Life of Riley (episode #1533)

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.

Grant, do you know what well-known candy bar is named after a horse?

Well-known candy bar named after a horse?

Yeah.

The stallion?

The Marshmallion Stallion.

I don’t know.

I have no idea.

Well, no, imagine you’re standing in the checkout line and there’s all this candy in front of you.

Oh, $100,000 bar.

Right?

Because that’s like price money.

It could.

Maybe it is.

Baby Ruth?

No, that’s baseball player.

Mars bar?

I have no idea.

Snickers!

Oh, is it really?

Yeah.

Named after a horse’s snicker?

Oh.

Well, after a horse that was named Snickers.

Oh, I see.

Franklin Mars, the founder of the Mars Candy Empire, had a farm in Tennessee.

It was called Milky Way Farm because he had made a bunch of money off of Milky Way candy bars.

And he had a favorite horse there.

And the horse was named Snickers.

And so when it came time to name his new candy bar, he named the candy bar Snickers.

Oh, that’s nice.

How sweet is that?

For a second there, my mind went a different direction.

I’m saying like, moon pies, horse pies, maybe there’s a connection.

What?

No.

But that’s wrong.

So anyway, I learned this the other day.

And ever since, of course, I’ve been having a blast looking up the stories of how candy bars got their names.

Or different candies.

I’ll give you one more.

Yes, please.

He’s also from the Mars family.

Franklin Mars’ son was Forrest Mars, and he got this idea to make a particular candy that was chocolate with a hard shell.

And then he approached Bruce Murray.

Murray was the son of Hershey Company president William Murray and said, hey, do you want a stake in my company?

I’m going to make these little candies.

And they ended up, Mars and Murray ended up calling their candy by their initials.

Oh, M&M’s.

M&M’s.

Oh, okay.

But I have a couple more of those for you to think about, and I will save them for later in the show.

And we’re looking for your questions and stories about language and anything related to how we talk and why we talk that way and what it’s all about.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

And talk to us on Twitter @wayword.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Susan Cruz, and I’m calling from Iowa.

I have a kind of a question for you guys.

Okay, shoot.

I grew up in a very large family.

There was 11 of us kids, and my mom was always busy.

There was always chores to do, and there was always times as a child you didn’t do what you were supposed to do.

And my mother had an old saying that, you know, when she was angry at us for whatever it was, for me in particular, not, you know, sorting the laundry or whatever it was.

But she would say, you’re not worth your weight in salt.

And, you know, as an eight-year-old child, you really didn’t know what that meant.

So I just thought I’d throw it out there to you and see if you could tell me what that’s all about.

You’re not worth your weight in salt.

Yeah.

You have to have these different sayings.

When you have 11 kids, you just need to shut stuff down.

Right.

I think that’s probably true.

Susan, what did you think it meant?

Well, obviously, I wasn’t worth something to her at that moment in time.

But how it related to salt, I had no idea.

And, you know, as far as I know, salt is pretty cheap.

So I didn’t really know.

I just knew I was in trouble.

Yeah, it’s interesting because historically salt has been so valuable as a commodity.

Back in ancient Rome, soldiers were paid in salt, sometimes literally or sometimes they were given a salt allowance to buy salt.

Because, you know, to preserve your food before refrigeration and that kind of thing.

Oh, sure.

You needed salt.

And I’m just reminded of the fact that the Latin word for salt, sal, is in our word salt in English.

And also the Latin word salarium, which was the payment to soldiers with salt, gives us the word salary.

So you’re earning your salt that way.

But to be worth one’s weight in salt, I guess it depends on if you had a lot of salt or not.

I wonder, you know, I also wonder if it’s a euphemism.

For something else.

You’re not worth your weight.

And I don’t know.

It’s hard to say.

My mom had a lot of old sayings.

This was just one that stuck with me.

My mom was one that would be angry at me very often.

So that ultimately led to me thinking she was disappointed in me for some reason.

But how it related to salt, I had no idea.

So salt is payment to the Roman legions, right?

Yeah, back in the olden days.

And then once they figured out how to extract salt more efficiently from the earth and the ocean, then that money source just poof, dried up.

An everyday thing.

So salt wouldn’t have been that valuable after that?

No, but it still was well into the 1700s.

Salt was incredibly valuable.

Well, thank you for clearing that up.

It’s a new phrase to me, so I’d be curious to know if other people heard that version of it, you’re not worth your weight in salt.

Well, Susan, thanks so much for calling.

Oh, sure. You bet.

Thank you for your time.

All right. Thank you.

Thanks. Bye.

Bye-bye.

We had a lively discussion on the Facebook group about the expression, pick your brain.

Pick your brain.

Yeah, somebody comes to you and says, I want to pick your brain.

Can we have coffee sometime and let me get some information from you?

Yeah, they just kind of want your advice or expertise or even just they want you to say, go get them, tiger.

Yeah.

A lot of people really like it and a lot of people are not so enthusiastic about it.

Laura, who posted the original comments about this, said, I’ve always disliked the idea that the person querying was eager to apply a pickaxe to my head and pry loose my own valuable knowledge.

