Lead On, Macduff! (episode #1565)

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 Grant, I bet you’ve been up to the same thing I have been up to, which is perusing seed catalogs and dreaming of this year’s garden.

Yep. It’s like the adult version of the Sears catalogs that you looked at at Christmas time when you were a kid. Isn’t that the truth? They’re so beautiful. All these lovely plants and flowers and, oh, it’s just delightful.

Well, yeah, the images, but of course also the language is what’s catching my eye. You know, some of those names are just, I mean, why would they be naming fruits and vegetables things like Diplomat or Albion or Seascape, you know? I mean, they’re sort of like paint chips or something.

Yeah, there’s a sequence of three that I saw. It’s Divino, Sebeto, Oroch. They’re like some characters from the new, you know, the new Star Trek series.

Oh, I was thinking a law firm or something. I’ve had some fun fooling around with those names and just putting them together, just piling them together into little poems. How about this one? Purple Passion, Jersey Night, Silky Sweet Hybrid, Ruby Perfection.

Wow. That’s prom night with your sweetie playing Bruce Springsteen on the radio. Actually, it’s a poem about cabbage and asparagus.

Oh, yeah, that too. I do like a good cabbage. Asparagus not so much, but cabbage I do. Here’s another one. Sugar baby, starlight, crimson sweet sparkle, tasty bites.

Wow. And that’s first love, right? That’s what I’m thinking here. This is your first love, a little shy hand-holding, and then you both give your first smooch.

Yeah, actually, it’s about watermelon and strawberries. One more. German winter, white swan, night and day, purple ruffles, flashback mix.

German opera. Has to be, right? No, it’s edible flowers. No, either that or it’s a Berlin nightclub at 3 a.m.

Could be. But you plucked these names from where? From the seed catalog websites? Right, from the Burpee and the Johnny Seeds catalogs. They’re lots of fun.

Yeah, they are lots of fun. If you’re planting your garden or going through the names and there’s something that’s really struck you, give us a call. Let us know what you think. Maybe put together your own seed poems. 877-929-9673 or send your seed poetry to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hi, this is Tenley Thompson calling from Jackson, Wyoming.

That sounds like a lot of fun. It’s a super fun town. We’re just outside the national parks and up high in the mountains. And it’s kind of an outdoor wonderland for sure.

So, guys, I’ve got lots of friends and I’ve been out here in a long time in the valley. And we have a lingo out here that’s sometimes called bro-bra. And it’s what skiers and snowboarders and mountain bikers and other outdoor enthusiasts sometimes speak.

And we say a lot of terms that some of which I grew up with and some which I’ve only heard relatively recently that I’m really curious about where they come from. And the one I’m most curious about is the term send it. So if a skier or a snowboarder takes a piece of really difficult terrain or if somebody’s trying to challenge them to do it, they’ll say, oh, bro, go send it. Send that cliff. Or sick, you sent that man.

And I’m wondering where the term send it comes from. Why do we say send it when we want somebody to really do something ambitious and take something difficult?

So you’ve been hearing this how long, you think? Gosh, I know it’s been very popular for at least a decade, but I think it probably goes back at least 15 or 20 years locally. But I also have been hearing it more and more in other outdoor sports, too. You’ll definitely hear mountain bikers talk about sending something. Sometimes you’ll hear it in other sports, but I first heard it with skiers and snowboarders.

Yeah, I think I first encountered it in the mountain biking discussion groups online, but definitely the snowboarding groups, skiing groups, and the climbing groups. The rock climbing groups, which, by the way, is probably where it’s from. There’s a climbing dictionary by Matt Samet, S-A-M-E-T, and he quotes somebody saying they remember it from the mid-1980s.

There’s an article in 5280 magazine out of Denver by Georgia Perry where she quotes Samet saying that there’s a video from a 1988 climbing competition where you can hear a California climber use the expression, which is what lexicographers love. We love it when you can actually date a term and actually have proof that it was used, not relying just on memory.

So we know then that send it as a verb, a slang verb meaning go for it, dates to at least 1988. And in his dictionary, his climbing dictionary, Samet says to send is to free climb without falling. And the noun send is a successful ascent of a climb, a wall, a mountain, et cetera.

But notice there’s a little difference there. These days, it’s a transitive verb. You send it, you send something. But in the dictionary, as the climbers use it, it was intransitive. You just send. Wow, you really send something like that.

Yeah, you either send it or you sent it. There’s also when you did it afterwards. That’s so fascinating. It would make sense. Do you ever hear someone say something about getting sendy? S-E-N-D-Y?

Yes. Or they did a full send? So, yeah, a full send is like if you really did something epic. So, you know, oh, bro, that was a full send meant you really you took a line that’s never been done before or you really committed to something that took a lot of guts and ambition to go ahead and do. And all that was a full send.

