Like a Boss

You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

You ever notice how if you’re running errands all day and you’re not careful, you can end up with a big handful of those annoying plastic bags?

Even if you’re thoughtful enough to plan ahead and take a canvas tote bag on your shopping trip, there’s still no escaping them.

If you look around, you see them everywhere, floating along in the breeze, caught in the fence, flapping lazily in a tree, or maybe there’s a bag lying by the curb collecting water as you’re stepping over it.

But my question, of course, is do we have a term for those escaped plastic bags out in the environment?

Should we have a term?

Well, we do have some terms, at least in different parts of the world.

A few years ago, I discovered that in Ireland, they sometimes call them witch’s knickers.

Witch’s knickers.

You can just imagine white underpants hanging from a tree, right?

Yeah, magically appearing.

Sometimes they’ve been called bag hawks.

Bag hawks.

Because they just float up high in the sky, right?

And a number of different places, if you look in the newspaper archives, you will see that in this campaign to rid certain communities of these disposable bags, people will say they’re so common that they’re almost our second state bird.

Or they’re so common they look like our state flower.

Right.

The state flower of X.

Or the national flower of this or that country.

Yeah, I’ve also seen shoppers’ kites.

And you mentioned hawks.

I’ve seen retailed hawks.

Retailed hawks.

Knights.

As opposed to red-tailed.

I think my favorite, I like witch’s britches, although I know that’s not really common.

Right.

Witch’s knickers is a little common, but the rhyme is nice, isn’t it?

Yeah.

But I like urban tumbleweed as well.

Oh, urban tumbleweed. Very good.

Well, you know, my problem in my house is we reuse these bags all the time.

We put kitty litter in them or just things that need to be wrapped up extra tight in the trash can.

But now we’re at the point where the recycled bags that are made from recycled plastic, the promotional bags that you get at conferences, they cost a quarter at the register and the ones that you’re supposed to reuse.

Now I have 40 of those.

And there’s no way I’m ever going to use 40 of these recycled bags, right?

And I can’t really justify throwing them away.

Right.

Well, there is a woman in Santa Barbara who takes them to Africa, to Tanzania, where there’s a real problem with those plastic bags everywhere.

And she has people collect 25 bags and then bring them to her, and they get a free canvas bag.

We’ll link to her site on our website.

It’s a cool project.

It sounds fantastic.

Do you have a special name for those ubiquitous disposable bags that you get at the register, at the supermarket, or the drugstore?

Give us a call, 877-929-9673 or call us or write to us with any language question words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Megan from New York.

Hi Megan, where in New York are you?

New York City.

What can we help you with today, Megan?

Well, my boyfriend and I have a little feud, a friendly feud, somewhat friendly feud going about the phrase a bull in a china.

And insert your answer in the blank because I say it’s a bull in a china closet, which is what my grandmother and my mom have always said.

And he says a bull in a china shop.

And he does not think that a bull in a china closet makes sense.

And I maintain it. That’s the point that it’s too big to fit into a closet.

So it doesn’t make sense.

Nice.

So your argument is between China Shop and China Closet.

Yes.

How convinced are you that you’re right?

I don’t think, honestly, I’m kind of Switzerland on this.

I think that we’re both right.

Okay.

He maintains that I’m wrong and he’s right.

I think you’re right that you’re both right.

Exactly.

Exactly.

And how thick is this guy, anyway?

Come on, he’s got to cut you some slack, right?

Hey, he’s going out with her.

I know.

Okay.

All right.

So what’s the story here, Martha? Why would we have two of these?

The earlier version is Bull in a China Shop. That came about in the early 1800s, I think.

Right.

But I’m with you, Megan. I think that Bull in a China Closet, in a lot of ways, although I’ve not heard it in the wild, but you see examples of it, I think it’s more evocative because a bull in a China Closet would be a mess because that’s something really small.

It’s a little cabinet for glassware.

Yeah, with glass fronts so you can see the beautiful china on the inside, right?