And, you know, other people are saying, yeah, it’s so cringe-inducing.

I can’t help imagining a pile of stripped-down chicken bones.

You know, I’ve never been a fan of that expression, pick your brain.

Why?

I think because back when I was a medical reporter for a newspaper, I watched brain surgery up close and personal.

So I get this mental image.

But it was an interesting discussion because some people said, people, you’re taking it too literally.

But if you go back into history, the expression pick your brains or pick a person’s brains apparently refers to like picking a pocket, picking somebody’s pocket.

Oh, I see.

Isn’t that interesting?

And I personally would rather have somebody approach me and say, I’d like your advice.

Right.

Yeah, because pick your brains is vague enough.

You don’t know what they want.

Yeah.

I’ve had meetings where what people wanted from me was for me to give them their whole business plan.

Right?

And I’ve had meetings where, wow, you should really be paying me a consulting fee.

And then I’ve had meetings where they just wanted a gut check on a big idea, and I was able to give them that.

And that’s the better kind of brain picking.

Right.

Well, a lot of people had strong feelings about this expression one way or another, so I’d love to hear what everybody else thinks.

Sure, yeah.

Does the expression pick one’s brains skeeve you out or annoy you?

Is it just too far along the figurative spectrum?

Is it something you use?

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org or tweet us at Wayword.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name’s Evie from Texas.

And can you please tell me where the phrase, it’s raining cats and dogs, come from?

Where the phrase, it’s raining cats and dogs, come from.

Where did you come across that that made you think about this?

It was a rainy day, and I was watching the rain come down, and I asked my dad what does it mean, what does afraid of raining cats and dogs mean, and he said he didn’t know.

Is that something that the two of you say together?

Do you both say it’s raining cats and dogs, or did you hear it somewhere else?

I just said it.

Okay.

And Evie, do you have a dog yourself?

Yeah.

He’s more like a bodyguard to me.

Because he wants to make sure I’m safe at times.

And what’s your dog’s name, Evie?

Penny, like the coin.

Penny like the coin. That’s nice.

So raining cats and dogs, Martha. What do we know about that?

Well, you’ve never seen cats and dogs falling out of the clouds, have you, Evie?

No.

Yeah, yeah. So that’s what we call a figure of speech.

It’s just an imaginary thing.

And the idea of raining cats and dogs just refers to the idea that when the rain is really, really coming down, it’s really noisy and really loud, right?

Yeah.

I mean, if you can imagine cats and dogs all flying down from the clouds, it would get really, really noisy, right?

Barking and howling and meowing and meowing and a little fighting on my way down.

Yeah.

A bit hissing.

Yeah, some hissing for sure.

Yeah.

And the reason that I think it has to do with the noise of rain is because if you look at cultures around the world in different countries, they also talk about something that’s really noisy, like in Greece, for example, they don’t say the rain is coming down hard.

They say it’s raining chair legs.

Can you imagine if a bunch of chair legs were coming down out of the sky?

That would be really noisy, too.

Or in South Africa, they say, it’s raining grandmothers with clubs.

What?

Right? It’s really crazy.

So like grannies coming down, thumping the ground with clubs.

Yeah. And in Poland, they say it’s raining frogs, which would also be really noisy.

Sure.

And in Colombia, they have a Spanish phrase that goes, it’s raining even husbands.

Or it translates as, it’s raining even husbands.

It’s raining men. Hallelujah.

Yeah.

Yeah, so the English version of that is it’s raining cats and dogs, which is a very, very noisy situation.

Okay.

Does that make sense?

Yeah.

Thank you for calling, Evie. We really appreciate it.

You’re welcome.

All right, take care.

Thanks, Evie.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Bye.

So we have to debunk.

Yes, let’s debunk.

The famous email.

Yes.

That floats around.

Oh, my gosh.

That I’ve now been getting for over 20 years.

Yep.

Raining cats and dogs does not come from sodden thatched roofs that had animals on them and that would fall through when it rained a lot. Thank you. Please do not send us that email.

Does not come from that. Has never come from that. There’s no evidence. That’s no, no, it doesn’t.

There’s nobody in the history of studying language that believes that. Why that email has so much life, I will never know. It’s because it’s so pat. It’s too perfect, right? And it comes around and you think you’ve learned something, but all you’ve learned is lies.

Right.

When have you ever heard of a dog climbing up in a thatched roof to hang out?

They could, but that’s not the origin.

Right.

It’s not.

Right.

Nor is the Jonathan Swift poem about the same.

Right, which unfortunately talks about drowned animals.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But that’s actually newer than the expression itself.

Right, right.

But it refers to what’s cacophonous.

Yeah, loud, because cats and dogs are loud.

Think about a time in our society and culture and history of humanity when the loudest thing wasn’t people.

It wasn’t our machines.

It wasn’t our air conditioning units and our automobiles and our airplanes.

Exactly.

Call us 877-929-9673 or send us an email.

That address is words@waywordradio.org.

I came across an elaboration of a phrase that I really like.

You’ve heard people say, oh, that looks like hell.

My room looks like hell or something like that.

But the other day I came across the use of the phrase, it looks like hell with everyone out to lunch.