Yeah. And Tenley, what about if I’m Cindy? What am I? If you’re Cindy, you are the kind of person who sends things. So, you know, if you’re describing somebody, you know, I’m a girl in this town and guys outnumber girls quite a bit in Jackson Hole. It’s a very young community. We skew kind of young. I’m in my late 30s.

And if you’re trying to describe somebody as a potential dating prospect, for instance, you might say that they’re sendy, meaning they’re very extreme and their ambition in sports. They’re sendy, meaning like they’re willing to send a big cliff or they take the most difficult terrain and they’re kind of an extreme athlete. They’re sendy.

Oh, that’s excellent. Thank you for fleshing that out. You know, it’s one thing to read about these terms in my reference works. It’s another thing to hear them from someone who is on the ground and hears them from her peers on a day-to-day basis. This is excellent.

Well, this is so exciting because so many of these terms, I just wonder where they came from. And this is so cool to hear about. One of the theories that I don’t really buy into, but I’m going to relay here, is that the send, the original send in climbing, meaning to go for it or to really climb that mountain, dude, might come from the Elvis Presley song, Return to Cinder.

Because by scrambling up a surface faster than other people, you’re rejecting or returning to the sender. The previous routes or methods others have taken were slower. But to me, it reminds me of the Sam Cooke song, You Send Me. Darling, you send me. Because to send someone an old slang was about like send them to heaven or send them to the moon or send them to the heights of passion.

Others say that it’s even simpler than that, that send it might simply be you’re returning the climb straight back to the hell where it was conceived because it’s so difficult. But the best theory probably is that when you’re shouting at somebody up on a wall and they’re far away and you’re shouting, ascend it, A-S-C-E-N-D, it sounds like S-E-N-D.

Oh, seriously? Yeah. Oh, that makes sense. Ascend it sounds like send it. Send it. So it’s possible it just lost that first A sound through lanician and ascend it became send it.

Oh, wow. And now it applies to somebody going downhill as well. Right. Isn’t that lovely? That’s cool. That’s probably, that’s the soundest theory that I could think of. That’s the soundest theory that has been proposed.

Yeah, it does. Wow. Well, cool. Well, Tenley, thank you so much. Stay away from the yard sales. Be safe out there. Don’t be a gaper.

I will definitely do that. You know the yard sales we mean. I know exactly.

I will try not to litter the ski run with all of my gear as I tumble down the slope and let my hats and my poles be scattered about on the run in a yard sale.

Yes, I will definitely avoid that.

We’ve got some great powder days for the rest of the season.

And I’m so excited.

I’m going to tell everybody in town where this comes from.

All right.

Take care.

Be safe.

Be well.

All right.

Stay, Cindy.

Yes.

Best wishes.

Thank you, guys.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Email us, words@waywordradio.org.

Chat us up on Twitter @wayword.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Alex.

I’m calling from Columbia, Missouri.

Hey, Alex, welcome.

I had a question about, I guess it relates to the game of chess, military, and a little bit about bureaucracy.

A few months ago when the Queen’s Gambit dropped, everyone started to get into the game of chess in my life, including me.

We all started playing. Some got really good and I stayed bad.

When I was starting to learn about chess, you know, theres there’s portions of the chess board called the rank and the file.

And I was really curious because I’ve also heard this term be used in reference to members of Congress or staffers or just in bureaucracy in general.

So a few weeks ago, I was just trying to do some preliminary research and see where did this originate from.

I figured it came from the military, and that’s what I found.

Based on my research, I found that it related to the space, the position that members would stand in in the military.

But then I realized, well, how did it turn from being used in chess and in military to describe the spatial location of a person to the bureaucratic role that one fills?

And so I was really curious to hear where that cultural transition happens and figured you all might be able to shed some light on that.

I want to give you a different idea, Alex, is that rank and file doesn’t come from one or the other.

It exists. It coexists in chess and the military at the same time all the way back, basically back to the 12th century in French, which is where English got both words.

So, rank in French is R-A-N-G, which means a line of soldiers or the horizontal rolls on a chessboard.

And then file comes from a word in French meaning a series, a line, a queue, a thread, and it’s related to our English word filament or the military word enfilade.

And so both of these words exist side by side for centuries, both in chess and military.

And this goes back to chess as this longstanding metaphor for the battles of war.

Chess has long been seen, as far as the history of chess has been recorded, as this game that represents the kind of wit that you need to be a general organizing, reying, and then sending out your troops on the battlefield.

So it’s not surprising that the term rank and file should be in both places all the way back.

Does that make sense?

Yeah, absolutely.

It makes so much sense that I’m like hitting my forehead having not came to that conclusion of my own.

All right.

Take care of yourself and be well, all right?