And so you’ve got this wild, steaming, snorting, bucking creature in this tiny little space with all these fragile things.

That is truly the definition of a mess and chaos, right?

Yes.

And actually, did you know that Mythbusters did a myth bust about a bull in a china shop?

I haven’t actually watched it yet, but I noticed it when I was trying to Google answers.

They actually put a bull into a china shop to see what happens.

And what did he do, pick out a nice 18-piece set?

I have watched that video, and actually what they do is they set up a faux china shop in a bullpen.

But it’s pretty cool.

The bulls are kind of balletic, you know?

They’re actually pretty nimble creatures, and they go through these fake aisles of china things, and they really don’t knock very much over.

Oh, interesting, interesting.

So they would be more destructive in a China closet, a smaller space.

But I wonder if you could train a bull to be like a mob enforcer.

He comes around to the China shop for some protection money, and I’ll sic the bull on you if you don’t pay up, right?

I don’t know.

I’m just thinking about this.

Maybe in Pampona.

So look, Megan.

Maybe in Pampona.

Martha and I are in agreement here.

You got to tell your boyfriend that you’re both right.

This is a colorful phrase.

You can go on and use whichever one that you want.

He doesn’t have to claim primacy or some kind of like, he’s not special because his is different than yours.

Well, he’s special because his was first.

His is about 80 or so years older than China Closet.

But you’re both right.

Well, if he’s 200 years old, then he’s fine.

Your boyfriend.

Sometimes he acts like it.

Oh, really?

Does he ever act like a bull in a China shop or a China closet?

Oh, always.

That’s why we argue about it.

Because I’ll say, I’ll clean my whole house and he’ll come over and he starts knocking things over and leaving moisture rings on my furniture.

And I’m going, you’re such a bull in a china closet.

And he’s going, I don’t even know what that is.

What is a bull in a china closet?

Oh, I get what’s going on.

This is called deflection, Megan.

He’s leaving moisture rings on your furniture and knocking things over.

And then he’s criticizing your grammar.

Hello.

Yeah, instead of accepting the criticism that’s due him.

Well, I look forward to sharing this podcast when it comes out on podcast.

All right.

Thanks for giving us a call, Megan.

Thanks for listening, too.

Thank you. Have a great day.

All right. Take care.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

Well, we solve dilemmas, we settle disputes, and we keep relationships together.

877-929-9673 and words@waywordradio.org.

Hi. You have A Way with Words.

Hello. This is Gustavo from Santiago de Chile. How are you?

Bienvenido.

Thank you. Thank you.

What can we help you with, Gustavo?

Yes. It’s about this expression, to have a crush on someone.

I thought it was a fairly recent language creation.

But then some time ago, I was watching this British TV serial, Downton Abbey, and then one of the characters used that expression there, and the story there takes place between 1912 and 1914.

So it’s about 100 years ago.

That means that the expression is even older than that, unless they made a mistake, which I doubt.

So my question is, when and how did this expression originate?

Boy, it’s interesting about Downton Abbey.

We’ve gotten about three different callers on the show about this because everybody’s really paying attention to the language on that program.

So your question is about to have a crush on, meaning to be infatuated with someone.

Or to really be excessively fond of them in an almost unreasonable way, right?

Yeah.

A crush is not.

Correct, yeah.

You’re right.

Your instincts are good on this.

Mountain Abbey is totally fine.

To have a crush on somebody is older than the period in which the show is set.

So we can find uses of to have a crush on somebody from the early 1900s.

And we can even find crush, meaning the person that you’re infatuated with, the person that you are suddenly and quickly in love with from the 1880s.

1880s.

Yeah, there are large numbers of related terms as well.

You can have to mash on somebody.

A lot of people probably know the term mash note, which would be a love note that you might pass in a class.

That’s a mash note.

You could have a crash on somebody as well, not just a crush on.

You can even have a case on somebody, meaning, again, to have a crush on them.

All of these terms, I think, really are not quite onomatopoeic, but close to it.

They’re like the coup de foule in French.

I’m going to pronounce this in two.