I just love that image.

Oh, that’s nice.

Yeah, yeah.

Hell and everybody left.

Hell’s a busy place.

It’s a very busy place.

There’s a lot going on there.

If everything we’ve been told is true or even part of it is true.

It looks like hell with everyone out to lunch.

Hit us up on Twitter @wayword.

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.

Joining us on the line now from New York City is our quiz guide, John Chaneski.

Hey, John.

Hey, Martha.

Hey, Grant.

What’s up, bud?

I like to think of myself as sort of an ambassador to different kinds of puzzles and games.

And one of the places I like to go is sometimes is board games.

Now, this quiz is inspired by a party game, a board game called AKA, as in also known as.

It’s a party game invented by my friend Aaron Solomon, who’s a game show producer.

Now, in AKA, you have to guess a common item that’s clued using, shall we say, other words.

For example, in the category of card games, the clue is, catch me a salmon.

And the answer is, go fish.

Got it.

Right.

Very good.

Yeah.

If you want to edit in as if you got the answer, go for it.

Yeah.

That’s good.

I’ve adapted the game a bit.

I’ll clue an item for you both.

And if you can’t get it, I’ll give you the category it’s in.

And let’s see how we do.

For example, if the clue is the starvation sports, can you think of an answer for that one?

The Hunger Games?

Yes, the Hunger Games.

It’s a Jennifer Lawrence movie franchise with a category.

Very good.

Here are some more clues inspired by the game, a.k.a.

A noise rabbit.

A noise rabbit.

A noise rabbit.

So something bun?

Oh.

Yeah.

Bugs Bunny?

Yes, that’s it.

Bugs Bunny.

I was thinking a noise is two words, not one.

Oh, sorry.

It’s my…

How can I possibly pronounce a noise and a noise differently to have it come across?

I don’t know how.

A noise rabbit.

Here’s the next one.

In between bride.

In between bride.

Yeah.

Midwife.

Oh.

Yes, midwife.

Nicely done, yeah.

How about this one?

Plant Store University.

Nursery School.

Oh, good.

Yes, Nursery School.

Novel Assembler.

Bookmaker.

Ooh, good.

Bookmaker, yes.

Very good.

You’re going to be very good at this game, Grant.

How about this one?

Aquarium Lid.

Ooh, Aquarium Lid.

Tank Top.

Tank Top, one for Martha.

Yes, very good.

How about a Roof Enthusiast?

Ceiling fan.

Oh, good.

Yes, ceiling fan, nicely done.

How about, I know you’ve heard of this one.

Swaddled swine.

Pigs in a blanket.

Pigs in a blanket, good.

Just making me hungry.

How about the correct siblings?

The Wright brothers.

The Wright brothers, yes.

Marmalade mackerel.

Marmalade?

Jellyfish?

Jellyfish is correct, yeah.

Poor plasma.

Something blood.

Yeah, weak blood.

Bad blood?

Bad blood, yes.

Taylor Swift’s song or Neil Sedaka’s song, depending on how old you are.

The huge explosion hypothesis.

Big Bang Theory.

Big Bang Theory, right.

How about housekeeper with integrity?

Maid.

Maid.

Made right?

I don’t know.

No.

I just went to made right.

Maid of honor.

Maid of honor, yes.

Member of a wedding party is a category.

Yes, very good.

You guys did really great.

Cool.

John, thank you.

It’s been a delight as always, and we’ll talk to you next time with more puzzles and quizzes, right?

I look forward to it.

See you then.

All right.

Take care.

Bye.

And we want to hear from you.

What are your thoughts about language, slang, word origins, grammar, the things your grandma used to say?

Give us a call, 877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

I’m so glad you took my call.

Oh, of course. Who are we talking with?

My name is Marie-Claire Lapointe, and I’m calling you from Montreal.

I’ve been listening to you for years.

Marie-Claire, welcome to the show. We’re glad to have you on.

What can we do for you?

You know, I’m a woman in her 70s, and I live along with my cat, Toby.

But sometimes an old expression that I’ve read somewhere that people don’t use much these days comes to mind.

As I’m petting Toby, I look at him, and I think, you know, he lives a perfect, privileged life.

Not necessarily my life, but his life is perfect.

Spoiled kitty, right?

And perfect, as far as I can see.

So I tell him this.

I say, Toby, you’re living the life of Riley.

And that’s the expression.

I would love to know the source of it.

Riley sounds like an Irish name.

And I just wonder, because maybe Riley did not live the life of a prince.

Maybe he left with a, I don’t know where it comes from.

And I’m so curious.

So your sweet kitty is living in the lap of luxury.

Yeah, and that’s the meaning of living the life of Riley.

It means living an easy life, a luxurious one.

You really don’t have a care in the world, which sounds like certain domestic house cats I know.

Including Toby, it sounds like.

It’s a phrase that’s mystified people for a very long time, and it seems like it might be related to early vaudeville songs back in the 1800s, particularly one that was by a fellow named Rooney who wrote a song about a Mr. Riley who was an innkeeper and was dreaming of when he could be a hotel owner.

