Kite in a Phone Booth (episode #1524)

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 asked you to send us your memories about food and language,

And we heard from Sarah Trone in Moorhead, Minnesota.

And she said that when she was a first-year high school English teacher,

She taught in Williston, North Dakota,

Which is in the northwest corner of the state near Montana and the Canadian border.

And it was her first year,

And she said it possibly the first or second week of her new career.

And one of her duties was to read the day’s announcements to her homeroom students.

And she writes, I got to the lunch menu to read and then said this,

Today for lunch, slush burgers?

What’s a slush burger and why would I want to put it into my mouth?

And her students cracked up and had to explain to her

That a slush burger is what she grew up calling a sloppy joe.

Sloppy joe.

Sloppy joe, of course, yeah.

That’s what most people know it as, right?

A sloppy joe.

But there are other terms for it around the country?

There are other terms around the country for it,

And in most of the Dakotas, you call it a slush burger.

Oh, interesting.

That’s cool.

Because we don’t think of slush.

We think of slush as being dirty mushed ice,

Like pummeled dirty ice.

Yeah, exactly.

But I grew up calling it sloppy joes.

I imagine you did, too.

Yeah, I’m very sure.

Yeah, but you can also call it a spoon burger or a tavern sandwich.

And these are all crumbled meat with sauce.

It’s not the ones that are crumbled meat without sauce, which have another whole list of names, right?

Yeah, yeah.

Like the made rights and the crumbly burgers.

Yeah, they kind of creeped me out even before I became a vegetarian.

Oh, I…

You know, they would make the buns so wet and soggy.

I loved it.

Sloppy Joe Day on school was the great day, particularly if they included a nice big chunk of the government cheese, which I loved, and you put it right on there.

Oh, so good.

Well, we know that you’ve got a lot of memories about food and language.

Share them with us. We never get enough.

877-929-9673.

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

Welcome to Way With Words.

Hello. This is Kathleen Mulligan calling from Ithaca, New York.

Hello, Kathleen. Welcome to the show.

Hi, Kathleen.

I wanted to ask you about a phrase that my mother used to use.

My mother passed away in 2016.

She was born in 1924, and her favorite expression was, go fry ice, which she would say to me

If I said, you know, Mom, won’t you let me have this pretty necklace of yours or something?

And she’d say, oh, go fry ice.

And I used to ask her, Mom, what does that mean?

And she’d say, well, it means go fry ice.

So I never have heard anyone else use it.

And when I heard your show on the air a couple of weeks ago, I thought, these are the people that can help me.

That’s such a frustrated mom explanation.

It means what it means.

I loved it so much that when she died, I suggested that we put it on her gravestone.

But my siblings outvoted me on that.

Oh, but that would be the one that everyone would come to see, right?

That would be the stone that would become a legend.

And if you knew my mother, it was perfect.

So you got outvoted on that epitaph?

I did.

My father’s gravestone says, it’ll be fine.

And that kind of says everything about my dad.

Really?

I thought it’d be very funny to have, it’ll be fine next to, oh, go fry ice.

Well, it’s one of those minced oaths that are similarly sort of absurd or impossible,

Like go fly a kite in a telephone booth or go jump in a lake.

Or there’s an old Yiddish one that translates as go whistle in the ocean,

Although there’s a much naughtier version of that that you might do in an ocean.

But the earliest use I’ve found of this, it probably predates this,

But in 1929 there was this wildly popular serialized novel by someone named Ruth Dewey Groves,

And it was in newspapers all over the country.

And it was called Rich Girl, Poor Girl.

It was very dramatic.

Murder and romance and racketeers and things like that.

Pretty hair-raising stuff, really, for the time and place.

Yeah.

And there was a character in there who said,

Oh, bother. Tell them to go fry ice.

So I’m betting that that’s it.

You think?

Well, I can imagine my mother growing up and my grandmother reading something like that.

And it was probably floating around before that.

Yeah, but that’s what we’ve seen in print.

Right. And of course, my mom was, you know, she was born in 24.

She, you know, wouldn’t have been talking too much before.

Well, after it was serialized in the newspapers, it was published as a book.

So the novel was around for a while and the author wrote a bunch of similar books as well.

She was in vogue for a while.

Right. Oh, I bet that’s it. Okay.

Have you heard other variants like go fry an egg or go fry your face?

No. I’ve never heard any other fry expressions besides go fry ice.

Gotcha. I do want to say Martha mentioned minced oaths earlier.

And the minced oath that we’re talking about here is a synonym for a bug off that begins with an F that we can’t say on the radio.

So it’s possible this is a very minced oath. It’s kind of far removed from it, but it’s a very polite version.

Go fry ice.

Okay.

Wonderful.

Okay.

All right.

Take care of yourself, Kathleen.

Thanks for calling.

Thank you very much.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Call us with your language question, 877-929-9673.

Until this week, I assumed that everybody pronounces this word the way I do.

The word is spelled F-R-A-C-A-S.

Oh, boy, yes.

I am surprised we have not talked about this on the show.

So F-R-A-C-A-S, and it means a disturbance or commotion, right?