The lightning strike, right?

And I think it exists in Spanish as well, right?

To be struck by lightning is to have a sudden, quick infatuation or to instantly fall in love with someone.

I think they all represent that kind of collision of your eyes in this subject of beauty or this wonderful person.

And I think onamana P is not quite the right word for it, Martha, right?

Well, but it’s somehow evocative that way.

There’s also the word pash.

Yeah.

That’s an old word that didn’t survive the way that Crush did.

But pash, I’m pashing on someone.

It might be short for passion, right?

Yeah, yeah.

It’s to be passionate about someone.

But that shh sound.

No, it’s interesting.

It’s just kind of a crashing, crushing sound.

Yeah, but I believe it’s actually an emotional description of a collision, a collision between personality types and characters and romance.

Yeah, I first thought it was even spelled with A, not with U.

And then, yeah, it’s amazing that it’s so old, this expression.

I never imagined that.

Thank you very much, yes.

And Gustavo, do you have an idiom in Spanish, in Chilean Spanish, for this kind of thing, besides enamorado?

Si, enamorarse is the most typical one, and then volverse loco por alguien.

To go crazy?

Yeah.

Nice.

Well, next time I have a crush on someone, I will feel much more confident now.

Sure.

Well, best of luck in life and love, Gustavo.

Thank you very much.

This is great.

Okay.

Thanks for calling.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

I’m looking at this old newspaper from 1922 that uses the word crush in quotation marks.

Oh, nice.

It’s a little column.

And it’s so funny.

This woman is saying, why is it that girls of 16 or 17 pick out the most impossible boys of their acquaintance to fall in love with?

The more of a roughneck, that’s also in quotes, the boy is, the more of a hero he seems to be to the girls.

Honestly, one of my girls hero-worshipped a boy for weeks merely because he could play football like a demon.

He wasn’t good-looking and of intellect had merely a trance.

Yet she had him camping regularly in our parlor week after week where he spent most of his time talking about himself in slang and bad grammar.

Before she recovered from her infatuation.

Well, all of us nice guys have always wanted to know why women go after the bad boys.

Send us your mash notes to words@waywordradio.org.

Give us a call, 877-929-9673.

Or tell us about your lost loves on Facebook and Twitter.

Jim Rohde from Minneapolis left us a voicemail saying folks in his hometown of Waseca have an interesting way of saying goodbye to each other.

He says folks back home take leave of each other by saying, well, if I don’t see you in the future, I’ll see you in the pasture.

Which makes sense if you know that Waseca is in southern Minnesota and the population is less than 10,000.

Not counting the cows.

Exactly.

877-929-9673.

words@waywordradio.org.

And we’re also on Facebook and Twitter.

The Word Parade continues.

Stay tuned.

Support for A Way with Words comes from the University of San Diego, whose mission since 1949 has been to prepare students for the world as well as to change it.

More about the college and five schools of this independent Catholic university at sandiego.edu.

You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett, and we’re joined by our quiz guy, our funny man, John Chaneski.

Hello, John.

Hello, Grant. Hello, Martha.

Hi, John.

What do you got? You got a quiz there, something for us to play, a game?

Let’s talk about NIM, N-Y-M.

The fact is there are enough kinds of word types ending in N-Y-M, NIM, that I can quiz you guys about it.

And I’ll give you an example of a nym.

Like hot is an example of this type of nym.

Vis-a-vis cold.

Oh, antonym.

Right, antonym.

Very simple.

All these nym words.

I call this quiz the secrets of nymes.

Okay, great.

For those of you who have little kids, you probably know what I’m talking about.

Or read that as a child, right?

Or read the book, right?

Here we go.

The first one is pole.

P-O-L-E.

Pole, vis-a-vis.

Poland is an example of what type of nim?

Phononym.

No.

Demonym?

Yeah, demonym or demonym.

Yes.

Okay.

Got it.

Good.

Here we go.

In Alcoholics Anonymous, the word denial is said to stand for don’t even notice I am lying.

