L-U-R-V-E, Love

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You’re listening to A Way with Words.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

You know, Grant, you and I read a lot of email newsletters, right?

And there’s one that I keep pressing on other people who are interested in language, and that is Michael Quinion’s e-newsletter.

I know you read it every week.

I do the same thing.

I treat it like a religious tract.

I’m like, “You must read this. It will change your life.”

You do?

Yeah!

Well, because people, the world is filled with bad information about language, but Michael, who’s British, consistently gets it right, doesn’t he?

He is great.

He is a dogged etymologist there at worldwidewords.org.

For example, in a recent newsletter, I learned the word “carrot mobbing,” which you probably already know.

That’s a kind of social activism where people shop at a small business specially chosen for its good environmental practices.

Carrot mobbing, sort of like flash mobbing.

And so it has a lot of information like that in short, digestible pieces.

And at the very end, he offers this little lagniappe, a little treat, which is a few headlines and bloopers and that kind of thing that people send in.

One of his emails came from a reader who said, “A few days ago, I was down in Los Angeles and saw a sign which said, ‘In full shoes. Three for $20.'”

I love that!

I don’t have a need for three shoes.

I love it.

I have a need for that sign.

I want to put it on our website.

“Shoes. Three for $20.”

Anyway, that’s the email newsletter that I press on people who want to learn about language.

What about you?

My favorite new blog, and I’ve got a ton of these, is the one that linguist Arnold Zwicky has started keeping.

As you know, he is part of the Language Log crowd.

That’s the big language-related group blog.

It’s fabulous.

But he’s got so much stuff that he wants to say.

He started his own blog on the side.

Now, Arnold is a visiting professor of linguistics at Stanford, but that doesn’t mean that he’s all stuffy.

A lot of his stuff is about comics or pop culture or something that somebody said on a television show.

So the entry point is very easy for anyone to get into.

One of my favorite posts that he had recently was about a woman who took her cat to get a haircut.

Now, she was from the South, and she’d moved to the North.

And so she told them, she said the same thing she would have said at home, “I need a line cut for my cat.”

L-I-N-E.

Oh, no!

When she got the cat back, they had given the cat a lion cut.

So he had a tuft on the end of the tail, big fluffy hair around his neck and his feet, and the whole rest of the body was shaved.

The poor kitty does not look happy.

But this is Arnold’s way of talking about a really simple dialect pronunciation of “line.”

It comes out “line.”

That is beautiful.

And you can totally understand how somebody in the North, where they don’t say “line,” might misunderstand, right?

Sure.

But Arnold Zwicky, the blog is at arnoldzwicky.wordpress.com.

You can also just Google his name, Arnold Zwicky, that’s Z-W-I-C-K-Y, and he’ll come up with this page and his language log post as well.

Good stuff.

Good stuff.

Poor kitty.

If you’ve got a favorite blog that you’d like to share with us, give us a call, send us an email.

The email address is words@waywordradio.org, and the phone number is 1-877-929-9673.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hey, this is Amanda from Fort Worth, Texas.

Hi, Amanda.

Well, hello, Amanda.

How you doing?

I’m fine.

How are y’all doing?

Super duper.

Great.

Good.

I’m calling in a phrase that I grew up with.

I don’t know that it’s necessarily Texan, but the phrase is “raise the window down.”

So this is like you’re in an automobile and it’s hot in the car and the air conditioning’s not working and you raise the window down.

Right, and that means to open it.

That is great.

I love it.

Very familiar, though.

Very familiar.

I think I’ve heard this one before.

Really?

Now, are you from Texas originally?

That’s where your people are from?

Yes, I’m from a small town in central Texas.

Okay, okay.

Another one that we use is “help your plate.”

Nice.

And I learned that from my in-laws when I married my husband years ago, and they would say, “Darling, are you going to help your plate?”

And it means to put the food on your plate as in, I guess, helping yourself to a serving or…

Or a helping.

Mm—

So you help your plate.

Now, you know, Amanda, that one is new to me.

I don’t think I’ve heard that one before, but you’re explaining it makes sense.

And his people, where are they from?

East Texas.

Okay.

But now let’s go back to “raise the window down.”

How does that one work?

Let me ask you a question here, Amanda.

Did you ever hear anyone talk about a window that opened sideways?

Did they ever say, “Raise that window down,” or is it only a window that goes up and down?

Just a window that goes up and down.

Yeah.

Because, you know, some buildings, some homes and offices will have windows that open sideways, right?

Mm—

So what do you do in that case?

It comes from the Italian side of my family, and I wonder if—because my father always grew up hearing it—if when they learned English, something didn’t get confused.

I don’t know that that saying is necessarily Texan.

Well, no, it’s Southern.

You’ll actually find it pop up here and there throughout the South.

Really?

Yeah.

Mm—

I don’t think it has a thing to do with Italian heritage at all.

Wow.

Good to know.

Yeah, yeah.

So did you surprise people if you were ever away from Texas and used those expressions?

Oh, all the time.

You know, a lot of this language is familiar to me.

I had an aunt who—God bless her—she passed away this last year, but she lived down in the Dallas area 20, maybe 30 years, and I swear, every time I saw her, she had something new to say that I’d never heard before.