Yeah, noisy coral or brawl.

And you say, typically say what?

I say fracas.

I thought everybody said fracas.

But they say fracas with a silent S.

In Britain, yes, they say fracas.

Also in this country, you can say fracas.

Fracas, that’s the one I hear most often.

And those vowels are very American vowels.

Really?

Yeah, fracas.

Fracas.

I always say fracas.

And yeah, it comes to us through French.

So that’s probably why the British pronounce it with the fracas.

Yeah, an old verb meaning to break into pieces or something, right?

Yeah, I’m looking at the dictionaries here, and I see that some of the American dictionaries,

Like American Heritage, they don’t give the British pronunciation where the S is silent.

Right.

They only give fracas or fracas.

What do you say?

Do you say fracas?

That word has been skunked for me for a long time.

I think at one point I realized I said it incorrectly, besides which, when I say it, it tends not to go over very well because people don’t know what the hell I’m talking about.

Really?

Besides my son, who will often say, Papa, don’t use words like that.

Nobody knows what they mean.

He says that to you?

Yes, he’s 12.

He’s a prime snark for years.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Whitney calling from Tennessee.

Hey, Whitney, we’re in Tennessee.

Memphis.

All right.

Yeah, I wanted to call about the phrase, growing to beat the band.

Growing to beat the band.

And in what context have you heard that?

So the first time I remember hearing it, my mother has a bit of a green thumb,

And I was taking care of her plants one time, and then she’d gone on a trip.

And when she came back, she said, man, these plants are growing to beat the band.

And I gave her a quizzical look, and she said it means that they’ve grown a lot,

Or they’ve grown very quickly.

Yeah, so why does to beat the band mean a lot or very or much, right?

Right, yeah. And even where it comes from, because she told me an interesting story in my family, where my great-grandmother, who was in Thunderbolt, Georgia, there were Ichigella people that lived in the neighborhood.

And she would take them sometimes, my family sometimes, to South Carolina to go to the Dufuski Island.

And that’s where she picked up the phrase.

And that’s where my mother first remembers hearing it.

So, yeah, I was also wondering about the origins of it, too, if it was related at all to the Geechee Gullah kind of culture.

Oh, interesting.

That is interesting.

And a place called Thunderbolt, Georgia, I have to put them on my must-go list.

That sounds like a place I want to see.

Yes, you do.

It’s not a part of the Gichigola culture or language.

It’s more general English.

It’s kind of a standard English at this point, dating from the late 1800s.

And the origins are murky, but the best theory that I know is that it has to do with your typical public celebration back in the day.

Think pre-radio, pre-TV, where every speech by a politician had a band at the beginning.

Every public performance, except for maybe the sermon at church, had a band at the beginning.

Even then sometimes you had music.

And so to beat the band means to get there before the show starts,

To get there before the band starts,

Because when the band starts, you know it’s underway.

Originally it meant to get in there early or first,

And now it means to do it thoroughly or completely or all together all at once.

But it also combines with what you might call this thing that English does really well,

Which is percussive emphasis,

Where we use words related to hit and to beat and to strike

To indicate that something is good or is much or just to emphasize it like it’s a whopping good

Time to whop something is to hit it, right? But it’s very much an Americanism. You will find it

Elsewhere in the English speaking culture, but it’s very much associated with the United States.

And it’s kind of fading because I think as we become an increasingly hyper literate culture,

These old expressions that don’t have a lot of sense to them, we can’t make out their origins

Or connect them easily to our own lives, we stop using them.

And I think this is one that’s going.

Yeah, that would make sense.

That makes perfect sense.

Thank you, Whitney.

We appreciate your call.

Well, thank you all so much.

Have a good day.

Take care, Whitney.

Bye-bye.

Okay.

Is there an expression that your family uses that you’re curious about?

Call us 877-929-9673 or send it to us in email.

That address is words@waywordradio.org.

Boy, I am trying to wrap my mind around this word because I heard some academics using it, but the word is planful.

Is this something they talk about at learnings when they’re doing teachings?

Yeah, maybe. They were talking about it in a very positive way, saying this person is planful.

Full of plans? Full of ideas?

Yeah, methodical and yes.

Yes, thinking ahead.

They’re planful.

Yeah, and apparently this is a word that is being used more and more.

I won’t use it, but I appreciate that it conforms to standard English morphology.

It’s a perfectly good way to make a word.

It’s comprehensible when you hear it.

If you read it, you would know what it meant, but it’s not for me, I don’t think.

Not for me, but let’s give it a few years.

Yeah.

I think it may stick around.

The reason I said learnings and teachings is because those are two education words that I will never use those.

Oh, yeah.

They’re just not for me.

I didn’t need to make those into count nouns in that way.

877-929-9673.

More about what we say and why we say it as A Way with Words continues.

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 is our quiz guide, John Chaneski.

Hey, John.

Hey, Martha.

Hi, Grant.

This quiz this week is about size.

Now, you’ve mentioned before I am 6’5″.

I’m over 200 pounds.

Kind of a big guy.

I like big things.