This is an example of what type of nim?

It’s an acronym.

It’s an acronym.

Sort of.

It’s a type of acronym, a specific type of acronym.

Oh.

It’s not an initialism.

No.

Yeah, but it doesn’t really mean that, but they went back and made it mean it’s a backronym.

Backronym, right.

Okay.

How about the term AWOL is an example of what type of nim?

Okay, that’s an acronym.

Yes, that’s an acronym.

Do you know the difference between an acronym and an initialism?

Yes, I do.

I don’t know.

Let me put in my pin number.

Sure, an acronym is one that can be pronounced as a word.

Initialism is the one where you say the letters.

So IBM is an initialism, and acronym would be AWOL.

AWOL, right, or NASA is an acronym.

Very good.

Thank you.

How about this next one?

Mark Twain is an example of what type of NIM?

Pseudonym.

Pseudonym, yes.

How about acoustic guitar is an example of what type of NIM?

Ooh, I love it.

Retronym.

Yes, a retronym.

Would anybody care to explain what a retronym is?

Yes, because when the electric guitar came around, you no longer just had a plain little guitar.

You had to specify that you meant the non-electric kind, so you made it an acoustic guitar.

You had to go back, retro, retro the word guitar to make it acoustic guitar.

Very good.

Here’s the next one.

An editor named Daly and a unionist named Foreman are examples of what type of nym?

I love these.

We do these on the show occasionally, right?

Sure.

We call them, well, there’s a bunch of different names, right?

Yeah.

Approponyms or something like that.

Oh, aptronyms?

Yes, aptronyms.

Aptronyms, yeah.

Okay, here’s the next one.

Overlord vis-a-vis the Battle of Normandy is an example of what type of nym?

Good question.

It’s more commonly known as codename.

Yeah.

But there’s a nym word for it.

I don’t know.

I can’t think of it.

Kryptonim?

Yes, a kryptonim.

Very good.

Very good, yes.

Let’s try this one.

Madonna is an example of what type of nym?

Pseudonym, stage nym.

I don’t know.

But specifically, like Plato, like Socrates.

Oh, because it’s one word?

Yeah.

Oh.

Mononym?

Yes, mononym.

Really?

Yes, it’s a mononym.

Good.

Here’s the last one.

Crown is an example of what type of nym?

This is a tough one.

Metonym.

Yeah, metonym or metonymy means a part used to represent the whole.

For instance, the crown is part of a monarch, so the crown represents the monarch.

Nice.

You guys did fantastic.

Nice work on the secrets of nims.

Thank you.

And, you know, when the quiz guy questions us about language terms, we better show up.

You did.

You represented.

You certainly did.

We didn’t show off, but we showed up.

Thanks, John.

That was pretty cool.

Thanks, Grant.

Thanks, Martha.

Always glad to have you on the show.

Same here.

If you have a question about wordplay, language, grammar, slang, regional dialects, call us 877-929-9673.

Or you can send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Grant.

Hi, Martha.

This is Laura calling from Sacramento.

Hi, Laura.

Welcome to the program.

Hi, Laura.

Actually, I have something that I wanted to share with you guys and also all of your listeners, and I was hoping to spread it around, a phrase that we can start using, that one day when a future caller asks future Grant and Martha, where did this come from, then we’ll know the answer.

Oh, okay. Let’s see. Let’s hear it.

Okay. Well, so I was thinking a few weeks ago about the slim chances of running into someone that you know in a big city like Sacramento. And that started me thinking about the little town that my boss Joyce grew up in. And somehow that inspired me to think of a phrase that one would use in the following situation.

So you meet someone, and then they find out what city you’re from or what college you attended or whatever, and then they ask you, oh, do you know so-and-so? And all of us, I think, have that happen to us. And I know it’s, yeah, people are just trying to make conversation and make connection with your story, but I think most of us city folk have a somewhat sarcastic reaction when people ask us that because the chances are so small that you actually know them.