And there are lines in it that go things like, is that Mr. Riley? Can anyone tell? Is that Mr. Riley that owns the hotel?

Well, if that’s Mr. Riley they speak of so highly, upon me soul, Riley, you’re doing quite well.

That phrase was popularized during World War I.

We see a lot of letters from American soldiers writing home, and they’re talking about living the life of Riley, talking about a luxurious life, or sarcastically talking about conditions in camps.

And you see that often with the life of Riley in quotation marks, which suggests to us that maybe they picked it up over there or it was a relatively new phrase to them in one way or another.

So, Martha, we know that it was popularized during World War I.

It first pops up in 1902 or so.

But there was a second round of this expression becoming popular, right, after World War I, right?

Oh, yes.

Yes.

The radio show.

And you’re an old-time radio fan.

Yeah.

And the TV show, right?

Right.

The Life of Riley starring William Bendix.

So there was the 40s and 50s.

There was a radio show and a TV show.

Actually, there was a short-lived TV show starring Jackie Gleason that didn’t catch on.

Oh, I didn’t know that.

Yeah, it was a flop, unfortunately.

But the version starring William Bendix was really successful and actually kind of reinvigorated this phrase.

And you can see it pop up again and again outside of talking about the radio show in newspapers and books in the 40s and 50s.

And ever since then, it’s kind of tailed off.

But people like you still remember it, Marie Claire.

You know, I think that’s where I first read it.

I started reading English with comic books, and I think I heard that expression really years and decades ago.

There was a Life of Riley comic book.

It wasn’t very long-lived, but it did exist.

Okay, I don’t remember the title, but I’m pretty sure I heard that very young, that expression.

Well, thank you so much for listening to the show, and thank you for your question today.

I know that a lot of people probably go, oh, yeah, I remember that, and they’re probably very satisfied to get that answer.

Well, I’m very satisfied.

I’m thanking you.

I’m assuming that Toby listens to us as well.

Well, I can’t really help it, but he sleeps a lot.

Yeah.

Sounds like a cat.

Okay.

Thank you.

Au revoir.

Thank you.

Bye.

Thanks for calling.

Bye-bye.

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

When I was in Alaska recently, I got to see puffins in the wild, and that was thrilling.

You know, they have these comical little faces, kind of white faces and multicolored beaks, and they look really funny when they try to fly.

They just, their wings go so fast.

Do they fly?

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

They’re out there in the water, and then they try to fly, and it’s just kind of hilarious to watch them.

But I was on this boat and the captain said, yeah, over there.

And then she used the collective noun for puffins, which I didn’t know.

What is that?

A circus.

A circus of puffins.

Yes.

And I said, come on, that’s not really the collective noun.

And she said, oh, yeah, we use it all the time.

A circus of puffins.

That’s nice.

And as soon as you know that and you see these goofy looking birds, it’s perfect.

So many of those collective nouns are only used to discuss collective nouns.

So it’s nice to hear them in the wild from an expert.

Yes.

Or at least somebody who should know.

From Rika the Boat Captain.

Thanks, Rika, for that.

We’d love to hear your language encounters in the wild or elsewhere.

Give us a call, 877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Rosa Cavazos, and I’m calling from Carn City, Texas.

Welcome, Rosa. What can we do for you?

Well, I just have a little story to share with you.

In 1962, in the town that I was born and raised in, all Mexican-American children in the town of Carn City, we were all segregated into one class in school.

And we were told that we were going to be in the zero grade.

Now, most of us were six or seven years old at the time.

And as students, we were forbidden from speaking Spanish.

And we would get in trouble for speaking Spanish.

It was pretty much total immersion for us.

As we became assimilated into the American way of life.

And many of us had Spanish-speaking names, and the teacher went down row by row and met with all the students, and many of us, she changed our names to either American or English names.

She could not pronounce my first name.

My first name was Yodula, and she asked if she could change it to Teddy.

And I told her no.

Then she asked if she could call me by my middle name of Rosa, and I agreed.

So your first name was?

It still is.

It’s Stilula.

But since then, I have gone by Rosa.

Can you spell that name for us?

T is in Tango.

E is in Echo.

O is in Oscar.

D is in Delta.

U is in Uniform.

L is in Lima.

A is in Alpha.

Sounds like you’ve spelled that many times before for people.

Yes, many times.

So you still go by Rosa because of the decision of this one teacher.

Correct.

And how did you feel about being assigned a different name?

Because it was my middle name.

I was okay with it.

But nobody at home called me by my middle name.

They do now because it’s been so many years.

The philosophy being that by Americanizing your names and forcing you to speak English, that you might incorporate into the larger society better.

Correct.

And do you regret that? Did you retain your Spanish-speaking abilities?

Well, interesting that you should ask that.

I have. I maintain Spanish and have spoken it all the time.

Stationed in Spain for four years.

And surprisingly enough, I came back to my hometown after serving in the Air Force for over 37 years.

And I am currently the eighth grade Spanish teacher.

Fantastic. It all comes around, doesn’t it?

Yes, I’ve come pretty much full circle.

And so when people from Spanish-speaking heritage come into the school now, what happens?

Well, interestingly enough, we now have English as a second language.