Things like my male sibling.

Or as you may know it, big brother.

Okay, yeah, big brother, sure.

Also known as an authoritarian leader or invader of privacy like in 1984.

Now, sometimes, though, you have to go small.

Like the past, present, and future.

Or as you may know it, small time.

Got it?

Okay, gotcha.

All right, it’s either going to be big or it’s going to be small.

So the word big will be in the name or the word small will be in the name.

Exactly.

Here we go.

Ladle.

That’s such a non sequitur.

True.

Big spoon?

Big?

Also known as an asterism of seven stars within the constellation Ursa Major.

Oh, Big Dipper.

Yes, Big Dipper.

Asterism.

Here’s one.

A mark left on a surface by pressure.

Small print?

Yes, small print.

Very good.

Let’s try this one.

An alliance.

An alliance.

Big league.

Yes, big league.

Way to go, Martha.

Here’s a small one.

Presentation.

Small talk.

Yeah, small talk, yeah.

Spinning toy.

Big top.

Big top.

For my friends in the circus, yes.

Cook in oil in a shallow pan.

Small fry.

Small fry.

You seem to be enjoying these, Martha.

I really like that.

How about pressed milk curd food?

Oh, big cheese.

Big cheese, yes.

Milk curd food.

Notice of a traffic offense.

Big ticket.

Big ticket.

Big ticket.

It’s always big ticket items.

It’s never big ticket purchases, but it’s always items is one of those words.

Comes along with big ticket.

Big ticket items.

This one’s, I think, the toughest.

Here we go.

Looked after.

Marked by pettiness, meanness, or a narrow outlook.

Small-minded.

Small-minded.

Yes, way to go.

Different kind of minds to care for.

Gotcha.

Well, that was our big and small quiz, and you guys did very, very well.

Congratulations.

That was big fun, John.

Thank you.

You’re no small talent yourself.

Thanks, John.

We’ll talk to you next week.

Talk to you then.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

All righty.

Bye-bye.

This show’s about language and everything related to it.

If you’ve got a puzzle or a quiz for us or a word that’s mystified you, this is the place to find out more, 877-929-9673,

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

Hi there. You have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Duncan from Brooklyn.

What can we do for you, Duncan?

Yeah, well, I had a question about kind of Brooklyn slang and New York slang.

I originally grew up in California.

I heard, I was like having a conversation about slang with some of my friends from college

And someone brought up the fact that you can say dumb, meaning really.

And brick meaning especially cold.

And so just sort of asking if I were to say the phrase to them,

It’s dumb brick outside, but they know what I’m talking about.

They said that’s something we heard all the time.

And I was like, wow, if I heard those two next to each other,

I would have no idea what they were talking about before learning that from them.

So my question was sort of like just about the origin of that,

But also like examples of two slang words popped right next to each other

That would kind of make you go like, what on earth is this person talking about?

Yeah, dumb brick. I’ve heard both of those before. Let’s treat them separately. Brick is the most

Interesting of the two. Brick to mean cold is going to mystify most of our listeners. They’ve

Just never heard it unless they do know something about New York City slang. I know it’s been around

For at least 20 years. I’ve got written records of that, but I have no doubt that it’s older than

That. But it’s a classic New York slang word that isn’t really associated with one particular

Generation. So it doesn’t die, which is pretty cool. Sometimes when a slang word comes on too

Strong and too quickly, it’s associated with one era and it sounds dated or unfashionable pretty

Quickly. It’s not so with brick. Here we are about two decades on and it still has legs and still

Got a life. So that’s nice. But dumb as a intensifier or something you use as an emphatic,

That goes back at least 200 years, maybe 300 years.

And it started as a euphemism for damn, D-A-M-N.

And you can find it in the 1700s.

They’re talking about somebody being dumb rich, meaning very rich.

Isn’t that interesting?

That is interesting because it sounds so…

Contemporary, right?

Yeah, it sounds like something…

Because I know people also use stupid for that reason, too.

Like if it’s stupid gold outside, I’ve heard that before.

Yes, stupid is an intensifier, is an adverbial intensifier.

Has got at least 30 years on it.

I wouldn’t be surprised if I really looked into it.

I could find it in probably early hip-hop songs

In the late 70s, early 80s.

I would not be surprised at all.

Totally, totally.

And it’s funny, too.

It’s funny you say that it’s New York-specific.

I told my sister I was going to be talking to y’all about this word,

And she was like,

Are you sure that my friend didn’t tell you this?

Because I remember having this conversation

With someone from Long Island.

And I was like, no, my friend told me this.

So it was nice to be justified.

That it wasn’t just like something my friend made up.

Yeah, that’s pretty cool.

Yeah, so yeah, it’s a very New York thing,

To brick meaning cold.

There are a lot of theories about why brick,

Because cold bricks are especially cold,

And because they’re hard and heavy.

And New York, when it’s really cold,

Sometimes it’s a heavy duty just to leave the house.

But I think that’s all fanciful,

And people kind of putting on the word after they hear it,

Rather than that really being the origin of it.

Definitely.