And it’s not like you live in a tiny town like Heartline where Joyce grew up. And so I was thinking that when someone asks you that, that your answer could be, well, it’s not Heartline. And it’s based on the tiny town of Heartline, Washington. It’s in eastern Washington. It’s spelled H-A-R-T-L-I-N-E. And it’s a really tiny town.

And I have all kinds of really cute stories because Joyce likes to talk about what it was like growing up there. One of my favorites is how she says that every Monday the lady from the newspaper calls everyone in town to get the news for that week. And I just asked her today if she’s been in the newspaper recently, and she said, I don’t know. It depends on if my mom was home to answer the phone.

And so there’s all kinds of cute little things about being in that town. Her brother’s the mayor now of the town, and it has, I think, less than 200 people in it. Oh, my gosh. And when she was growing up, their actual shipping address was half a mile east of Post Office Box 54.

That is so adorable. So the rest of us who don’t have that experience, you know, when someone asks us that, we’re thinking, it’s not a little tiny town like Heartline, so we can say, it’s not Heartline. I kind of like that, it’s not Heartline, because I’m not sure that we actually do have a term for this.

I have another friend who calls that kind of question six degrees of stupid. But that’s kind of mean, don’t you think? I lived in New York City for 16 years, and I cannot tell you the number of times that I went to a party or waited for the subway or had an encounter in a store where I stood next to somebody that I knew and didn’t know that they were going to be there.

Or I stood next to somebody who I vaguely met at a party once before. And it happens. Even in a big place, it happens. You have these accidental connections. And you tend to go the places where people who are like you tend to go, if that makes absolute sense.

Oh, well. But not hard line. I like it. Well, what do you think, Grant? Should we try to popularize this?

Sure.

Yeah.

So the way it works is you run into somebody and they say, hey, oh, you’re from such and such place. Do you know so and so? And you say, well, it’s not heart line, meaning how dare you ask that because there’s no chance.

Right?

I guess so.

Okay. We can give it a try.

I guess so.

Yeah.

Let’s turn on the sirens if you don’t mind.

Oh, a close listener.

Whoop, whoop, whoop, whoop.

Here we go.

All right, Laura, we’ll see what we can do. All right?

All right.

Thank you guys.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Call us with your language questions in the meantime, 877-929-9673, or send those emails to words@waywordradio.org.

We were talking earlier about bull in a china shop, and the fact is that there are a lot of similar expressions in other languages, quite a few in Spanish.

Like como un elefante en una cacharrería, which is like an elephant in a pottery store. They also have in Spanish like an octopus in a hardware store, which I love.

That sounds like my four-year-old. They are all hands. I swear. I only count two, but I think there are eight.

That’s great.

Call us with your words and phrases, 877-929-9673, or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi there, this is April from Iowa City.

Hi, April.

Hi, April. Welcome to the program.

Thank you.

What can we do for you?

Well, I have a question. I’m an avid Internet user, and there’s something I’ve noticed lately in the last couple of months is that people will use the phrase, like a boss.

I’ve seen it on Facebook. I’ve seen it on, you know, other Internet applications I use. And about, you know, one minute of Googling found the Andy Samberg video that was very funny and clearly uses that phrase.

So I figure that’s probably a source of its current popularity. But I wondered, is that where it originated, or does it have a longer history than that?

So like a boss, in what circumstances are you seeing it?

Oh, people will use it to say that they did something very skillfully or with great authority. Like someone might say, I made that dinner like a boss.

Right, with style and panache and a little bit of class, right?

Yes, yes.

Okay, now I have to confess I haven’t seen the Andy Samberg video.

April, I too am an avid internet user, and I know exactly what you’re talking about.

Now, have you seen the images making the rounds, and there’s like a billion of them, where it’ll show somebody doing something kind of freaky or embarrassing or awkward, but they seem not to care. They have a look of like being cool or collected, right?

And it’ll say, like a boss.

Right, right, like the joy of enthusiastic failure.

Yeah.

Hey, that’s it.

What?

You pretty much nailed it.