Have a great one, y’all.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Call us 877-929-9673 or send your stories about language to words@waywordradio.org.

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

I’m Martha Barnette.

I’m Grant Barrett, and out of the darkness comes that man of mystery, John Chaneski, our quiz guy.

Hi, John.

Hey, Grant. Hey, Martha. No mystery here. It’s a quiz as usual.

Now, I know what you’re going to ask me.

John, what personal obsession of yours are you going to use as a flimsy excuse to hang on a quiz this week?

Well, will it be superheroes, puppies, British game shows?

Thank you for asking.

I am a frequent blood donor and recently gave blood.

And from that, believe it or not, I got the idea for this quiz.

I will give you two words.

For example, ruble and debris.

Now, one of them needs a type of blood to become synonymous with the other.

As you know, the four blood types are A, B, O, and AB.

Now, for ruble and debris, do you know what you should add to one of those to get the other?

Yeah, ruble should get a B to become rubble.

Exactly.

Add a B to ruble, you get rubble, which is synonymous with debris.

Nice.

Now, alternatively, some words may need to donate blood.

For example, if I said kernel and seabed, what would you say?

This is kernel as in kernel of corn.

Right.

Oh, okay.

Kernel.

And seabed?

Seabed, right.

How about if you donate AB?

Right, what do you get?

You get kernel and seed.

Seed, yes, very good.

You remove, you take the blood, the AB from seabed to get seed for kernel.

And also remember the blood types, A, B, O, or AB.

You’ll have to add or remove one of those types to one of the two words to get a synonym of the other.

Here we go.

Awaken and ruse.

Awaken and ruse.

Oh, ruse gets an O.

It becomes rouse.

Right.

I call that O positive because you’re adding the O.

Rouse.

Very good.

Again, as we sometimes recommend, a piece of paper and a pencil might help you with this.

Let’s see.

Here’s the next one.

Container and cartoon.

Container and cartoon.

Oh, take one of the O’s out of cartoon and you get a carton.

Yes, you do.

That’s an O negative.

We remove the O.

All right.

Let’s try this one.

Coached and hidden.

Coached.

Oh, take the O out of coach and you get cached.

Cached for hidden.

Yes, very good.

Doable and allocate.

Doable and allocate.

Take that AB out.

You get dole and allocate.

To dole something out, to allocate.

Martha’s on the AV trip.

Yes.

Her blood is on fire.

Here’s the last one.

Decayed and rotated.

Decayed and rotated.

Oh, rotated becomes rotted by taking out an A.

Yes, very good.

Rotted.

Nicely done.

Thank you very much.

This is always a pleasure to have you on the show.

We really appreciate it.

It’s really my pleasure, guys.

Thank you so much.

We have great fun on the show.

We talk about all things related to language, but you know what we love to do?

We’d love to hear your stories.

What’s a funny word that the kids came up with and everybody uses and has for decades?

Tell us that story.

Or what’s something that grandma and grandpa used to say that has been passed down for generations?

We’d like to hear that one, too.

877-929-9673.

Or email us, words@waywordradio.org.

Or if you found something funny on the Internet, share it on Twitter @wayword.

Hi there. You have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Claire Stadlin from Durham, North Carolina.

Hey, Claire. Welcome.

Hi, Claire. Welcome to the show. What’s up?

The thing that came to my mind was you did a show.

I’m not sure exactly when it was, but it was on the topic of leave-taking.

And someone called in and shared this wonderful story about moving to the South and hearing the expression, y’all come go home with us.

And you had this whole conversation where you used the term leave takings.

And I was just listening, like sometimes I’ll be doing my dishes or something while I’m listening and I just stand still.

And I’m just like, oh, this is a great topic.

I had never heard the term leave takings.

I come from a Jewish family in New York City, and we never say goodbye.

We say goodbye, but we never leave.

And we say goodbye, and we stand at the door, and we just keep talking and talking.

And so when I was a teenager, I spent a lot of time in Mexico.

My dad and my uncle had a home there.

And so my sister, my cousin, and I, we made a lot of local friends, and we had some boyfriends, and we just had a lot of fun.

And when it was time for everybody to separate in the evenings, we never wanted to part.

And so we would say goodbye and then never leave.

They found it so funny.

And they shared with us a popular song that spoke to, it wasn’t really about that, but it completely spoke to it.

And the song goes like this.

Porque vas y te vas y te vas y te vas y no te has ido.

Y yo estoy esperando tu amor, esperando tu amor, esperando tu olvido.

And the song basically means why do you go and go and you go and you go and still you haven’t gone.

And here I am waiting for you to leave me, waiting for you to leave me, waiting to forget you.

So that’s how your family says goodbye.

That’s what you’re telling us?

That’s what they told us, that we were exactly what that song was saying.