Thanks for calling, Duncan. Really appreciate it.

Hey, no problem. Thanks for talking to me.

All right, take care. Bye.

Bye-bye.

All right, bye-bye.

If there’s a word or phrase that’s caught your ear, let us know about it, 877-929-9673,

Or send us an email that addresses words@waywordradio.org.

I learned a couple of bits of industry jargon recently.

Wigging and gag.

I don’t know either one of those.

Wigging is a film industry term, and it refers to male stunt performers standing in for female actors by putting wigs on and doing the stunt instead of hiring a woman.

Right.

So you’ve got an actor who needs a stunt done.

They’re an actor who’s not going to do it themselves.

They’re a female actor.

And so the male stunt performers are just dressing up like women to do the stunts instead of just hiring a woman to do the stunts.

Exactly.

Exactly.

And there’s controversy in that community because there are women who say, hey, I’m perfectly capable of doing this.

Don’t be wigging.

Don’t be wigging.

Right.

Yeah.

Dressing up like that.

Right.

And they call the stunts gags.

Oh, I did know that term.

Yeah.

I wasn’t quite sure what gag you met, but I assumed it was one I didn’t know.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So a guy will be wigging in order to do a gag.

There’s also another practice called painting down, which is when Caucasian stunt performers make themselves darker to fill in for a person of color who’s an actor.

Right.

Yeah.

Instead of going to a little more trouble to find a person of color to do the role.

Yeah, because there are plenty of perfectly capable people of color who are in the stunt industry.

And want the work.

Yeah, exactly.

Like we all do.

We all want a chance to do our jobs.

Right.

Right. So wigging and gags and painting down.

Wow. Interesting. And how’d you come across this?

Well, I was reading this article about a stunt performer named Devin McNair,

A woman who filed some complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission

Because they were wigging when she could have been performing the stunts herself.

Right. Yeah. That’s not quite a Mrs. Doubtfire situation where the whole point of the script

Is to have a man dressed as a woman, right?

Right, right. It’s that there are women who are perfectly capable of doing these things according to them.

All right. Give us a call, 877-929-9673. Welcome to A Way with Words.

Hey there. This is Kalisa calling from Wilmington, North Carolina.

Kalisa, welcome to the show.

Hello, Kalisa.

What’s on your mind?

I was wondering about a phrase that my grandmother uses often, and she says the phrase,

When you ask her how she is, she says, well, I’m fairly middling.

And at first I thought she was saying fairly, like F-A-R-L-Y, middling, as in I guess like middling around.

But I learned that that’s not really what she’s saying.

And I wanted to know, first of all, what is the full phrase and where did that come from?

Because I’ve heard several different things about the history of it.

-huh.

So she says fairly Midland?

Well, it sounds like she’s saying fairly Midland, but then I learned the phrase is fair to Midland.

So it comes from like farm workers or cotton picker workers, and that’s how they graded the cotton, I guess.

I don’t know, but it always sounds like she’s saying fairly Midland, like barely getting by is what I assumed she meant.

Yeah, the much more common expression is fair to Midland.

And as you suggested, it comes from the old system of grading products, agricultural products like livestock, like sheep or cotton or something like that.

And there were all different ways of classifying those goods.

I don’t know why they didn’t do it on a numeric, numerical basis or something.

But but, yeah, there were different categories like fine, fair, midland, ordinary, and then even more specific ones like barely fair or strict midland fair.

And so when people say I’m fair to Midland, what they usually mean is I’m about average.

Although some people say fair to Midland and they mean I’m not feeling so well.

Yeah, negative.

Midland, by the way, just for everyone, we’re not pronouncing the G at the end, but it looks like middling, M-I-D-D-L-I-N-G, middling.

Yeah, and we often get calls from Texas where people are saying, I’ve heard this expression fair to Midland, and they’re thinking of Midland, Texas, but it’s not that.

So it sounds like she’s using another variant of that.

Yeah, because middling can exist on its own as an adjective.

There’s plenty of uses of it in historical record going back well into the 1800s,

And it just means average, right there in the middle somewhere.

Okay, that’s so interesting.

And it’s interesting how people put their own spin on it,

Because I’ve heard several of my grandparents use it where it sounds like they’re saying fairly or fair to.

That’s so interesting. Okay, that’s great.

So that’s pretty much it.

Perfect. Well, thank you all so much. That really helps. I would love to keep doing research on this, and I want to write more about it. So this was so helpful.

Oh, our pleasure. Thanks for calling. We really appreciate it.

Thank you so much.

Bye, Kalisa.

All right. Bye-bye.

Bye.

Take care.

Those expressions that make it around the family that you take for granted, one day they just pop into your mind and you’re like, what? Why did we say that?

Well, this is the place to find out. 877-929-9673.

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

I found another Turkish proverb I really like that translates as a fava bean doesn’t get wet in somebody’s mouth.

Can you guess what that means?

I don’t know what that means.

It means if you tell this person a secret, they will tell it to others.

I think they’re running their mouth so much that the bean can’t even get wet.

It dries out.

I like the way you phrased that.