And you also successfully Googled the answer. It turns out that in 2005, there was a guy named Slim Thug, a hip-hop artist who did a song.

Straight song called Like a Boss, right? And it was on his album, already platinum. It wasn’t a very big hit. I don’t even think it actually went platinum.

And so he did this. And then in 2009, a couple of the guys from SNL, from Saturday Night Live, including Andy Samberg, and then Seth Rogen is in the video for it.

They did a version of Like a Boss, a parody version where they had him doing all this boring office stuff, like using the copier like a boss, you know, celebrating birthdays like a boss.

It’s all this kind of stereotypical office nonsense like a boss. And you can actually see it spike the term like a boss when you look on Google Insights or the Google keyword searches and see that the use, right as that video is released, just explodes on the Internet.

The power of Saturday Night Live to spread memes is still very strong. And that is absolutely the source of popularization for this.

So is it over now?

No, it’s going strong. And just go to a site like Reddit and look for the words like a boss, and you will find it everywhere.

What’s interesting to me is that it’s a nice continuation of some older meanings of boss that date back to the 1800s, meaning a person, not necessarily the boss of an operation, but a guy who is the head of a gang or the head of a crew, who’s powerful or who has authority or class.

I thought that maybe it went back to video games. When you complete a level on a video game, you have to fight a really tough opponent called a boss.

Oh, yeah? That’s possible.

I don’t do a lot of gaming, so I don’t know, but I do remember that from Mortal Kombat, right? The last round, right? Is that the boss round?

Exactly, yeah. I did it in Super Mario Brothers, but same idea.

Okay.

It might come from that, I don’t know.

But you do find it occasionally pop up before 2005 in hip-hop lyrics.

But really, you’ve got to give all due credit to Andy Samberg and the folks at SNL for putting out their parody version of Like a Boss.

That was the popularization moment.

Cool.

Thanks for calling, April.

Really appreciate it.

I appreciate your answer.

Thank you.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Goodbye.

877-929-9673 or send your questions in email to words@waywordradio.org.

I’m plundering the old books again, Martha.

What else is new?

I found a book of similes from the 1800s.

Oh, boy.

You’ve been up all night.

Yeah, there’s some cool stuff in here.

They’re evocative.

Some of them are old-fashioned, but some of them still make a lot of sense.

Here, for example, are three about eggs.

Eggs?

Okay.

So as easy as peeling a hard-boiled egg, which actually doesn’t seem that easy to me.

I don’t find that easy.

Somebody thought it was easy.

It’s here in this book.

Maybe they knew how better in those days.

As hard to shave as an egg.

That one is hard, right?

I like that.

That’s difficult to do.

Yeah, hard to shave as an egg.

And this is my favorite of the three.

Difficult to grasp as the small end of an egg.

I’ll say.

Yeah, really hard to grasp a small end of an egg.

Yeah, with your hand anyway.

With your hand.

What do you use, calipers?

877-929-9673, words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Dan Gaze from Rochester, Minnesota.

Hi, Dan.

Welcome to the program.

Hello.

Thanks for having me.

How can we help?

Well, I do a lot of writing in the research world, and we do a lot of protocol writing.

And it seems that a lot of our work revolves around using the phrase evidence-based.

And it always comes to me unhyphenated, and I change it to hyphen between evidence and based.

And I have no idea why I do that.

It just looks like it’s the right thing to do visually.

And typically that’s how I have gotten through undergraduate and graduate school and now a career, by just looking at words.

I kind of am an English savant.

I have no idea why anything works the way it does.

I just know what looks right.

Okay.

So that’s basically the question.

And I know, like, certain phrases have the hyphen, first class, low budget, things like that.

But evidence-based bounces back and forth off my desk, and I always put it in, and usually it stays because I have the last say on it.

Well, I would say that your instincts are right on.

That’s exactly what I would do.

That phrase there is functioning as an adjective before the noun, correct?

Like sports-related writing?

Yes.

I mean, the rules can get really complicated here, but I think the easy rule is just to lean toward that hyphen if you’ve got a phrasal adjective like that.