Oh, that’s so perfect.

Yeah, I think it was originally done by Jose Alfredo Jimenez.

Yeah, that’s right.

And his then wife, Alicia Juarez, who died just a few years ago.

He died tragically young in the 1970s, but it was huge.

He had so many hits, but it’s an incredibly long song.

I can just hear the guitars, you know?

Yeah, me too, yeah.

I can’t believe you know this stuff.

This is why I love your show so much.

I don’t know what year it was, though, but that’s got to be a while back because if he died in the 1970s, so that would have to be, what, late 60s, early 70s, something like that for this song?

Well, you know, it could have been popularized before we were there, but we were there like in the late 70s, you know, like 78s.

Yeah, but the thing is about Jose Alfredo Jimenez, he is huge and still huge.

He’s kind of legendary.

I don’t know if Sinatra level, but big time.

So some of his songs are such classics that you still play them at birthday parties and quinceañeras and baptisms and weddings and stuff like that.

They’re just like the songs that you expect to hear.

Yeah, this song is so sad, isn’t it?

It’s so cool.

It is.

It’s a very sad song.

It’s really sad because the other person has chosen to go look for a new life.

Right.

But they just won’t let you go.

They won’t leave.

Yeah.

Yeah, it’s very sad. It’s not at all like the belief taking concept, but it completely fit with the idea of why do you go and you go and you go and you never go. You don’t really give me a chance to get over you.

Thank you, Claire. That’s lovely. All the memories attached to this song that it’s just a perfect connection. Thank you so much.

Oh, my goodness. We don’t want you to go.

I don’t want to go.

And that’s just it.

I will never hang up if I don’t have to.

Like, I would love to talk to you guys forever.

You know, we’ve talked about this on the show before,

But we have a term for people who don’t want to hang up.

We call them doorknobbers.

Okay, well, I am a therapist.

And in my field, we call doorknob therapy

When someone’s walking out the door

And they, like, drop a big bomb at the end of the session.

Yes.

Oh, perfect.

Been there, done that.

That’s hilarious.

You call that doorknob therapy?

That is terrific.

Right, right.

And they’ve already used their 50 minutes.

Just one more thing as I’m going out the door.

Yeah, the Columbo moment.

One more thing.

Oh, Claire, you are a delight.

Thank you so much for having me on the phone.

You have energized us for another day.

Thank you.

Same here.

Hasta luego.

Bye-bye.

Gracias.

Bye.

Hasta.

Hasta luego.

Ciao, ciao.

Well, we know that Claire isn’t the only one who can sing.

If you’ve been reminded of a song, sing it into our voicemail.

Maybe we’ll put you on the air, too.

Language and music are closely related, and we know that you’ve got something to say.

877-929-9673.

Following up on our conversation about prison book programs,

These programs that distribute books to people who are incarcerated, and the fact that prisoners

Most often request dictionaries while they’re in prison, we heard from a former inmate named John

Who called us to say that when he was in prison, he used dictionaries for taking classes and for

Writing letters because he didn’t have access to computer spell check and he wanted to make sure

That his words were spelled correctly. And he also said that in every quad, in every cell block,

There were Scrabble players. A lot of times you couldn’t get the official dictionary. You had to

Wait months to get it and get approval. So the easiest thing to do is just use a regular dictionary

And agree that if a player’s word isn’t in that dictionary, it’s not a word. And we also heard

From Carolyn, who left us a voicemail saying that she donated National Geographics to a prison.

It’s a cool way to get rid of old dictionaries that you might have around the house. And again,

What’s preferable is paperbacks.

A lot of times they won’t take hardcover dictionaries.

You know, you’ve answered some questions for me

Because after we talked about it, I got to thinking,

I wonder if there are other uses like using the pages for rolling papers

Or, you know, as husks to light cigarettes, that sort of thing.

I don’t know.

877-929-9673.

Hi there. You have A Way with Words.

Good afternoon, ma’am. How are you?

I’m doing well.

Who are you and where are you calling from?

My name is Manuel Alderetti, and I am calling from the big state of Texas.

Welcome to the show, Manuel.

What can we do for you?

Appreciate you.

Well, I’ve been having this longstanding debate with my girlfriend.

I’m actually a couple of years older than her, so I tend to hit her with some of these old school, you know, sayings.

And one of the things that I grew up hearing specifically with my family, my dad and his brothers, was a term called cut me a husk.

And I heard it within the family,

And maybe every now and then in and around the San Antonio area where I grew up.

But other than that, I’ve never heard it.

So when I brought it up to my girlfriend, she swears up and down,

That is not a thing.

And I heard you guys on the radio not too long ago,

And I was really, really impressed with how you guys delve into old school sayings

And things of that nature.

And I wanted to know if you knew anything about that particular saying,

Cut me a husk.