But she used to take smug delight in just speaking as thick as she could.

And do you ever do that?

You ever just decide to pour it on just a little extra just to bamboozle them?

It’s funny because I don’t hear my own accent.

Right, right.

But others, you know, some of us, I guess, our accents are stronger than others.

But no, I mean, we say things, I think, and don’t even realize that someone else wouldn’t understand, like “fixin'” or “y’all.”

I mean, we always say “y’all.”

And that’s perfectly natural.

That’s the way most of us behave in our lives.

We feel like we speak regular American English, and there’s nothing wrong with what comes out of our mouths, right?

Right.

I’m telling you, man, there’s nothing wrong with what you’re saying.

It’s perfectly fine.

I had a friend the other day, and he’s an older gentleman.

He’s about to turn 90.

And we were talking about different phrases and how saying something can mean two different things.

And he said, for instance, Amanda, one could say to somebody, “When I look in your eyes, time stands still.”

Or I could say, “Your face could stop a clock.”

It was hilarious.

It was really funny.

Oh, I’m stealing that.

I want to steal it before everyone’s heard it.

I don’t think you can deliver it in the same way, though.

No, no, I can’t at all.

Not authentically.

But that’s a good one.

Amanda, thank you for sharing so much of your language with us.

This is interesting stuff.

You’re welcome.

Y’all are awesome.

I really enjoy your show, and thank you very much for having me.

All right.

Oh, it was our pleasure.

You take care of yourself.

Okay.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Well, we’d love to hear your stories about something you heard that was funny or something somebody told you that you didn’t understand or vice versa and mishmash and this and that.

And what not, and what not.

Don’t forget what not.

And heretofore and whereas and henceforth.

The number to call is 1-877-929-9673.

That’s 1-877-WAYWORD.

Or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Martina.

Hello, Martina.

Hello, Martina.

Welcome.

Thank you.

Where are you calling from?

I’m calling from San Diego, California.

Yeah, what’s up?

All right.

I bought a card for my husband who is serving in the Navy in Iraq for a year.

And on the card, there were two guys.

It was kind of a ’70s photograph.

The one guy on the left looks like an office clerk with a brown polyester suit, massive sideburns.

And the other one on the right looks like a Gary Glitter-like psychedelic rock star with hairy chest and big hair.

And then the inscription read, “By day, smart, sensible office clerk with suit. By night, crazy cosmic lurve god with attitude.”

And I just love the image, and I love the whole card because I sent it with a present of my husband’s favorite TV show, which is from England from the ’70s.

And I wanted to kind of combine this, but I do not know the meaning of the word lurve.

It spells L-U-R-V-E.

And I’m not an English native speaker.

My first language is German.

And so I always pick up my dictionaries, and I could not find it.

And then I asked some friends who were English native speakers, and they didn’t know it either.

So I thought, maybe that’s a question for Grant and Martha.

Well, hello.

I think it is.

Well, what do you think it means?

Well, I thought maybe it’s an Austin Powers-like pronunciation of the word love.

And I can’t even fake a British accent, but it’s kind of groovy.

Oh, please go ahead and try.

Lurve or something like that.

Nice, nice.

But I don’t know if that’s the case or not.

It’s something like that.

It’s certainly an exaggerated dramatic pronunciation of love.

So you can just replace L-U-R-V-E with love and get the same idea, except there’s a little more happening there.

When you say love, you know, it’s just like an exaggerated way.

And it’s kind of a mooning, pining, angsty kind of love.

You know, it’s just really over — it’s not love.

It’s love.

But what happens there is something interesting in the mouth, at least to English speakers.

It’s another case of what we call, da-da-da-da, the intrusive R.

So when we stretch out that O sound and we kind of pucker our lips and kind of a kissy face, just do that.

Everyone do that with me now.

I want the entire country.

Just do this.

You go, “Love.”

Yeah, you hear the R kind of show up, doesn’t it?

That’s right.

And so people, when they do this really dramatic kind of kissy face voicing of the word “love,” obviously the best way to spell that is L-U-R-V-E.

Okay.

And you’ll find it a whole bunch of places online.

And there are almost always humorous or ironic uses of love where it’s kind of teasing, joshing, jesting, joking kind of talk about love rather than something very serious and personal.

And certainly if you were giving your husband a card with a couple of characters out of the 1970s on it, like two different kind of clichés of the ’70s man on it, then that’s exactly the right medium for love to show up.

Well done, well done.

All right, well, thank you for calling.

We appreciate the question.

Thank you so much, you guys.

That was really awesome.

We lurved talking to you, didn’t we, Grant?

Yes, we did.

Thank you, Martine.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Grant, is that the same idea as — I know we’ve talked before about the word “nasty.”

Nasty.

That’s really “nasty” instead of “nasty.”

Is that the same idea that intrusive are?

It’s a little bit like that, yeah.

There are some variations here.

And there’s a jargony word that we can kind of throw in here that’s the — Oh, good.

You sure?

Yes.

It’s a type of apenthesis.

Oh, of course, apenthesis.

Apenthesis is when a sound inserts itself into a word for no reason really whatsoever that has to do with etymology or the true history or original spelling of the word.

Apenthesis.

E-P-N-T-H-E-S-E-S, apenthesis.