There’s classes that are, I believe, being taught bilingually.

In my particular class, I couldn’t give them total immersion in Spanish.

I would lose them all.

So I’m slowly having to, you know, go back to the basics, and the basics are learning how to pronounce the letters in Spanish, learning how to pronounce the numbers in Spanish.

So it’s a very slow process.

And, you know, we did have a cultural lesson last week, and I told them, I asked them, okay, this is how it was like speaking Spanish in the past.

This is how it was viewed before 1969.

And I asked them, you know, how is speaking Spanish currently viewed?

So they had to ponder on that.

And I gave them the example, well, you’re in a Spanish class.

And I also asked them, you know, how will Spanish help you or others in the future?

You know, we talked about job opportunities, traveling, being able to communicate in more than one language.

So when kids come to the school now and they speak Spanish as a first language, they find themselves accepted for who and what they are.

Yes. Cultural competence has come a long way around here.

And yes, Spanish speaking is allowed, you know, it’s not frowned upon like it used to be.

I’m thinking about one fact that surprises people once they start to study linguistics as a whole, which is that monolingualism, speaking just one language, is actually rather rare.

And most of the world speaks more than one language.

Americans who are monolingual are unusual.

Yes.

And especially when I had the opportunity to travel the world, especially in Europe, everybody knows at least two languages.

Yeah, at least.

Yeah. So what we’re seeing here is kind of a restoration of the American language scene to what the rest of the world has long been doing, right?

Yes.

Well, Rosa, thank you for calling and sharing these memories. These are really great to hear about and talk about.

Yeah, and it’s interesting the distance that we’ve come in accepting people from other cultures and knowing that they, too, are a part of the larger American fabric.

Yes, it’s about time that we say it’s okay for you to have your own identity and your culture, and we’re going to accept you as you are.

Yeah, be here with us as you are, and we will enjoy living together.

Thank you so much, and I appreciate giving the opportunity to share my story with you.

Of course. Take care.

Thanks, Rosa.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

There are experiences with language that you’ve had. We’d love to hear about it.

Share it with us and everyone else, 877-929-9673, or email words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, yes.

Hi.

Hi, who’s this?

My name is Ali.

I’m coming from Toronto, Canada.

Ali, welcome.

What can we do for you?

Thank you so much.

Yes, I had a question.

I was listening to one of the podcasts a couple of weeks ago, and I heard the phrase that leg up.

For example, one of them said, if you know Mandarin, you have a leg up in business world.

So I was wondering why they used that word.

So why do we say a leg up?

And the meaning that you took away was?

Well, you have one step ahead of everyone who doesn’t know man.

You have an advantage. You’re one step ahead. That’s exactly right.

Yes.

It has to do with horses. If someone helps you get on a horse, they could be said to be giving you a leg up.

They may literally make a little basket with their hands for you to step in and help ease you up, pull you up into the saddle.

Oh, okay. That’s cool. Thank you.

Yeah, it goes back hundreds of years.

And it’s another one of those horsey terms that permeates English.

And sometimes we just don’t realize that it’s a horsey term.

Yeah, it’s very, very interesting. Thank you very much.

Thank you for the call. Really appreciate it. Bye-bye.

Thank you. Bye.

Another one that’s like that is a hand-up.

So you can also give someone a hand-up to help them mount a horse,

Or mount a wall, or climb up something, right?

Just get up if you’ve fallen and can’t get up.

You give them a hand up.

And that also goes back a couple hundred years.

877-929-9673.

We were talking earlier about the phrase, the life of Riley.

And there was a little article in the Patterson Morning Call back in 1909 that I got a kick out of when I was looking through the newspaper databases.

The article is titled, Wanderlust, quote-unquote, Wanderlust gripped Mike, 13-year-old Italian boy found by brother yesterday.

And it’s a quick little article.

Michael Katanis, the 13-year-old Italian boy who had been missing from his home, No. 8 Prospect Street since last Sunday, was discovered yesterday by his brother John.

Michael, according to his own story, had been, quote, living the life of Riley ever since he bolted.

He ran errands for two or three men and obtained sufficient money to pay for food.

He had been sleeping in an empty freight car on the Erie Road.

His brother met him accidentally in Eastside Park.

He was escorted to police headquarters for the purpose of receiving a scare and then taken home.

John Katanis, the brother, said last night that he could not account for the youngster’s wanderlust.

He says he expects to keep him home hereafter, even if he has to tie him up.

And I don’t know, these little windows on life that you get when you’re going through the old newspaper databases.

I mean, that kid sounds like he had a blast running away from home.

I found something recently.

There was a guy by the name of J.W. Alpert who worked for the topographical something or other.

They were mapping out the West and Southwestern United States.

And there was a little clip that suggested he’d been reposted from Utah to, I believe, Virginia.

But the way that they wrote it made me think that he was a spy.

And I so want to find out if J.W. Alpert was a spy.

It was very interesting.

Old newspapers, man.

It’s more than just language.

There goes your weekend.

You want to talk about language?

Call us, 877-929-9673.

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.

A few weeks ago, we had that call from John in Bismarck, North Dakota.