So that’s H-U-S-K?

Right, like a corn husk.

How did a typical conversation go when you heard it being used?

Okay, so say I’d be working with my dad in the backyard or something like that,

And he was maybe taking his time or something,

And I’d tell him, come on, pops, speed it up, and he’d be,

Hey, son, I’m old, cut me a husk, give me a break.

Okay, give me a break. That’s a good one.

Was he perhaps a Marine?

He was in the Marine Corps for a short amount of time during the Vietnam era.

He was a Marine during Vietnam.

That makes a lot of sense.

I bet you that’s where he picks it up because this phrase is associated with Marines and it comes out of the Vietnam War.

And the usual form is cut me a huss, H-U-S-S.

And there’s a story behind this and it has to do with a helicopter, a special kind of helicopter.

So in Vietnam, HUS was the designation for certain configurations of the Sikorsky -34 Seahorse Helicopter.

Now, this was a multipurpose utility vehicle that kind of filled the need until much larger helicopters could be put into service.

It was ugly.

It was kind of crude.

But it was relatively inexpensive to manufacture.

And it was reliable and capable when flying.

And it wasn’t prone to breakdown.

So this was a trusty vehicle.

And its tail and top rotor could be folded for transport on sea or land or whatever.

So in Vietnam, among the Marines, this helicopter was a problem solver.

So when situations got dicey, you got a helicopter to your location, and that was some kind of ultimate favor.

So when a Marine needed support, they’d radio, get me a HUS.

They’d radio, get me a HUS, H-U-S, or give me a HUS.

Meaning get me one of those helicopters.

And so over time, that kind of became more generic,

Just meaning do me a favor or do something nice for me or do me a solid.

And it turned into variations like cut me a huss,

Which is kind of a mix of cut me some slack and get me a huss.

And then more generally later, it came to mean do me a favor

Or help me out of a sticky situation.

So that’s where it comes from.

So it is a legitimate real term.

And it’s probably your father’s Marine experience that brought it to him and been to you.

Right, right.

Wow, that is amazing.

I appreciate that answer.

I’m going to find a way, maybe look up in your website or something, or maybe a podcast so I can throw this in my girlfriend’s face.

Because I knew it was out there.

Be nice about it.

I knew it was out there.

Awesome.

Well, thank you guys very much for answering my question.

Take care.

Be well.

Yes, sir.

Bye-bye.

You guys take care.

Bye-bye.

All right.

Thanks.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello there.

Hello, who’s this?

This is Diana Hersey from Duncanville, Texas.

Welcome to the show, Diana.

Where in Texas?

Duncanville, Texas, which is the southwest suburb of Dallas.

What can we do for you, Diana?

I just have a query about language use in between I am sitting down and I am sat down.

And people are saying he was sat there.

I heard this in England quite a few times.

They’re not using the ING anymore.

They’re just saying he is sat there or we were sat there instead of we were sitting there.

And I just wondered if this had crept into the States too, I think probably.

But it definitely, I heard my brother say it in England and I heard other people.

I’ve heard James Corden on the television say it.

So that was my question, whether you had noticed anything or whether it’s just an accepted change in language usage.

I have noticed that myself. So just to be clear, where some people would say you were sitting, speakers of this particular dialect of English would say you were sat, or they would say I was sat instead of I was sitting.

And what about this one, Diana?

Have you ever heard someone say, I was stood instead of I was standing?

Occasionally, yes.

I was stood in the back of the crowd.

I was stood in the back. I’ve heard that too, yes.

Yeah, you’ve got a good ear for this. This is a dialect change.

I can tell you a little bit about this, Diana.

Linguists have noticed this as well and have been studying it since the mid-1980s.

But real work has been done on it since where they’ve gathered data and looked at actual transcriptions of people speaking to figure out what’s going on here.

And it looks like this construction, this innovation in this dialect feature, was originally mostly heard in the north and the southwest of England.

But there’s been a large uptake of it since the early 1990s, although it’s not universal.

The fact that a 75-year-old man is now using it means that it has spread quite a bit, for sure, because such innovations tend to appear in the speech of younger speakers.

And in one academic paper, they say that the Irish and Welsh are far less likely to say the be stood version than the English are.

But the Irish do also sometimes say be sat instead of be sitting.

So this English innovation, this particular direct feature has spread further than England.

It has penetrated into Ireland as well.

So it’s more likely to be found in the speech of speakers born after, say, I don’t know, 1985.

Although, again, it’s becoming more common.

Yeah, Diana, thank you for bringing this field report.

It’s really cool.

Okie dokie.

I appreciate it.

Okie dokie.

Take care, Diana.

Be well.

Thank you so much.

What’s the word or phrase that’s caught your ear lately?

We’d love to talk with you about it.