Okay, all right.

Well, super-duper, if you’ve got a question like Martina’s, we’d love to help you with it.

The number is 1-877-929-9673 or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Next on A Way with Words, it’s a workout for your gray matter.

Stay tuned.

You’re listening to A Way with Words.

I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett, and we’re joined now by our quiz guy, Greg Pliska.

Hello, Greg.

Hello, Grant.

Hello, Martha.

Hiya, Greg.

What do you have for us?

Well, I have a puzzle that I’m calling Weight Loss Program.

Okay.

My sister recently had some really great success actually with a diet, and in her honor I’ve put together this little quiz.

Here’s how it works.

Each answer is a pair of words.

And if you remove a word for a particular unit of weight from the first word in the pair, you’ll get the second word.

Oh.

Nice.

So I will give you clues to both words, and you give me the answer pair.

For example, here’s a clue to a seven-letter word, a topic for this radio program.

Now, if you remove a unit of weight from that word, you’ll get a three-letter word that means to spoil or disfigure.

So you’re looking for a seven-letter word and a three-letter word.

So like mar-edomology?

No.

Am I going in the right direction?

You got the right second word, mar, but you want to add a unit of weight.

Gram.

Gram, mar.

Grammar.

Oh, grammar.

Grammar, or mar-edomology.

It’s about C words.

That’s right.

Exactly.

It’s mautical.

Just to make sure that’s clear, you got the first seven-letter word, topic for this radio program, grammar.

You take out gram, and that leaves you with mar.

Gotcha.

If you’re ready to go, let’s lose some weight.

Okay.

Number one, seize as an illegally parked car and a contemporary communication medium.

Oh, like impound an I-M.

There you go.

Phew.

Well done, yes.

Good clue.

Grant is looking at me puzzled, puzzled.

Gotcha.

I-M stands for instant messaging.

Yes, onto I-M.

So to seize the car is to impound, and you remove pound, and you get I-M.

Very nice.

All right, you guys are good.

You guys are good.

Here’s another one.

Painful headaches and the first name of architect van der Rohe.

All right, so painful headache is a migraine, and then the unit of measurement is a grain, which leaves M-I-E.

Actually, painful headache is headaches, plural.

Oh, headaches.

I’m sorry, I didn’t hear the plural.

That’s all right.

So M-I-E-S.

Oh, yeah.

That’s a Dutch name.

How do you pronounce it?

M-I-E-S, I believe.

M-I-E-S.

M-I-E-S van der Rohe, famous architect.

Yes, and a grain is not as common a weight, but it’s used mostly now to measure the mass of bullets and gunpowder.

Yes, that is correct.

Here’s another one for you.

A Palm Beach County resort town whose name is Spanish for mouth of the rat and a timely benefit or blessing.

So the big word is Boca Raton, right?

What was the other one?

A blessing?

A timely benefit or blessing.

So the unit of weight is a carat, C-A-R-A-T, which leaves B-O-O-N, boom.

Boom, absolutely.

Very good.

I think I get the rules now.

That’s good because I’ve run out of units of weight.

Okay, let’s start.

Let’s begin.

We can play this with — we can do this with units of length as well, if you’d like.

Oh, can we?

Yeah, it’s not a weight loss program anymore.

A little bonus question.

It’s now a length loss program.

It’s exactly the same thing, except you’re removing a unit of length in order to get a new word.

So your first clue is guaranteeing oneself a position in the playoffs, and if you remove a unit of length, you get a word meaning to hold onto tightly.

Well, clench is in there somewhere.

Yep, guaranteeing oneself a position in the play.

Clenching.

Clenching.

Take out inch and you get cling, C-L-I-N-G.

Which means to hold onto tightly.

Exactly.

Well done.

All right.

Here’s another one for you.

Figure of speech comparing two unlike objects and the Spanish word for yes.

Well, we know the last one is C-S-I, right?

It means both S-I.

And a figure of speech comparing two unlike objects.

Often using like or as.

So a simile.

And the word is mile.

Yes.

Okay.

Yes.

Okay.

How about one more?

Okay, you got it.

One more.

This is a length.

It’s a piece of rope for fastening something on a ship, and your second clue is abbreviation referring to a connected set of computers.

Oh, so the first word is lanyard.

Yep.

And the unit of measurement is a yard, which leaves us with L-A-N, which stands for local area network.

Land.

Land.

Exactly.

Excellent.

Well, you see, you’ve slimmed down already.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, our own version of Wait Wait right here on this show.

This is good.

This is good.

This was a good one.

Oh, just because you got most of the answers.

Actually, no.

What I like about these puzzles, Greg, is that I get inside your brain, and it’s a fairly happy place.

It’s fun, Greg.

So you think?

Well, no.

It shows that your deviousness and cleverness, and you know, this is how you — it’s like reading an author.

Yeah, yeah.

We like what you’ve done with the boys.

Little bits of your character are revealed, and I’m like, oh, okay.

This is how the man works.

Now we get you.

Okay.

Now, next quiz guy, because we’ve got him figured out.

But it was great fun.

Thanks for coming, Greg.

Thank you.

It’s my pleasure.

If you have a question about wordplay, language, grammar, slang, regional expressions, or strange old sayings, call us at 1-877-929-9673.