He was participating in an online program for military veterans,

And part of the program included a discussion about how to describe one’s emotions.

Say you’re talking about a scale of emotions from 1 to 10,

1 being clinical depression and 10 being euphoria.

How do you talk about that emotion that’s right in the middle?

What is number 5?

What is the word for that?

And when we put the word out, we got a lot of response on social media, email, and on the telephone.

And Martha, there was some really good stuff in there.

There really was.

When we talked with John on the phone, he used the term middle emotion, but he wasn’t completely happy with that.

And we kicked around some other ideas like being affectless and insouciant, and those don’t really work either.

A lot of people suggested just a single adjective like complacent, content, balanced, placid, fine, copacetic, unemotional, beige.

I kind of like beige.

Middling, ordinary, unremarkable, homeostatic.

And Mark Hazuda in New Jersey suggested comfortable or, if you’re a Pink Floyd fan, comfortably numb.

I kind of like that.

And David Coven is a resident psychiatrist at the University of Arizona College of Medicine.

And he wrote in with a response that a lot of professionals used, which is the term euthymic or euthymia.

It’s defined in Merriam-Webster’s dictionary as a normal, tranquil mental state or mood.

And apparently they use that clinically to talk about somebody’s emotions.

E-U-T-H-Y-M-I-A?

Euthymia, yes. E-U-T-H-Y-M-I-A.

Or you can describe someone as being euthymic.

And it comes from a Greek word, thumos, which means soul or spirit.

And then we also heard from Kevin Innes, and he lives in Spokane,

And he said that coincidentally he was listening to our podcast,

And then later in the day he was listening to a podcast about philosophy,

And they were talking on that podcast about apathia or apathia,

Which is a freedom or release from emotion or excitement.

Oh, wow.

I do find you have this list of suggestions from listeners that many of those for me aren’t middle emotions,

That they have a negative or positive value, which maybe the other person didn’t feel or didn’t see.

And I think that maybe is partly where we’re coming up with this difficulty is it is so based on your personal experience.

You almost do need a word that most people don’t know.

So you can immediately assign it this one middle value and it doesn’t come up with any baggage.

Right, right.

Something like content just…

No, that’s positive for me.

Yeah, that’s…

And there was a…

Complacent for me has a slight negative connotation that suggests an indifference to the world.

Yeah.

Indifference was another thing that somebody brought up.

But again, that doesn’t really…

To me, that’s negative.

That’s way on the negative spectrum, nowhere near the middle.

Right.

I’m so interested that on the one hand, we’re having such a hard time coming up with this.

And on the other hand, our listeners stepped up like I’ve never seen.

Seriously.

Absolutely.

Well, thank you all for your submissions.

We really appreciate it every time you write.

We consume this stuff voraciously.

We read it.

We discuss it.

We love it.

We send it around.

And it shows up on future shows.

So keep those responses coming to this question and all the others.

You can always email us, words@waywordradio.org.

Talk to us on Twitter @wayword or call us 877-929-9673.

Toll free in the U.S. and Mexico.

Hello. You have A Way with Words.

Hi there. This is Tom Ryman calling from Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Hi, Tom from Minneapolis. Well, welcome.

What can we do for you?

I’m a fourth year medical student here in Minnesota, and I’ve loved medicine for a lot of reasons.

And one of them is there’s a lot of good language in it.

Oh, yeah.

From all sorts of origins and all sorts of languages and with lots of good stories.

But one kind of newer phrase that I came across was last year on my surgery and emergency medicine rotation.

I had a lot of people who would say if something was done well, they’d say strong work on that.

And it was something that initially I thought, oh, maybe this is just some new slang that I haven’t come across.

And then I realized I was hearing it a lot in all sorts of contexts, but they were all medical.

I didn’t really hear it anywhere else, and other friends hadn’t heard it outside of medicine.

So I did a little bit of Googling, and it was kind of hard to tease that apart from some things like strong work ethic came up.

But I did find a few message boards that talked about it as a specifically medical thing.

Yeah, absolutely.

You’ve done the right work, and you found the same conclusion that we would come up with, which is this is medical slang.

Or I’d say maybe even jargon.

It belongs specifically to this industry

And especially to medical students.

We had a call on our voicemail a while back

From somebody who had the exact same circumstance.

She’d never heard it until she started her surgical residency,

And she heard it everywhere around her from the surgeons

And other people in the medical fields.

And it’s not uncommon for you to be immersed in something

And suddenly just find yourself awash in this new language.

And I think you may also have heard things like pimping.

Do you know this one?

Yes, I do.

And that’s one I think might have been featured on the show previously.

That’s right.

We did talk about it.

Yeah, it’s when the teaching doctor basically badgers the student doctors

To ask them their information on a particular patient or subject, right?

Is that your understanding?

Right, and they keep coming at you with harder and harder questions

Until you fail.

That’s right, right, because the goal is to break you.

Yeah, exactly.

That’s interesting because we do that in improv as well,

If you’re pimping somebody, you’ll say to your scene partner, like, and how did that song go or something?

And then they have to come up with all these lyrics for a song.

But it’s called pimping.

Same idea.