So call us 877-929-9673 or tell us the story in email.

That address is words@waywordradio.org.

More about what we say and why we say it.

Stick around for more.

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’ve talked, of course, many times on the show about family words, and Luke McNeil from Shutesbury, Massachusetts, wrote to us about a family gesture, a gesture that’s evolved in his family. He said,

I realized the other day that our family coined a special gesture.

My mom or one of us three kids would hold up a hand and wiggle four fingers.

That would mean, how about I get us all some little paper Dixie cups with chocolate chips?

What? That’s so specific.

It is, right?

He says, normally this would be after dinner when we were watching TV or a movie and wanted a snack.

I suspect it started with one of us going to get some chocolate chips, and the next thing you know, the rest of us wanted some too.

We got in the practice of asking the others if they wanted any and counting on our fingers.

Then we slowly drop the verbal question, and it most would say anyone after wiggling four fingers.

And now they just wiggle four fingers.

And I thought that was so fascinating.

You know, we talk about the evolution of language on the show, the evolution of words, and they had the evolution of a gesture right there in their own home.

Right there in their family.

Oh, that’s so nice.

I love that.

Yeah.

I think if I try that in my home, nobody will know what I mean, though.

I need the whole backstory.

Yes, yes.

You need the etymology of those wiggling four fingers.

But, you know, that got me to thinking, do I have any family gestures?

And I couldn’t think of any, but you know what?

I bet our listeners do.

We have one in our house.

Do you?

Yes.

When my son was very young, he decided to put a chart on the wall of all the times that somebody made a joke that was really good.

And so there was a column for me and his mama and for him.

And he would put a pencil mark every time you made a joke that he thought was particularly good.

Now it’s just an air gesture where you make like a little mark in the air as if you’re putting a notation on this invisible chart that somebody made a good joke.

Oh, that’s adorable.

Yeah, little five-year-old Guthrie thought he was the good adjudicator on comedy.

Oh, that’s wonderful.

We would love to hear about your family gestures.

It’s a form of communication, and we talk about that here on the show, 877-929-9673.

And make them polite, please, or we can’t talk about them on the air.

Or tell us an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Paula from Cheyenne, Wyoming.

Hi, Paula. Welcome. What’s on your mind?

Well, I was responding to your invitation to share a passage of literature that I found particularly moving.

But I have a little story first.

Oh, great.

I grew up on the prairie in Montana, and then I moved to Wyoming, where I was still on the prairie.

And then I moved to Turkey and I lived in Ankara. I was on the prairie, but it wasn’t the same prairie. So I started reading a lot of stuff from home. And one of the books I read was Willa Cather’s My Antonia.

And so when I moved back after when the pandemic hit and the school was closed and I decided I’d come home for a year or so, I got back into reading more Willa Cather.

And I discovered that her home was only about six and a half hours away.

And since I didn’t feel like getting on a plane and flying anywhere, I thought I would drive there.

And I discovered that you could stay in her house.

It was actually her real house.

So I went on Christmas Day.

The house was empty.

It was all mine.

And I sat in her house, sat in her living room, read her books, slept in her room.

I think it was her room.

Read her books in the morning.

And then I stopped at her museum and bought a whole stack of books.

And the passage I loved came from one of those books.

Oh, that’s lovely.

Let’s hear it.

The setup is that it’s just Taya Kronenberg.

She’s a young Scandinavian girl who has a gift for music.

And she has great things in store for her, but she’s still pretty young.

She’s like 15.

And this man named Ray, who’s not much, but maybe, you know, five, six years older, works for the railroad.

And he’s always planned on a life with her.

But he gets hit by a train and she’s called to his side and he’s dying, but he doesn’t want to admit it because he wants to give her always eternal hope.

So this is the scene.

The spark in his eye, which is one’s very self, caught the spark in hers that was herself.

And for a moment, they looked into each other’s natures.

Taya realized how good and how great-hearted he was, and he realized about her many things.

When that elusive spark of personality retreated in each of them, Taya still saw in his wet eyes her own face, very small but much prettier than the cracked glass at home had ever shown it.

It was the first time she had ever seen her face in that kindest mirror a woman can ever find.

Very good. Thank you. That’s so lovely, Paula.

And how emotional that must have been to sit in her house, in her chair, and read her words and feel like you know her and feel like you were communicating or she was communicating with you from the decades, through the decades, over the years.

And I don’t know, through the ether.

It was especially when I was in a room.

I tried to pick the room I thought was hers because there were several bedrooms upstairs.

And I slept upstairs in her bedroom, I hope.

And I chose the one that had the, I chose it from the view of the street because I, there’s a passage in another one of her books where this professor doesn’t want to give up his office.

He’s got this like attic office and you want them moving, but he wants to stay there because he likes the view because he looks out and you can see just a little smidgen of a lake in the distance.