I found another Turkish proverb, like you’re the kind of person that goes up hunting Turkish proverbs.

That is because I am the kind of person that says, oh.

Martha’s collection of Turkish proverbs is well known in these parts.

Now I’ve got to learn Turkish.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi there, this is Sean in Asheville, North Carolina.

Hi, Sean.

My girlfriend and I were having a conversation the other evening about the name of a town

And a prominent road here near us in Asheville.

And the name of that town is spelled L-E-I-C-E-S-T-E-R.

And I was just calling to see if there was, A, an objectively correct way to pronounce this word,

And, B, if there is, why do we pronounce it so many different ways?

So the town is L-E-I-C-E-S-T-E-R, and you have avoided saying it on purpose.

Correct. Yeah, I don’t want to influence the decision.

And you want to know if there’s an unassailably correct way to say that word.

Yes.

All right, I’ve got 900 answers. I’ll give you the…

All right.

Sit down.

That’s what I expected.

The first thing is, when we talk about place names, the answer is no.

There’s no one way that all the different places that are called that same thing, there’s no rule on that.

We’ve talked numerous times on the show about how people can’t pronounce Versailles as Versailles and Paris as Paris and just a ton of different place names that are Charlotte or Charlotte and just different.

So the answer, the first answer is, how do the people in North Carolina say it?

That’s the correct way for that particular town and that particular place.

What do they say?

Okay.

So we, this is part of the argument, is that we have both heard it both ways multiple times from multiple different sources.

So you’ve heard it as Leicester and as what?

Leicester and also, to throw another one in there, as Leicester.

Leicester.

A combination of the two.

Yeah.

Oh, my goodness.

And how old is this town?

A couple hundred years?

Probably.

I’m assuming as old roughly as Asheville is.

Yeah, yeah.

I don’t know about that.

That sounds about right.

So this is part of a family of place names that we Americans have borrowed from the British.

And there’s a bunch of them.

And they all end in C-E-S-T-E-R.

And they all have this strangely compressed pronunciation where the word is long,

But the way we say it is short.

And it’s confusing because Americans tend not to do this in American English.

There’s a couple different things happening here,

And I’ll get to these other place names in a second.

One is vowel reduction, where different vowel sounds kind of blob together

To form one vowel sound.

And the other one is called haplology, which is a fun word,

Which means when two sounds appear in a word next to each other

And they’re very similar, they tend to reduce to just one sound.

So a word that’s spelled L-E-I-C-E-S-T-R

Did used to be pronounced something more like Leicester, Leicester, Leicester, Leicester.

But there were three syllables and now it tends to be two, okay?

Because the two syllables that sound roughly the same, the EIC and the EST combined to make one sound.

Whether it’s Leicester or Leicester is up to you.

And even in the United Kingdom, by the way, although most people say Leicester,

You will hear Leicester and you will hear longer forms of it as well,

Just depending how far deep in the countryside you are.

So other place names, you probably, everyone’s thinking of Worcester, right?

It looks like Worcester.

Everyone’s thinking of probably Gloucester, which looks like Gloucester.

People might be thinking of Limster, which looks like Leominster, and there’s a bunch of other ones.

And so we’ve inherited, for the most part, those pronunciations from the United Kingdom.

And again, they haven’t always been like that.

All of these place names, by the way, used to be two words.

That sester comes from a Latin word meaning camp.

And all of them seem to come from places that many years ago when the Romans were in the British Isles, they had a camp.

And so it would be a name of a place plus camp or the name of a person plus camp.

Winchester.

Yes.

Same route.

Yeah.

Winchester.

Very good.

So they’ve all reduced down.

And place names are their own special kind of abbreviation and contraction of language because they tend to be old.

They tend to be said a lot.

And when something is old and said a lot, it tends to simplify.

Okay.

I think that was what I was expecting the answer to be is that there’s no definite answer.

And it just sort of came to be how it was.

So if you really want to get to the heart of this, go down to where the old men hang out in front of the barbershop or the old women hang out in front of the beauty salon or the bench outside the courthouse or whatever the equivalent is there in Lester, Lester.

And ask them.

Talk to the folks who have been there for 50, 60, 70, 80 years.

And that’s probably your best bet.

All right.

Well, that sounds great.

Thank you guys so much.

Thanks for calling, Sean.

We appreciate it.

Thanks for calling.

Bye-bye.

All right.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

I found a great Turkish proverb.

In translation, it goes, if your mouth is burnt by milk, you blow before you eat yogurt.

Right.

It’s a burned once.

Yeah.

Right.

Yeah.

Or burned child fears the fire or something like that.

Burned child fears the fire.

Yeah.

But if your mouth is burnt by milk, you blow before you eat yogurt.

That’s absolutely true.

Yeah.

I feel like I’m going to start blowing on my yogurt before I eat it.

It reminds me of a woman who watched our boy when we were a kid.

She was from Trinidad.

She had the loveliest voice.

And one of the things that she taught my son when he was about six months old is to not go near the radiator in our Brooklyn apartment.

Yeah.

And she had a rhythm.

Then she would say, no, no, no, no, no, wave her finger.