So court-hyphen-imposed deadline, sports-hyphen-related writing, as you said.

I think where some people get tripped up is when you’re using an adverb and then another adjective before, like hotly contested race.

You wouldn’t want the hyphen there.

But I would lean toward your way of doing it.

I would too.

And I think evidence-based should take the hyphen even when it’s after the verb.

Really?

Yeah.

My research is evidence-based.

I would say that evidence-based needs the hyphen.

And you’ll find that most style guides will say that’s probably your best course of action.

The difficulty is that in English in general, we are tending to drop our hyphens.

And decade by decade, more and more style guides are saying that the hyphens are optional or they’re suggesting that words that are really strong compounds that go well together should be just made one word and the hyphen should be removed altogether.

Like high school.

Yeah, an ice cream.

Evidence-based isn’t there yet because we clearly have a noun and we have a participle and those two are probably never going to merge into a single word.

Like no one, so now it looks like noony.

Noony, noony, noony.

I can’t stand it.

Yeah.

Do you get flack for doing that if you put the hyphen in there in evidence-based?

No, not at all, because usually I’m the last one to submit it, and then it goes in front of a board.

So they must seem to think that it looks okay and typically gets approved.

And it’s not even that big of a deal.

It’s not the crux of research.

But in health care these days, it seems to be that most things need to be evidence-based before they can be put into action, or the reason that they are put into action is because they’re evidence-based.

So it just occurs so often, and I always look.

I try not to look it up because I just go with what looks right.

And so far, so good.

Yeah, I think you’re fine.

And I would encourage you to start, if you don’t already have one, an institutional style guide where you formalize some of these decisions that you’re making and try to get your colleagues to agree that this is the way that you all go.

You’ll save yourself a lot of editing in the long run.

Yeah.

Cool, Dan.

Thanks for calling.

Yeah, thank you.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Well, this is an evidence-based show, 877-929-9673.

All occasionally we do squabble and we settle squabbles.

Send them to words@waywordradio.org.

A few more similes from this book for you, Martha.

All right.

Large is life and twice as natural.

I just love that description of somebody.

Large as life and twice as natural, meaning real and right in front of you.

Nice.

Did you really see Elvis Presley?

Yep, large as life and twice as natural and much more handsome in person.

877-929-9673.

Coming up, bedtime catchphrases for children and more of your calls.

Support for A Way with Words comes from National University, where flexible online classes let you earn your degree or credential on your schedule.

More at nu.edu.

You’re listening to A Way with Words.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

You may remember a call we had from Sarah Osborne.

She lives in Cobham, Virginia, but she grew up in England, and she wanted to know the origin of an odd family saying.

When Sarah was a child, her mother tucked her in every night with the phrase, good night, sleep tight, see you on the big drum.

And we were intrigued by this linguistic mystery, but we really didn’t come up with a good answer for her about what in the world that meant.

And something about this phrase piqued the imagination of our listeners.

We were deluged with emails speculating about what the big drum might be.

But we never did really get an answer.

Sarah herself thought it might have something to do with her family’s military roots, and after that call aired, her 80-year-old mother emailed from England suggesting maybe it had to do with the traditional drumhead religious service held on naval ships.

Because, of course, they didn’t have chapels on naval ships.

And her mother writes, the altar was formed by a pyramid of drums laid there by the drummers from the ship’s naval band.

There would be four small drums and the largest drum placed on top and then draped with the Union Jack or military standards.

And indeed, if you Google the phrase drumhead altar, you’ll see lots of instances of this.

An improvised altar in the field that’s made from a stack of military drums piled neatly and draped with the colors.

And there’s also such a thing, I didn’t know this, as a drumhead court-martial.

Oh, I didn’t know that either.

Yeah, it’s one that’s held in haste in the field when officers have to deal with the offender right then and there.

So who knows?

But the relationship between that and the thing that you would say to a child at bedtime is kind of distant.

Well, she was suggesting that maybe if you don’t go to sleep, you’ll get in trouble.