Do you have any idea how long it’s been around?

I don’t.

I found when I’ve looked into this, I found it as far back as in books from the 80s.

But by the 90s, when the Internet started exploding, it started popping up everywhere as people were kind of publishing these medical student glossaries.

And then everyone was basically ripping off those glossaries.

And then they would appear on other websites and other books.

And the 90s kind of were a really good time for finding things out.

But also it meant that it was easier to plagiarize from everyone else.

So it kind of blows your chance to really find a source for some things like this.

Well, there’s so many other phrases, like I said, strong work ethic that come up when you’re searching for it.

So, yeah, it’s hard to isolate.

You do those negative switches.

Just put a negative before.

So look for strong work as a quote, and then type in work ethic as a quote,

And put a hyphen or a negative sign in front of work ethic, and it will eliminate those from your results.

Okay. That sounds good.

And does it really come up in other specific jargons?

No, not with this kind of frequency, no.

But as a particular bit of medical patter, it’s very firmly in the medical realm.

And isn’t that interesting because it doesn’t seem like it has a particularly medical origin?

I can’t imagine what that would be, but it’s interesting that it hasn’t jumped over to other fields.

Right, and I think because it has a sort of bravado sound to it,

I thought maybe it was just the way that surgeons talked or emergency docs talked

Because they have sort of a culture like that.

It is so well known that not only does it appear in glossaries,

But you will see it on medical television shows.

They have totally adopted this.

Their medical advisors who help them try to be more authentic will insert this

Or have this available to the scriptwriters.

What a job.

What a job.

Well, good luck.

You’re in fourth year.

How many more years to go?

Well, this is my last year of school, and so I’m applying to residency right now.

Okay.

Well, good luck with that.

I know that’s kind of nail-biting.

A little bit, yeah, but we get through it.

Tom, I have a feeling that you can call us back in the future with lots more examples.

Yeah.

Yeah, I’m sure I will.

All right.

Take care.

Thanks for calling.

I really appreciate it.

All right.

Thank you.

Bye.

All right.

Bye.

We’d love to hear about the jargon from your workplace, so give us a call, 877-929-9673,

Or write it all up and send it to us an email.

That address is words@waywordradio.org.

Grant, do you like chunky candy bars?

Yeah, I do.

I do, too.

They’ve got the chocolate and nuts.

It’s texture for me.

I need the multiple kinds of texture, the chewy, the hard.

Yeah, the little raisins.

Did you know their name for a baby?

Oh, really?

Yeah, a chunky little baby.

Philip Silvershine was a New York City candy maker back in the 1930s,

And he invented this candy bar that’s chunky,

And he happened to have a little granddaughter who was a chunky baby.

And they called her chunky.

Oh, that’s nice.

He named the candy bar after the baby.

That’s very sweet.

877-929-9673.

Hi there.

You have A Way with Words.

Yes, this is Ron Ellingworth.

I’m calling from North Pole, Alaska.

North Pole, Alaska?

Wait.

And is this the town that gets floods of Santa letters every year?

Yes, it is.

And Santa Claus, a person changed his name legally to Santa Claus

And is actually on the city council of North Pole.

What?

Fantastic.

Are you serious?

I’m serious.

Well, Ron, this is great already, but did you have a question for us?

I did.

When I was growing up in Iowa, my aunt, who was the eldest in a family and probably about 20 years older than my mother,

Had an expression that she used for us.

Whenever we would go out and be doing something, she’d say, don’t get into any jackpots.

And we took that to mean something along the lines of don’t get into trouble or don’t do something that would get you into trouble.

Things like that. But I’ve never heard other people use that expression.

So this is in Iowa. Where were you in Iowa? And how long ago would this have been?

Iowa, it was in Council Bluffs.

Council Bluffs, okay.

She was actually born in the Sandhills in Nebraska.

But this was in Iowa.

I was just through that part of the country recently and saw the riverboats and the gambling.

So it’s all kind of coming together here in this question about jackpots,

Because the theory is that it relates to literally being in a poker jackpot that you really should not have been in in the first place.

Where you keep putting more money into the pot even though your cards are terrible.

So you’re kind of stuck.

And the only way out of this is either just fold and lose your stake and lose the money that you put in.

Or to tough it out and hope that everyone else folds because you’ve managed to trick them into thinking you have great cards.

So that’s being in the muddle part of it.

Like it’s basically playing out of your depth in poker.

Okay, okay.

So you’re in a jackpot.

The poker stuff and the riverboats and all that, the gambling casinos and things that are there now, we’re not there.

That’s all pretty recent stuff in there.

But that doesn’t mean that it didn’t have anything to do with that.

Yeah, it doesn’t.

I didn’t mean to suggest that it comes from that part of the country or those riverboats.

It actually goes back to the 1800s for sure.

And it has a nice other later use, although it’s possible this is the earlier use and we just haven’t found it in print.

Jockpot referring to a snag of logs in a river, either on land or in the water.

Just the kind of thing that might interrupt the flow of work or block a thoroughfare or that needs to be cleared before you can farm, that sort of thing.

So metaphorically, it’s a tight spot or a predicament.