That’s 1-877-WAYWORD, or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

[music]

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Jessica in Fort Worth.

Hiya, Jessica.

What’s up?

Well, I was calling with a question about the subjunctive tense.

Okay.

I very seldom hear it used anymore, and actually, even in print, I’m seeing that it’s not really used, and I’m wondering, is the subjunctive tense dead, or is it just not that commonly used any longer?

Is it moribund?

Tell me about it.

Let me ask you where you’re not seeing it, where you expect to see it.

A lot of times, even in print, I just hear people say, “I wish I was,” as opposed to, “I wish I were.”

Mm—

Mm—

There are two things to say about the subjunctive.

First of all, it’s a mood, not a tense.

Oh.

Tenses like past, present, and future, that kind of thing, and English verbs also have mood.

There’s the indicative mood, which indicates inaction.

Jessica is calling A Way with Words.

There’s the imperative mood, which is, “Jessica, call A Way with Words.”

And then there’s the subjunctive, and I can tell that you’re sensitive to what the subjunctive does, which is that it can do a lot of different things, like express a wish or talk about something that’s not really true, right?

Right.

Like, “I wish I were an Oscar Mayer Wiener,” or something, right?

Right.

Right.

Here’s the thing about it.

Most of the time, the subjunctive is invisible.

You’re using a subjunctive, and you don’t even know it.

For example, if I say, “Every week you call A Way with Words,” that’s indicative.

But if I say, “Jessica, it is important that you call A Way with Words,” the word “call” is the same in both of those sentences, but in that second sentence, it’s functioning as a subjunctive.

And so there are lots of verbs that get used all the time, and we don’t realize that they’re subjunctive.

But as you said, it starts to rear its subjunctive head.

It pops up with the verb “to be,” just as you indicated, and so it’s a lot more obvious there.

And you use it usually when you’re talking about something that’s “contrary to fact.”

Have you heard that expression used in English class?

Yeah, I believe so.

So, for example, I might say, “If Jessica were here, we would all go out for burritos,” or something, right?

Right.

But I know that you’re not here.

So I’m saying, “If Jessica were here,” that’s a subjunctive.

I have a special place in my heart for the subjunctive.

Like you, you would like to see it more, right?

I always, when I hear, like if I hear someone say, “I wish I was a millionaire,” that jumps out to me almost like a double negative, and it just screams of poor grammar.

Mm-mm—

You, me, and Beyoncé, do you know her song, “I Wish I Were a Boy”?

I don’t think I’ve heard that one, but I always think of the “If I Were a Wealthy Man” from “The Fiddler on the Roof.”

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So major props to “Fiddler on the Roof” and Beyoncé.

They’ve got it right, that subjunctive.

Let me counter all this poppycock by saying that the subjunctive is dead.

Your producer told me that you would say that.

Of course.

Put a fork in it.

Seriously, put a fork in it.

No, no, no.

It’s been dying for 200 years, and in very isolated cases, is it necessary?

And in most of those cases, they are artificial constructions invented by grammarians in order to prove a point that some part of the language needs to be sustained because it can’t sustain itself.

This is life support that you’re putting the subjunctive on, and the language doesn’t require it.

Most of the weight is carried by words like “may” and “should” anyway.

“If” does a remarkable job.

And as you said, the reason the subjunctive is invisible is because the subjunctive is almost unnecessary.

Well, is it necessary in other languages?

Yes, very much so.

Because they’re different languages.

Languages don’t map tense to tense, mood to mood, word to word.

Well, no, no, no.

But I think, I mean, fine art isn’t absolutely necessary, but it’s beautiful, and I think there’s something really beautiful.

Once I finally mastered the subjunctive in Spanish, and it took me a long time, I felt like I had subjunctivitis because I just couldn’t do it.

And then I thought, man, we have this weak subjunctive in English.

I see what’s happening here.

It’s not nearly as flexible and robust and beautiful.

I see what’s happening here.

If this were 150 years ago and the cotton gin were invented, you’d say, “No, thank you, I prefer it to do it the old way, by hand, because it took me so much effort to learn how to sort this cotton by hand.”

Jessica, what do you have to say to that?

You must let the skill die.

If you were here.

It sounds awkward to me to say, “I wish I was a millionaire,” and I’m going to stick with you saying, “I wish I were a millionaire,” and I’m going to go back and see if I can learn some Spanish that I seem to have missed out on.

Excellente.

Well, I wish you were a millionaire, too.

And dollars, not pesos.

Exactly.

Well, Jessica, thanks for stimulating discussion here.

Thank you, Jessica.

Thank you so much for speaking to me today.

All right, you’re right.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Okay, well, how about the rest of you?

What do you feel about this adjunctive?

Should it live or should it die?

In English.

Let us know.

The number is 1-877-929-9673, or you can email us.

The address is words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hey, this is Jade from San Diego.

Hi, Jade.

What’s cooking?

Well, I have this friend who’s a surf writer, editor for a surf magazine, and he picks up a lot of slang in his travels.

And I noticed this phrase he was using, this word, and it kind of started to disturb me.

So I was going to give you kind of the setup.

Basically, I asked him, “So I guess you’re pretty psyched to be surfing in Bali next month.”