And my son did that for years.

Oh, really?

Yeah, so there’s a remnant of Carol in the house for a long time in the mouths of my little boy.

No, no, no, no, no.

I don’t know why that reminded me of that.

Oh, that’s nice.

Share your family memories about language, 877-929-9673, or send them to us in email.

The address is 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 had a voicemail from Jason Schrader who said that his great-grandmother grew up in the tiny town of Correct, Indiana.

Correct, Indiana.

Correct, spelled like you might be.

C-O-R-R-E-C-T, correct.

Correct, Indiana.

And he wanted to know why it’s called Correct, Indiana.

So I reached out to our friends at the Indiana Historical Society, and they confirmed that indeed in southeastern Indiana, there’s a town called Correct.

And the story behind it is kind of fun because historically prospective postmasters could suggest post office names when a community started to coalesce and they needed a post office.

And so what happened in that part of Indiana was they wanted to establish a post office and the prospective postmaster wrote to the U.S. Post Office Department, as it was called then, and suggested a name.

Now, this was in 1881, and that was the year of the Great Comet of 1881.

There was a spectacular comet that could be seen in Indiana.

And so he thought, well, gosh, that’d be a great name, Comet.

So he writes this on the form and sends it to the post office department.

But the post office had a hard time reading his handwriting.

So they returned it back to him with a card that said Comet on it, asking him to confirm, is that the name you want?

And instead of saying, yeah, I want to call it Comet or yes, that’s right, he wrote correct and sent it back.

And so they thought, oh, we got it wrong the first time.

They don’t want to call it Comet.

He wants to call it correct.

Well, that’s a little bit weird, but OK.

Oh, goodness.

And so it wasn’t the way he wrote the word Comet.

It was a misunderstanding about his response to the request for verification.

So there is indeed a correct Indiana grant.

I think the next time we go to Indiana, we need to run down to correct and get a picture next to that sign that announces the town.

Oh, that’s a good one, though.

So many of these place names are like, oh, let’s just name it after the town in the old world.

But there’s something to this one, right?

Yeah.

Tell us your story about how you got your name or you named your pet or the town got named or the name of your book or what you call your car.

We love names, it’s part of language, and it’s something we can’t do without.

877-929-9673.

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

Hi there.

You have A Way with Words.

Yes.

Good afternoon.

This is Liz Russell.

I’m calling from San Antonio, Texas.

Oh, welcome, Liz.

What can we do for you?

Well, I am a World War I history buff, and in a number of poems or accounts, I have read

The term going west to describe people who had been, I think, killed in combat. And I’m wondering

Where that term originated from and why it’s used so much, especially in World War I writing.

Are these British authors?

Yes, for the most part, I think.

Yeah, that would make sense to me. Do you have any lines that you can recite for us where they

Use go west in this way?

No, I’m sorry, I don’t. I have a number of books of poetry or letters, especially.

And I am just guessing that it was a general euphemism, maybe just slang from that time period.

Yeah, it’s much older than that. But yeah, for a long time, Go West was almost, there’s two ways it’s been used.

Literarily, like you’re talking about in poetry and so forth, in prose.

But also culturally, it’s very strongly allied with Scotland and Ireland when we think of all the British Isles put together.

It’s far more common in the writings that you find there.

And it typically is believed to come from the idea that the sun goes down in the west.

The end of every day is the sun setting in the west.

You can use the obvious metaphor of when we set our own sun, we are going west when our lives are over.

There are some other kind of fanciful theories about the walk to a hanging place being westward of the main town, but I think that’s not true.

And there’s another one that has something to do with whist, the game, W-H-I-S-T.

That one definitely is not true.

So generally, it’s just an elaboration on the idea that the sun sets in the West and the death of every day is like the death of every man and woman.

We go West when we die.

Well, that explains it.

They’ve also, they talked about that in that J.R.R. Tolkien movie, like they talked about the elves going west.

So a number of times I’ve heard that just as a reference.

And so I was just curious about it.

Well, thank you for answering my question.

Yeah, the Tolkien comparison is very important because he is, by the way, the reason that I’m here on the show today and that I’m involved in any kind of language-interested topic at all.

And so he very much had his ear to the language.

He understood both etymologies, classical languages, languages he invented himself.

He could write in runes just off the cuff.

And he understand the colloquial speech of the people around him because he lived both poor and rich at different times in his life.

So he encountered different kinds of speech.

And I would not be surprised if the metaphor that he uses for the elves comes from this being a fairly well-known expression where he was raised.

I hope that helps.

It sure did.

Thank you so very much.

Thank you.

Take care now.

Okay.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

I want to hear more about how Tolkien set you here.

For me, reading those books at 10, 11, 12, and seeing these fantastic indices in the back with the languages and the alphabets and stuff,

And I appreciated him as a writer probably more than I liked the stories.

I loved the stories, but the fact that he could put a word together.

And he resuscitated some of these archaic and just obscure, but in some cases, words that had already died, he brought them back.

And he put them into his works in such a way that you think, oh, he must have coined that.

But he didn’t.

