat or to swindle.

So I wonder if it’s connected to that.

And this goes back not that far.

I find uses of it in the 1940s, probably older.

So to cheat, to defraud.

And it was used in Indiana and the west of there.

To water it down, basically.

Wow, that’s pretty interesting.

And, yeah, I don’t know.

I still use it today and I’ve corrupted all my kids, you know, so they use it.

And I want to make sure it lives on.

Well, yeah, Bill, you’ve corrupted me because now every time I try to get ketchup out of a bottle, I’m going to think of that.

I mean, it’s a perfect word for that.

It’s not just getting ketchup out.

It’s adding water to get the last remnants out, right?

Yes, correct.

Yeah.

I’ll get it down a little bit so it’ll come out.

-huh.

That is super cool.

Bill, thank you so much for calling.

Yeah, it’s really exciting.

I’m glad that you guys could make that connection with it.

We’ll see what our listeners have to say.

We’ve got a ton of people in Indiana who will have opinions.

Oh, I can’t wait.

I just can’t wait to see what comes out on this.

Thank you for your call.

Really appreciate it.

What comes out.

We’ll Wabash it.

I love your show.

Take care.

Thanks so much for having me.

All righty, Bill.

My pleasure.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Do you know something about the verb to Wabash, meaning to get extra ketchup or something out of a bottle by putting water in there and sloshing it around so you can just finish it off completely? If you do, let us know, 877-929-9673. That’s toll-free in the U.S. and Canada.

Or email us, words@waywordradio.org. Welcome to A Way with Words.

Hi, I’m Shelby from Rockville, Indiana. Hi, Shelby.

Welcome to the show. What’s up? When I was growing up, my grandpa always used to say, keep your powder dry.

And so when I was younger, I always assumed that he meant to don’t sweat the small stuff, like keep your talc powder dry.

But as I got older, I realized he meant gunpowder because he fought in World War II.

So can you kind of clear up the discrepancies or maybe answer the origins to that question?

And so your grandfather used it to mean be prepared or stay ready?

I think so.

He would always say it when we left him.

So he’d give us a hug and he’d say, keep your powder dry.

So just general life advice about being in turtles.

Yeah, and it was every time we parted ways.

Gotcha.

Well, it’s much older than World War II, and it’s got a complicated story that we don’t know all of yet.

But it’s connected to Oliver Cromwell, who was an Englishman, still much hated by the Irish, who in the, I guess it was the 1640s, led a campaign against the Irish on behalf of the English and basically slaughtered many people.

And supposedly, before they were to cross a river on one particular part of this campaign, he told his troops, put your trust in God, my boys, and keep your powder dry.

So this is the 1600s.

However, the problem with this is, is that the quote doesn’t appear till the 1830s.

So there’s almost, that’s actually more than 200 years in between when he supposedly said it and when people start crediting it to him.

Cromwell is a little like Abraham Lincoln and Albert Einstein and Mark Twain in that things get credited to him that he didn’t say.

And I think this may be one of those.

All of the experts who’ve looked into this, people like Fred Shapiro, the editor of the Yale Book of Quotations, credit actually a song by a guy named Valentine Blacker.

The song was called Oliver’s Advice.

It was a ballad published in 1834.

And in the ballad, they have Oliver Cromwell saying this line.

However, just a couple years prior to that, the expression pops up in a couple political articles in some newspapers in Ireland and in England, where they’re just talking about various political gatherings, where, again, they’re saying that Cromwell said it.

But before that, before 1832, there’s no mention of this quote anywhere.

So probably the Cromwell credit is spurious, and it was just invented by some clever politician.

And to give it some credence and some credibility, they just said that Cromwell said it because it sounded better.

Well, that’s pretty cool.

I didn’t realize it was such a loaded statement for him to say, you know, when I was eight.

But you’re right.

It is gunpowder.

It’s not talcum powder.

Yeah.

Well, that’s really cool.

Don’t load your musket with talcum powder.

Yes.

Yes.

You know, you mentioned that he was from World War II, that he lived during World War II.

I’m wondering if he used the other expression that I’ve heard World War II veterans say, which is, keep your bowels open and your mouth shut.

Maybe I was a little too young for that one.

He didn’t.

I never heard him say that, but it’d be interesting.

I’ll ask my grandma if he’d ever said it in conversation with her.

Yeah, please do.

You keep your bowels open and your mouth shut, your head down and your chin up, and you may come home a civilian.

Oh, my goodness.

Yeah, I’ll ask her.

That’s pretty cool.

Okay.

Shelby, thanks so much.

I appreciate it.

Thank you very much.

We’ll talk to you again sometime.

All righty.

Bye.

877-929-9673.

Thanks to senior producer Stefanie Levine, director Colin Tedeschi, editor Tim Felten, and production assistant Tamar Wittenberg.

You can send us a message, subscribe to the podcast, get the newsletter, or catch up on hundreds of past episodes at waywordradio.org.

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We’re coming to you from the Recording Arts Center at Studio West in San Diego, California.

Thanks for listening. I’m Grant Barrett.

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

Bye.