And he goes, “Yeah, no, we will be pretty stoked if our plane doesn’t crash.”

And then a little while later, I heard something from my wife, kind of the same thing.

And so I said something like, “Hey, are we bringing steak to the barbecue at the Smith’s tonight?”

And she goes, “Yeah, no, we are not spending $50 to celebrate the birthday of their labradoodle.”

So I don’t know where to go with, “Yeah, no.”

Yeah, no.

Let me ask you, does your surfer friend hang out with a lot of Australians?

Actually, yes.

I would say that he’s in contact with the Aussies quite a bit, and definitely their lingo seeps into our conversations a lot.

We all surf.

Martha, this is an interesting question.

Yeah, no, you’ve heard this before, right?

Yeah, no, I have.

Jade, you’re not the only person who’s noticed that, and it’s interesting that you bring up the Australians, because there has been some research by Australian linguists on how often that seems to be used in Australia.

Oh, really?

Yeah, yeah.

And I don’t think that linguists have quite sorted out exactly how it works, or the logic of it, except that, yeah, no, they identify this expression as a discourse marker, or a discourse particle, if that makes you feel any better.

Okay.

Well, it’s interesting that you say that you can’t, that it bothers you, because it’s one of these things that doesn’t really have a grammatical function, but I think it works within conversation.

I think people who are having a conversation, it still makes sense to them, right?

Right.

It’s kind of like they’re being polite, and if you ask a question that kind of has a yes, affirmation, response, place, then the yeah kind of fits, and then the no, or they might disagree, or they have something that’s kind of negative or contrary right after, so it’s kind of a shortcut.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It’s sort of a softening, a way of being nice and then disagreeing sometimes.

That’s exactly the point.

There’s a certain face-saving happening there.

Certainly, if there’s a power dynamic difference between the two speakers, for example, if one knows more than another, the yeah and no can kind of take the sting out of a very harsh kind of no, you’re wrong, or yes, I’m absolutely right.

And so sometimes it’s about asking if there’s two things happening there.

They’re answering a question that is specifically and explicitly asked, and they’re answering a question that’s unspoken or is only implied.

And so this is kind of the reason why the yeah and no work well together.

Yeah, I guess that makes sense.

Now, you don’t think it has anything to do with the, I guess, the Wisconsinian yeah and no, you know?

No, no.

I think they’re different.

You will find, and as Martha mentioned, and we were talking about the Australians do this, the South Africans actually have a longer form.

It’s so common there was even a TV show by the name Yah Well No Fine.

Oh, keep coming.

Yeah, but you’ll find this in all of the Englishes spoken natively around the world.

There’s some variation of these kind of, and it only seems like an oxymoron because you’re trying to break it down to its component parts, the yes and the no and the yeah and no.

But if you treat Yah No kind of as its own one item, then it begins to make a little more sense.

There is something else happening there.

Well, I appreciate you clarifying that for me.

I hope we have clarified.

Just to summarize, it’s got a role here.

When you hear it, I always say to people, when you hear something that kind of annoys you, instead turn into a field worker, a researcher.

Listen and see if you can figure out what its function is because there is one.

It’s not junk.

It’s not a throwaway expression.

It actually has a purpose.

Very cool.

Okay?

Thank you so much.

Thank you for calling, Jade.

Thank you, Jade.

Bye.

Now if people aren’t aware of that, they’re going to be…

They’re all going to be like, “Oh my God, why did they have to say that? Now I’m going to find it everywhere.”

Well, if you’ve got a question about something your friend said that just sounded wrong, give us a call.

1-877-929-9673.

That’s 1-877-W-A-Y-W-O-R-D.

[Music] Well, Grant, I’ve been back on freerice.com playing their game.

You remember that one, don’t you?

-oh.

How are we getting anything done, Martha?

It’s not easy.

It’s not easy.

I tell you.

This is the website, freerice.com, where you can play these word games and every time you make a point, they donate a grain of rice to World Hunger.

And it’s a fun little site and a great time waster.

But I was doing really, really well and then I ran into a word that just stumped me.

You want to know what it is?

Really?

Martha, that’s pretty rare that you get stumped, right?

Yeah, I had a whole bowl full of rice before this happened.

Oh, wait, they dump it out when you lose?

No, thank goodness.

No, you just go on to the next one and you don’t feel too bright.

The word is ennead, E-N-N-E-A-D, ennead.

E-N-N-E-A-D, is it something related to a worm?

That’s a pretty good guess.

Ennead, E-N-N-E-A-D, is a group of nine.

A group of nine?

A group of nine.

It comes from the Greek word for nine, which I should have known.

So the next time you’re out there in the park choosing sides for a softball team, I can just hear you piping up, “Hey, do we have enough for an ennead?”

That’s a pretty nice word.

Well, you know, the way sports writers use all these different ways of saying the same thing, I’m surprised people haven’t talked about baseball teams that way.

It’s because they don’t play on an enneagon.

That’s another name for a nonagon.

Is it really?

Yeah, a nine-sided figure.

Oh, you’re looking it up.

You’re looking it up, aren’t you?

Of course I am.

Of course, all right.

The dictionary is my friend.

I’d tattoo it on my chest if it would only fit.