It’s his own language.

877-929-9673.

You remember our conversation a couple of weeks ago about the expression, little pitchers have big ears?

-huh, yeah.

Don’t say stuff around kids if you don’t want it repeated.

Right.

That prompted an email from Cheryl Taylor in Chicago who wrote,

My friends and I would simply say corn when we thought someone was listening in on our conversation.

Big ears of corn.

Yeah.

She said the first time my friend said it, it took a minute for it to sink in.

That’s funny.

Big ears of corn.

Right.

Corn.

Yeah.

We also heard from Celeste Lux, who lives in Nebraska,

And she said that her understanding of it was little pishers, you know, like the Yiddishism.

Oh, little pishers.

P-I-S-H-E-R-S.

Yeah, I could see how that would be a variant of it, right?

Yeah, possibly.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, good morning.

This is Dennis Corcoran calling from New Smyrna Beach in Florida.

Hi, Dennis.

Welcome to the show.

Hi, Dennis.

I’m calling with a question about a word I can’t remember.

It signifies the interval between the end of something like somebody’s life or an event

And the death of the last person who has a meaningful memory of that something.

What is that word?

Let’s recap that.

So it’s a word for an event that happens,

The interval between an event that happens

And when the last person dies who remembers it.

Is that right?

Yes, that’s correct.

And you saw this or heard this someplace?

I read it in a magazine article that I can’t remember and can’t find.

Okay.

Did you read it a long time ago or recently?

Last summer.

You know, the only thing that I can think of that’s even vaguely related to this is an East and Central African concept known as Sasha and Zamani.

Would it have to do with that, I wonder?

No.

The word I remember sounded vaguely Latin.

Vaguely Latin.

Okay.

It’s not like a memento mori, right?

Reminding of you that death is coming for us all.

It’s nothing like that, is it?

Yes.

Yes.

It’s in that vein.

Okay.

Oh.

I don’t know what that would be.

The only thing that I can think of that’s even vaguely related to that is this African concept of Sasha, which is the spirits or ancestors that are kept alive in the thoughts and hearts of people who remember them.

And then Samani, which is where our ancestors recede when they’re no longer remembered by the living.

So, for example, if the last person who can recall an ancestor passes away, then that ancestor also passes into the realm of Zamani.

It’s something that the philosopher John Samuel Mbiti called the ocean of time into which everything is absorbed.

And it’s this different kind of perception of time where the past is actually something that we’re approaching rather than moving away from.

It’s a really beautiful concept, but of course it’s not Latinate like you’re suggesting.

No, but what you describe is exactly what I had in mind.

Oh, well there you go.

The other thing that might relate to this, although again it’s not a Latin word, and I’ve seen this expressed a lot of different ways by a lot of different thinkers and writers and so forth.

But there’s a guy named David Eagleman.

He talked about three deaths.

The first about the body dying,

The second is when we’re buried,

And the third is when we’re forgotten.

So I could see calling what you’re talking about

The third death,

When that last person goes who remembers a thing

Or an event, a person, a place.

Yeah, that works.

Very interesting.

I wish I could come up with that word for you,

But I can’t,

But I like Martha’s description of the African tradition.

Yeah, you want to spell those for us, Martha?

Yeah, Sasha is spelled S-A-S-H-A, and Zamani is Z-A-M-A-N-I.

And there’s a lot more about this in John Samuel Mbiti’s book.

He was Kenyan-born, and he wrote a book in 1969 called African Religions and Philosophy.

And I think it’s such a gorgeous concept to think about time that way.

It’s not linear the way the Western thought puts it typically, right?

Right, right.

That as you age, you are advancing towards the past.

Yes, toward the great vault where collective human history exists.

And his last name is M-B-I-T-I, right?

So I hope that helps, Dennis.

It certainly does.

And we’ll look around for a Latin term for it, too.

Maybe there’s some Latin about the third death or something like that.

And we have a lot of well-read readers.

If they read the same thing you did, we’re sure to get emails about it.

All right?

Okay.

Thank you so much.

This has been very interesting.

Thank you.

Take care now.

Take care, Dennis.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Well, maybe you know the word for the interval of time between the date of an event and the death of the last person who remembered it.

Give us a call, 877-929-9673, or send it to us in email.

That address is words@waywordradio.org, or hit us up on Twitter.

Our handle is Wayword.

Remember our conversation with Andrea here in San Diego who was talking about a new restaurant called Curiosity?

And she was wondering if there’s a term for that kind of intentional misspelling in advertising.

Right, those punny restaurant names or salon names.

They’re so common, right?

Right.

And I forgot that another term for that is sensational spelling.

Oh, nice.

Very good.

Sensational spelling or divergent spelling.

That’s how you get fruit loops with two O’s in fruit.

The best example of sensational spelling that I know of was my sister-in-law.

When she was 11 or 12, they got a new kitten.

And my in-laws love animals, and they always seem to have a dozen of a variety of different things.

And they got a cat, and she named it Jazzy.

But as she explained to us, it’s Jazzy with a backward Z because the backward Z is cooler.

Jazzy with a cool backward Z.