And that is where he escapes to when he’s stuck and he can’t find ideas to write about.

So I thought, you know, I thought if that view is so important, then she probably chose the room that had the best view.

So that was what I chose.

And I looked from the window to try to see what maybe she saw because it probably hasn’t changed all that much.

The houses in the neighborhood are all about the same age.

Paula, thank you so much for sharing that.

That’s lovely.

You’re welcome.

And I think I might have to tackle some of Willa Cather’s books again.

Yeah, thanks for that memory.

Okay, thank you.

You’re welcome.

Bye-bye.

We’d love to talk about books amongst ourselves, and we’d love to hear what you have to say about what you’re reading.

What’s a vivid passage that just struck you as worth sharing?

Let us know, 877-929-9673, or tell us an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Here’s a little story about nicknames that comes from Lori Matthews in Fort Worth, Texas.

She said, my favorite grandmother, my maternal grandmother, used to call me Clem Kadiddlehopper.

I absolutely hated it, and knowing that I hated it, my siblings, who were all younger than me, all three of them used to tease me mercilessly in that mocking kid voice.

It turns out Lori’s grandmother died in 1982, and it wasn’t until a decade later that she learned that Clem Kadiddlehopper was actually a character portrayed by comedian Red Skelton, who was one of her grandmother’s favorite performers.

And Laurie says, so I went from absolutely detesting the nickname to now I kind of smile fondly and nobody calls me that anymore.

But whenever I hear the name Clem Kadiddlehopper, it kind of warms my heart.

Oh, that’s so lovely.

Yeah.

Isn’t that?

It’s nice when you can take something and connect it to the memory of a person that you loved and loved you back.

Yeah.

That’s very good.

Yeah, and when you feel one way about a name that somebody’s given you, and then over time your feelings about it change.

I thought that was a lovely little story.

Red Skelton, for me, has some memories.

My brother and I used to memorize his routines, particularly the stuff he did as the character of the mean little kid, and we combined them into a character we called Bubba, and we would do these stupid little routines.

As Bubba.

Most of it just stolen from Red Skelton.

Oh, man.

Do you remember any of it, dare I ask?

No.

A lot of it sounded like Red Skelton mixed with Beaker from the Muppets.

I’m sure it was terrible, but we had a great time with it.

Martha and I would love to hear about your nicknames and the stories behind them, 877-929-9673.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi.

This is Donna Delugge.

I’m calling from Lawton, Michigan.

It’s a little village just southwest of Kalamazoo.

Welcome to the show.

How can Martha and I help you?

When I was growing up, we did quite a bit as a family.

I come from a family of eight children, and we do a lot of outings with my dad.

And when we would stop and get started again, he would say, lead on, McDuff.

And I just wonder, did he make that up or is there a Macduff or is it somebody from history or literature?

So the expression again is?

Lead on, Macduff.

Lead on, Macduff.

And would he say it in a joking way or?

No, he would just say it like, let’s go.

Okay, let’s go.

Was it a sense of you go first and I’ll follow?

Or was it just let’s all go?

Let’s all go.

Yeah, you hear an expression like that and you think, oh, Macduff must have been a great soldier back in the day or something, right?

A great military leader or something like that.

But actually, lead on Macduff, he wasn’t the only one who used it by any stretch of the imagination.

It’s a fairly common expression.

But what’s really interesting about this phrase, Donna, is the fact that lead on Macduff is actually a misunderstanding or a misapprehension of a line from Shakespeare.

And the line from Shakespeare is actually lay on Macduff.

And in this sense, lay on means to attack vigorously.

And it comes from Macbeth.

And there was, you know, the great battle between Macbeth and his enemy Macduff.

And what Macbeth says is, before my body I throw my warlike shield, lay on Macduff and damned be him that first cries hold enough.

So he’s saying, bring it on, you know, attack me, go ahead.

But by the early 1800s, people were using the phrase lead on Macduff, sort of misunderstanding, misremembering, mishearing that expression.

Wow, that sure changed the meaning, didn’t it?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, it really did.

And it’s so common now that, I mean, plenty of people say it and have no sense of the connection with Shakespeare.

It’s sort of its own phrase now.

Mm—

I had never heard anyone else say it, and I was cross-country skiing with a friend a couple weeks ago, and we stopped.

We had to take our skis off and put them back on.

And when we were leaving, she said, lead on, McDuff.

And I couldn’t believe it.

Well, I guess my dad didn’t make it up because she said it too.

Thank you, Donna.

Thanks for the call.

Really appreciate it.

You’re welcome.

It was fun.

Thanks, Donna.

Bye-bye.

There’s something about those old family expressions.

They linger.

And when you hear them in the mouths of other people, you’re like, wait a second.