Yeah, a mess, though, a mess of just difficult stuff that you have to solve.

Yeah, it was used in logging sort of sarcastically, right?

Mm—

In jackpot.

Yeah, I mean, that sounds more like what I think her use was.

Yeah, but the problem with it is the dates don’t match up. The gambling use, the figurative gambling use, and the literal gambling use is older.

And then it looks like, as Martha said, the logging and forestry use is not only later but sarcastic, whereas they’re saying, oh, look, a lot of logs. That’s what we’re here for.

Oh, jackpot, when really it’s kind of a mess that they have to handle.

That could very well be what prompted that because it seems like that’s a legitimate comparison.

Yeah.

Interesting.

Okay, cool.

Thank you for your call.

We really appreciate it, Ron.

And do not get into any jackpots.

And tell Santa hello, of course.

I will try not to.

Unless you’ve got pocketies.

Right.

Mr. Claus is watching, clearly.

Take care now.

Yeah, exactly.

Thanks, Ron.

Bye-bye.

-huh.

Bye.

Grant, was that the first phone call we’ve gotten from North Pole, Alaska?

I believe so.

I love it.

I think it is.

Well, we want to hear from more of you, and we want to hear from Santa Claus, Indiana.

Yeah, 877-929-9673 or email words@waywordradio.org.

Here’s a term you didn’t know you needed, dingle doozy.

Oh, no.

Is that naughty?

Can we say that?

No.

Yes, yes, we absolutely can.

And you can find it in the Scots National Dictionary, dingle doozy.

It’s dingle, like you might expect it to be spelled, hyphen D-O-U-S-I-E.

And it means a stick or peat ignited at one end and waved rapidly so as to form a light, used as a plaything by children.

Oh, so kind of like a sparkler at Fourth of July.

Yeah, or a glow stick if you’re in a disco or something.

It also refers, I think by extension, to an active, bustling person.

A dingle doozy.

A dingle doozy.

But yeah, next Fourth of July, you know what to call that.

Sure, yeah, when you’re trying to quickly spell out words.

Yeah, yeah.

Counting on it to last on the retina until the word is spelled.

Yeah.

Talk to us on Twitter @wayword.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Yes, hi, this is Rachel Kuchakis, and I’m calling in from Lexington, Kentucky.

Hey, Rachel there in the bluegrass.

Welcome.

Yes, go cats.

Go cats.

Go big blue.

What can we do for you?

Well, I had a question regarding something my dad would always tell me and my family, my siblings, my mom.

Every time we would be like, Dad, I wanted to tell you something.

Oh, I forgot.

And he’d say, well, it must have been a lie.

And all through his 85 years, we’d ask him, Dad, what’s that mean?

Oh, it’s a joke.

And we never understood what it meant.

But he’d always say it to me.

He’d say it to my mom.

He’d say it to my sister.

Apparently my brother-in-law, his dad said it too.

We don’t know if it maybe is a generational thing or they were both military.

Maybe they picked it up there.

But for the life of me, we never understood the joke.

And you can explain it to us.

I can find it is back as far as the 1920s in newspapers.

And even in 1930s, Charlotte Henry, a young film star who played Alice in Wonderland, who was very well known for that, used it in an article about her search, pursuit for bows for men.

But I think the joke part of it actually goes back to a little anecdote that you can find sometimes repeated in older periodicals.

And it goes something like this.

One fellow says to another fellow, what’s the matter, old top? You seem to be worried. Trouble with the wife? He says, yeah, this is the latest I ever was out. I called her up an hour ago and told her where I was. And well, you’re all right then. No, I’m not all right. I’ve forgotten where I was.

So he forgot what he told her where he said he was.

So that’s the lie. So that’s why it must have been a lie. You forgot a thing because it wasn’t true and it’s easier to forget a thing that isn’t true.

Well, see, and my dad never was able to explain why it was funny. He thought it was funny.

That makes sense. Yeah, yeah. Well, lots of personal humor works that way where we think something is hilarious and nobody else does.

Oh, yeah, he thought it was hilarious. My mom would just roll her eyes at him every time he said it.

Yeah.

Well, eye-rolling is better than other responses.

It must have been a lot.

Well, thank you very much for helping us understand what that meant and where that came from.

Yeah, sure.

Thanks for calling, Rachel.

All right.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

We know there’s a word or phrase that your parent used that you’re still puzzling over.

You can call us about it.

That number is 877-929-9673 or send it to us an email.

That address is words@waywordradio.org.

You know, if you’re standing in the checkout line and looking at all the candy there, you notice three musketeers and you think, why would a candy bar be named after a great novel?

You’re going to tell me.

I am.

It’s actually named after the fact that it was originally in three pieces, and they were flavored vanilla, chocolate, and strawberries.

And they were marketed, the Three Musketeers bar was marketed as something that you would share with your friends.

But then the price of strawberries rose, so the company dropped that as an ingredient, and it was just the chocolate and vanilla-ish.

Oh, gotcha.

Yeah, so that’s why it’s not that different than some other candy bars, even though it has this unusual name.

Yeah, but three items and three musketeers.

Talk to us by email, words@waywordradio.org.

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.