Well, we’d love to hear the words that you found and didn’t know because it’s interesting.

You can also call 1-877-929-9673, or you can email us any question about language to words@waywordradio.org.

Coming up next on “A Way with Words,” get ready to tackle a quiz about slang.

Support for “A Way with Words” comes from National Geographic Books, publisher of “I’m Not Hanging Noodles from Your Ears,” and a collection of intriguing idioms from around the world by Jag Bala.

Learn more at shopng.com/noodles.

You’re listening to “A Way with Words.”

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

It’s time for this week’s Slang Challenge, where we try to stump a member of the National Puzzlers League with some curious terminology.

Today’s contestant is Dunn Miller from Oakland, California.

Hello, Dunn.

Hi, how are you, Grant?

Super-duper.

What are you doing in Oakland?

Well, I’m laid off, so I am figuring out what this new phase of my life looks like, and I’m volunteering.

It’s called cable television all day long.

And a little volunteer work, yep.

This is called an opportunity, right?

This is when people get really creative and doors open that you would never imagine.

What’s your field, Dunn?

I’m a librarian, I’m a researcher, and a sort of computer person on the very soft side of, you know, using.

Oh, sure, yeah.

Librarians have a high need for technology these days, don’t they?

Well, yeah, and I think that, you know, we’re pretty good about being leaders and breaking through a lot of stuff.

You know, decades ago, we were some of the first ones to be doing it, so yay for us.

Oh, definitely.

Do you have a slang word for us you’d like to share?

I do.

This comes from my daughter and her art partner.

They are both comic book artists, and they have a show running on Market Street right now that is in the bus kiosks along Market Street in San Francisco.

And the San Francisco Chronicle did an interview with them, and they called themselves Artners in Crime.

So “artner” is your word?

Yeah.

I like that.

That’s super.

So the art is inside the glass where the advertisements usually are?

Yeah, yes.

That’s cool.

And their project is a comic book that is done in panels as you go up Market Street at each of the bus stops.

It tells a story, but it’s a palindromic story, so it tells one story and then going up, and using the same pictures, it tells a different story coming back.

That’s fantastic.

I must have missed that.

I was just in San Francisco.

It sounds exciting, though.

It is.

And clever.

And palindromic.

Yeah, she’s a word girl, too.

Okay, Dunwell, we’re going to play a slang quiz.

We’ll see how you do with these words, okay?

Okay.

The rules are pretty simple.

I’ll give you a clue that describes one of two possible slang words or phrases.

Only one of them is correct.

Of course, your job is to pick the right one.

Oh, of course.

If you need some help, you can talk to our chatty Martha, and she’ll give you a hand, okay?

Okay.

All right.

All right, let’s try the first one.

If you’re a bold one, you said to have the stones, the backbone, the spine, the chutzpah, and a few other impolite things to do what you think needs to be done, which of the following could you also be said to have?

Is it the stitches to do what needs to be done, or the brass to do what needs to be done?

B-R-A-S-S.

That’s right.

I’m going with brass.

I’ll back you up on that.

Do you like that one, Martha?

Yeah, yeah.

What are you thinking?

Well, there’s a phrase that comes to mind when I used to work construction that was used frequently that involved spherical objects along with the word brass.

You’re right, it is brass, but interestingly enough, it doesn’t come from brass balls. It comes from having a brass face, which is far older, and to have a brass face means that your visage is fixed and your emotions are not clear, and this goes back hundreds of years.

A brass face is inscrutable, right? And so the other more delicate parts of the body that are said to be brass when you’re very strong or brave or have lots of courage is a much later occurrence, at least in the printed record.

Wow.

Here we go, number two. See how you do with this one. It’s a little harder. The moment of dawn’s early light has just one nickname that I can find. Which of these is another way of saying daybreak? Is it A, at rancid butters melt, that’s R-A-N-C-I-D B-U-T-T-E-R apostrophe S-M-E-L-T, or is it at sparrow’s fart, S-P-A-R-R-O-W apostrophe S-F-A-R-T, sparrow’s fart? Which of these is another word or another phrase for daybreak?

Wow.

Well, I just love the rancid butters melt. I love that, and I would think that might be it because at daybreak, perhaps, rancid butter melts quicker than good butter, and I don’t—and the yellow—oh, God. Martha, what do you think?

Well, then again, what do sparrows do? Eh, I mean, it beats fast. I mean, all the birds are up, that’s true. They wake up early in the morning, usually before—oh, that’s true, that’s right at dawn. I mean, I don’t know if they do that anymore at dawn than any other particular time of the day, but this is ringing a vague bell for me somehow.

Which one is? The sparrow, but I couldn’t tell you why. I mean, it almost sounds like a translation from another language or something, or some, you know, military slang or something. I don’t know.

Well, I really like that I’m a little funky, so I’m going with the rancid butters.

Okay.

Well, you know, the real one is sparrow’s fart. But I got to tell you, maybe we’re going to start something here. You gave them a whole backstory to rancid butters. I’m like, “Oh, I didn’t think of that one. I wrote that.”

No, I mean, we can be a little gross or, you know, uncouth here and just say, “What do humans do in the morning?” Well, certain bodily functions take place, and probably the same thing with animals, and you both touched upon something very true. In the morning, at daybreak, if you’re in the country, and maybe you’ve forgotten this, Martha, you can actually hear the waves of the birds twittering as they pass from the east to the west.