I thought that belonged to us.

Well, we can sort that out for you.

877-929-9673 or tell us on Twitter @wayword.

Following up on our conversation with Amanda in Evansville, Indiana, who was asking, do other people name their household appliances because her family always referred to their garbage disposal as George. We did hear from Gene Gruby in Trucksville, Pennsylvania, who says, we named the family compost bin Darth Vader. The composter is black and plastic and looms outdoors near the garden. We say, take this bucket of food scraps to Darth. I am your compost.

I’m just imagining, though, this writhing, disgusting, you know, rotten food and flies and worms, and then later it turns to vegetables and something wonderful to eat.

It’s magical, right?

It is.

It’s got the force behind it.

Midichlorians in there somewhere.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Mark from historic Yorktown, Virginia.

Yorktown, Virginia.

Welcome.

How are you doing, Mark?

I’m doing just great, thanks.

I heard a term that I’d never heard before.

I heard it from a friend of mine whose family’s lived here for five generations, and the term is a frog strangler.

Evidently, you’d heard it from his father quite a number of years back, and this area is kind of marshy, swampy.

You know, this region near coastal Virginia.

I’m familiar with the term the gully washer from out west, you know, southwest.

You know, a lot of rain usually going down like a ravine or something like that.

But he tells me frog strangler isn’t rushing water. It’s just kind of like when they’ve had a lot of rain and now the waters are rising in a swampy area. And there’s been so much of it that it’s a frog strangler.

There are lots of terms like that for a heavy rain, a frog strangler, a toad strangler. I don’t know if you’ve heard that one.

No, I have not.

And the combined toad frog strangler. Yeah, and they all have to do with the effect of a heavy rain, which you suggested. In the Midwest, sometimes you’ll hear a heavy rain called a goose drownder or even a fish drownder, which I think must be just an incredible rain. A chicken drownder or a frog drownder. And they all have to do with the effect of the rain.

And a gully washer, as you suggested, is the same kind of thing. It adds more water to a gully, which is a trench or a channel in the earth that’s made by running water.

But you’re distinguishing between a gully washer and a frog strangler?

Right. This area is really low-lying. It’s kind of marshy, swampy. There’s not really any hills here. And so his family always used it. Their meaning of it was that there’s been a lot of rain, and now the water is rising even within the swamps. And, you know, there’s a few little higher areas within a swamp or a marsh that typically aren’t inundated with water. And so, you know, this is trying to show that the water level is really coming up there.

Yeah. I mean, as far as I know, it just refers to a very, very heavy rain, often one that comes on really suddenly and just, you know, nobody’s prepared for it, not even the frogs. We get those. Terrible thunderstorms. Yeah, exactly.

There are other terms for those kinds of rains, like a fence lifter or a bridge lifter. It’s just all about the effect. A trash mover or a trash floater. Yeah, the chunk mover or the stump mover. Yeah, and there are lots of variations on the gully washer, too. Gully buster, gully maker, gully whopper, gully cutter. The south, for some reason, tends to have a lot of these. The strangler and mover ones seem to be very southern.

Yeah. So you hadn’t heard that one before, huh, Mark?

I had not. I just couldn’t miss the opportunity to share it with others because it was just one I had never come across in my many years and travels.

Yeah, it’s pretty picturesque, huh?

Yeah.

All right. Thank you for calling, Mark. Thanks for sharing that story. And thank you for allowing me to share it with the rest of your audience. I’ve been a long time listener. I really love the show.

Thank you, Mark. Thank you very much. We appreciate it.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

Or talk to us on Twitter @wayword.

Novelist Megan Collins is the author of The Winter Sister and Behind the Red Door, and she’s also the author of a tweet that I just loved. And if you do any writing at all, perhaps you can identify with it. She tweeted, if you haven’t emailed someone saying, wait, read this draft instead, are you even a writer?

Grant, I guess I’m a writer.

Yeah, me too. Several times over. Yeah, like the flurry of drafts that you send in the space of a very short time. And they’re all labeled like final. No, real final. No, absolutely final. Final, final, final.

Right. You’re sitting there trying to think of more ways to make it stand out in the person’s email, right? All caps, exclamation marks. Lots of punctuation, asterisks. You see, is there a higher level than the more important setting in the email? Most important.

Tell us about your writing experiences, 877-929-9673.

Thanks to senior producer Stefanie Levine, editor Tim Felten, and production assistant Rachel Elizabeth Weisler. You can send us messages, subscribe to the podcast and newsletter, and 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, or email us words@waywordradio.org.

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.

Many thanks to Wayword board member and our friend Bruce Rogow for his help and expertise. Thanks for listening. I’m Grant Barrett. And I’m Martha Barnette. Until next time, goodbye.

Bye-bye.

Thank you.