That is sensational spelling.

That is pretty spectacular.

You know, I was looking at a can of Ready Whip the other day.

I’m going through a ready whip phase where I put whipped cream in my coffee.

Okay.

That is spelled so strangely.

R-E-D-D-I-W.

Yes.

Is there an H?

No.

W-I-P with a hyphen?

But you knew about the two Ds?

We were talking.

You know, I had my phase already.

But you’re in a ready whip phase.

What comes next?

I don’t know.

You’re going to start getting all these coupons in the mail now.

Oh, I hope so.

I bet your Facebook ads are real fun.

Oh, gosh.

877-929-9673 is the number to call to talk with us

Or send your comments about language to words@waywordradio.org.

Hi there. You have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Chelsea Northrup.

Hi, Chelsea.

I’m calling from a band to New York,

And I would like to know about the phrase heavier than a dead minister.

My husband uses it frequently,

But neither of us understand why a dead minister is so heavy.

So, Chelsea, just to repeat, you’re from where in New York?

Binghamton, New York.

Binghamton, New York. Gotcha.

And your husband says heavier than a dead minister?

Yeah.

Meaning very heavy or heavy beyond all belief?

Yes. Very, very heavy.

Very, very heavy. Wow.

Does he have any idea where he picked that up?

Both of his grandfathers are from near Watertown, New York, and they both used it.

So he learned it from them, I guess.

Is this said with kind of jocularity or is this a serious thing?

It sounds kind of, might be slightly humorous to me, although it’s morbid.

I think it is humorous, but he uses it whenever he talks about something really heavy, and so does his grandfather.

We’re talking like a refrigerator or a piano or something like that.

Like a dead cow, yeah.

His grandfather was a dairy farmer.

Wow, and how does he feel about ministers?

I don’t know.

They were both relatively respectful and religious, so I don’t know how they feel about dead ministers.

It’s not exclusive to your husband or his family.

It has had some history to it.

I find uses of it going back to the 1800s.

It pops up first, as far as I can tell, in print.

In a Kansas newspaper, there’s somebody who’s claiming that they were a slave raised in

Kentucky, and they write,

At the log rollings of my state, someone attacking a large oak log would say,

This is heavier than a dead minister.

And this writer is using this in comparison to a political foe.

Who apparently is very huge and perhaps is the kind of person who has lived off the fat of others’ labor.

And so a lot of the uses that I see of heavier than a dead minister,

And sometimes it’s dead preacher or dead priest,

A lot of the uses seem to be suggesting that they’re overweight because they don’t do real work.

They’re not from farm stock.

They’re not out there tending to the cattle and they’re not there working in the fields

And they’re showing up at other people’s houses for dinner every night, you know,

And eating, you know, the best pies and the best meat and so forth.

And, you know, this fits into a long tradition of poking fun at the clergy and the church in Europe,

Where often the priests would be well fed.

There’s an Italian pasta called strozza preti, which literally translates as priest stranglers.

And the idea was that a priest would come to your house at dinnertime or lunchtime on Sundays,

And this would be a kind of pasta that you could fill them up with.

Or, of course, there’s the sweet eggy dessert from Portugal called Barriga de Freira,

Which means nuns’ tummies.

It was a reference to the idea that nuns were better fed

Than other people who weren’t connected with the church.

So a lot of this isn’t about wanting ministers to be dead,

And it’s not about imagining a dead minister.

It’s just talking about them as big people, larger than your average folk.

Very interesting.

So, Chelsea, that’s what we know.

So it’s got some history to it.

It’s about overfed clergy.

Thank you.

Yeah, our pleasure.

Thanks for calling.

Thanks for listening.

Yep, thank you very much.

Take care.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

There’s another version of that, heavier than a dead minister down a well,

Which suggests the awkwardness of how did it get in the well?

How do you get it out?

It’s even harder to lift out of a well.

And a lot of times the varieties, the variations on this expression

Are about the social complications as well as the physical complications.

The moral complications of having a person of the cloth who is now deceased.

What does this all mean?

Oh, yeah, yeah.

So there’s a real awkwardness to it, right?

And some people have tried to extrapolate things like,

If even a minister can die,

What does it say about the rest of us who are further from God?

Oh, wow.

So it’s a sermon waiting to be written.

That is heavy.

877-929-9673.

I just learned the word porkies.

You probably know it from…

Oh, yeah, lies.

It’s a rhyming slang.

Yes, it is.

It’s British rhyming slang.

Also used in Australia.

Okay, right.

And if you tell a porky, you’re telling a lie

Because lie rhymes with pork pie.

Right.

I came across this reference that says,

Scientists found that more blood is pumped into our nasal tissues

When we tell porkies, causing them to expand.

So our noses do grow when we lie.

According to this article.

That’s interesting.

That’s the kind of stuff I read.

Hit us up on Twitter, W-A-Y-W-O-R-D.

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.

Our toll-free line is always open in the U.S. And Canada, 877-929-9673.

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

A nonprofit supported by listeners and organizations

Who are changing the way the world talks about language.

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.

Thank you.