Yeah, they’re really high tech. But in any case, I was hoping that you guys would follow that path and think of that.

Well, I want to thank you, Don, for playing with us today. This was great fun.

Thank you for having me. It was delightful. Nice to talk to you. Best of luck in your job, Hunt. I hope that there is a librarian in need of somebody clever.

Oh, boy, do I ever also.

Thanks a lot.

All right.

Thank you. Take care of yourself.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

You can find out more about the National Puzzlers League at puzzlers.org. And you can call us anytime about any aspect of language. The number is 1-877-929-9673. That’s 1-877-W-A-Y-W-O-R-D, or send email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello.

My name is Rebecca Yonishkan from Indianapolis, Indiana.

Hiya, Rebecca.

Hello. What’s on your mind?

Well, my husband and I have been debating the meaning of the phrase “by and large.” “By and large.” “By and large.” What brought this to your mind?

Well, my sons Bart and Leo received a copy of the movie “Wall-E” recently, and we’ve been watching it constantly. And in one of our many viewings, my husband and I started to ponder the meaning of this phrase because a large kind of mega-corporation that runs the world, essentially, in that movie is called “by and large,” but it’s spelled a little differently. It’s kind of a play on the phrase, spelled B-U-Y, and then the letter N, “enlarge.”

So you’re wondering where we get the expression, the regular expression, “by and large,” meaning generally speaking or something like that, right?

Yes. I guess what is the origin of that? And then I think there are probably many ways that that phrase has then worked into the movie “Wall-E,” even though they never really come out and explain. You just have to kind of infer from watching the scenes.

Well, you know, what’s really interesting, Rebecca, about the expression “by and large” is that it’s a nautical term.

Yes. A quick internet search yielded that. My father, the former naval officer, kind of read that. I ran it by him. And he said, “Well, I think it’s sailing by the wind and large of the wind.” And he kind of explained the difference there, either sailing into the wind but still using it to move the boat or sailing with the wind at your back or large of the wind.

That’s pretty much it. Every time we talk about sailing on the show, people call us and correct us. So maybe he will, too. But that’s my sense of it, is that you can sail by, which is when you’re sort of sailing toward the wind, into the wind, and you don’t have quite as much maneuverability. And then to sail large, the wind is coming from a different direction, and you have a lot more maneuverability in the boat.

So the combination of “by and large” is all the different directions that the ship might be able to point. It makes perfect sense to me that it would be generalized in all possible circumstances, or generally speaking. So that fit with what he was thinking, right?

Yes. And then we kind of took it back to Wall-E and said, “Well, okay, it looks like they’re kind of saying, ‘Gee, if we can continue to consume at this rate, by and large, I don’t know if we’re going to end up being shot into space, but we may significantly deplete our resources.'”

Well, good point, yes. Further deplete them, yes.

Yeah, further deplete them. I never thought about “by and large” with a “you” until the Wall-E movie.

That’s a nice pun, though. Chains of stores tend to do that sort of thing, don’t they?

Yeah, pretty brilliant. I think that Wall-E is a bit of a paradox in that way, because the movie’s kind of got an anti-consumerism message, and yet they are marketing the living heck out of the DVD, aren’t they?

Oh, yes. And my two-and-a-half-year-old now sleeps with the little Wall-E character that we’ve bought into it.

Wall-E.

Yes, exactly. Well, thank you so much for your call, Rebecca.

Thank you.

All right. Happy viewing.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

The number to call if you’ve got a question about sailing is, I don’t know, what is Away With Boats? It’s not this show. 1-877-929-9673. That’s 1-877-W-A-Y-W-O-R-D. Or you can e-mail us. The address is words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi.

My name’s Christian.

Hi, Christian.

I live in Austin, Texas.

Great. What’s up?

Well, my wife and I got in an argument about a week ago over the word “swarthy.” I used the phrase “sworthy-eyed.” You know, you can use it like, you know, the good pirate calls to the bad pirate and calls him, you know, “Oh, you swarthy-eyed dog.” And my wife, being an English teacher, corrected me, and I don’t agree. So she was saying that “swarthy” meant “hairy.” And my understanding is that “swarthy” could be used to describe someone of dubious nature or darkly-complected.

Hairy.

Hairy, yeah.

Well…

Like Governor Blagojevich?

Like Robin Williams without a shirt?

Yeah, something more along that nature.

Okay.

Hirsute.

Hirsute.

Hirsute.

Here’s a problem with this all the way around. The first one is it doesn’t mean hairy.

Okay.

Now, it can mean somebody who is dark-complected. Olive-skinned, dark-haired, perhaps they are hirsute, but it’s all part of the package. It doesn’t on its own mean hairy. Does that make sense? Because you could actually have somebody who’s hairy, but it’s all blonde hair.

Right.

Fabio isn’t swarthy.

That’s right, and they would not be swarthy. It would have to be dark hair and also the dark skin that goes with it and just kind of a Mediterranean look. That’s typically what I think. And then you said something along the lines of it means two things. It means shifty or disreputable or something?

Yeah, yeah.

You know, someone of ill-repute or dubious nature or questionable morals, I guess.

Yeah, now we’re getting into some precarious territory because swarthy doesn’t mean that either.

All it means is dark-complected.

And if you look in large text databases, you will find that the top like 10,000 uses of swarthy, the different ways it’s used, they refer to things like swarthy complexion, swarthy visage, swarthy cheek, swarthy face, swarthy skin, swarthy coloring.

Sometimes you can use it to refer to the entire person, but again, you’re referring to their entire appearance and not just their hair.

Swarthy ruffian, swarthy fisherman, swarthy fellow, swarthy miner, and so forth, all right?

But it does kind of have that connotation.

Well, it does because it’s used by people who use it.

It’s kind of a code word for dirty foreigner.

That’s what it is, and it’s not a nice use of swarthy.

So I guess the bottom line is it doesn’t have anything to do with hair.

It does have to do with color, and then it kind of gets a little fuzzy.

A little messy from there.

So you can go back to your wife, the English teacher, and say, “Honey, you’re wrong.”

You know what I’m going to do?

I’m going to wait for the podcast.

I’m going to show up in her classroom and play it for her.

For her classroom, for her homeroom.

Oh, yeah.

Well, you know, if you need a couch to sleep on. [laughter] Thank you so much for your call.

Yeah, thanks.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Oh, that’s not good.

You can’t do that.

You know, in my household, these kinds of battles about language are always very lively because, as you know, my wife is a linguist/lexicographer, and I’m a lexicographer, and so the two of us are constantly like, “Well, no, actually.”

And we get down to the finest detail and start throwing references around, and then finally we just throw our hands up and go, “Oh, let’s go have dinner.”

Because at some point it’s just not worth it, right?

That’s right.

It’s Clash of the Linguistic Titans in your household, isn’t it?

If you have a linguistic dispute, we’d be happy to try to solve it or at least mess things up for you.

The number is 1-877-9299673, or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, my name’s Holly.

I’m calling from Madison.

Hiya, Holly.

Hiya, Holly.

Madison, Wisconsin, then.

Madison, Wisconsin.

Well, Holly, what are you calling us about today?

I was wondering if there was a term for words that mean their own opposites.

And I have a couple of examples.

One word that I think fits this is the word “cleave.”

Cleave can mean to split apart or to cling together.

Right.

And the other word I think fits this is “oversight.”

-huh.

And I didn’t know if there was a term for words that mean their own opposites or if there were other examples.

Oh, there are definitely other examples, yeah.

Tons of stuff, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It’s great stuff.

It’s great fun.

“Contronym” is a word that I see a lot for this.

“Contronym,” like C-O-N-T-R-O-N-Y-M.

Okay.

Or with an A, “contronym.”

And I’ve also seen “autoantonym,” “self-antonym.”

Oh.

They’ve also been called Janus words.

You know, Janus was the Roman god who had two faces, and we get the word “January” from that because he was looking back into the past and into the future.

Yeah, some of my favorites are “dust,” you know, like you dust to get dust off of things, but then you also dust a cake with powdered sugar.

Sure.

That one works for you, right?

Mm—

In the case of “cleave,” I mean, it’s actually two different words.

Right.

There’s one “cleave” that means “to stick.”

It’s related to the word for “clay,” and then the other one I think is related to “cutting words.”

So it’s actually two different words that look exactly the same.

There’s a ton of this stuff.

If you Google “Janus words,” which is — I actually prefer this term because it’s a little less jargony, and I think it’s a little more memorable, although it might be a little less comprehensible.

Does that make sense?

Janus, J-A-N-U-S.

Oh, sure.

I like that one.

You’ll find tons of lists of this stuff on the Internet.

“Screen” is a favorite one.

It’s a modern one.

If you screen a movie, you’re showing it, right?

But if you screen somebody at the airport while they’re undressing for security, that means you’re blocking the view to them.

Mm—

There’s a ton of this kind of thing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, thank you so much.

All right.

Well, thanks for calling.

Thanks so much, Holly.

Thank you.

Okay.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

One more word for you, Grant.

Yes, dear.

Enantiodromia.

What does that mean?

It’s the process by which something becomes its opposite and the subsequent interaction of the two applied especially to the adoption by an individual or a community, et cetera, of a set of beliefs, et cetera, opposite to those held at an earlier stage.

Isn’t that great?

So this is like the television show Heroes, where future Peter goes back in time to the past Peter and tries to get him to not to do some things that make the world explode.

Exactly.

That is an enantiodromic television show.

Something like that.

If you want to find out more about things like Janus words or what you call a particular language phenomenon, we’d love to help you.

The number to call is 1-877-929-9673.

That’s our show for this week.

Thank you.

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If you didn’t get on the air today, you can leave us a message anytime at 1-877-929-9673.

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Stefanie Levine is our senior producer.

Our technical director and editor is Tim Felten.

Tim also engineered our theme music.

Kurt Konan produced it.

We’ve had production help this week from Michael Bagdasian and Josette Hurdell.

From Studio West in San Diego, I’m Martha Barnette.

And from the Argo Network in New York City, I’m Grant Barrett.

Ciao luego.

Bye-bye.

You say neither, and I say neither, either. blank_audio