You’ll get a court-martial.

Yeah, but who knows?

Well, one that I liked, we got an email from John Vanderpan in Benbrook, Texas, and he suggested, actually it was his wife who tipped him off to the idea, that perhaps it has to do with the Robert Burns poem Tam O’Shanter, which features Brigadoon.

And he suggested, or his wife suggested through him, that perhaps it was a mishearing of Brigadoon, sleep tight and I’ll see you on the Brigadoon instead of big drum.

Right? And he suggests that perhaps the mother was reassuring the child of safety since witches or beings of the night can’t follow them onto the Brigadoon.

Yeah, that could be.

Interesting, right?

Yeah.

So, John, that was a great email.

If you have an idea about what sleep tight and see you on the big drum could possibly mean or where it could come from, let us know.

words@waywordradio.org or call us 877-929-9673.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Donna from Tallahassee, Florida.

Hi, Donna.

Hi, Donna. Welcome to the program.

I have a very sweet and loving grandmother born in 1898 and passed away in 1983.

And I was the oldest of her 13 grandchildren.

And when we would be at her house and maybe got a little too noisy or rambunctious, she would say, all right, you all, you better behave, or I’m going to knock you from an amazing grace to a floating opportunity.

I love that.

From an amazing grace to a floating opportunity?

Right.

And, of course, she never did, but we all knew that meant Gran had just about had enough.

With that many grandkids, yes.

Yeah.

Have you ever heard that?

Interesting. Are you African-American, perchance?

No, I am not.

Oh, it’s interesting because most of the uses that I find of this term come from African-American writers or people from the black community.

Most of the older newspaper mentions of it are from black newspapers, and it almost never appears in print anyway from white folks.

Well, she had very, very close ties to the black community.

So that might explain it.

There we go.

That could explain it.

Like, for example, you’ll find this in a 1930 play written by Langston Hughes with the help of Zora Neale Hurston.

It’s called Mule Bone.

And it’s in there.

And that’s where a lot of people pick it up from if they read the great Harlem Renaissance writers and poets.

But they will probably have heard this numerous times because it is such a striking phrase when somebody says, I will knock you from an amazing grace to a floating opportunity.

Love it.

And it’s almost opaque.

I’m not even really sure I know what it means.

I don’t know what it means.

I think what it means, it will knock you from being able to sing.

I’m guessing here, being able to sing in church to being a ghost.

So you’re going from singing amazing grace to being a ghost, kind of hovering around, floating around.

So I’m just completely guessing.

I don’t know.

I have no idea.

And no expert that I can find knows anything about this.

How interesting.

Well, I enjoy this explanation so much, and maybe I can get a copy of that play and read that for myself.

You can find it in full online.

Just look for Mulebone, M-U-L-E-B-O-N-E, by Langston Hughes.

You’ll find numerous mentions of it.

You’ll probably find full copies of it.

I don’t think it’s out of copyright, but it’s one of those things where people put it up anyway.

I will do that.

Thank you so much for calling, Donna.

I really appreciate it.

Oh, thank you so much, and keep up your wonderful, insightful work.

Oh, thank you, Donna.

Thank you very much.

Bye-bye.

Bye now.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673, words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Eva from Honolulu.

Hi, Eva.

Welcome to the program.

Hi, Eva.

Hi.

How can we help you today?

Well, I was coming back from Thanksgiving dinner with my brother, and we had been really quite disappointed because our host had said that they’d made two turkeys so there would be lots of extras.

And we kind of waited for them to offer us a little bit of turkey to take home, and it didn’t come.

So on the way home, we were talking, and we said, well, we would have asked, but it would have been, and both of us simultaneously said, in Fridig.

And we realized as we were talking that this was a word our mother used and that we never used it with anyone else, but somehow it popped out of both our mouths at the same time.

So I was wondering where that term comes from, if it’s from some part of the country or if it’s a word that’s in common usage.

Nice.

And Eva, what does it mean?

Lacking in dignity is how I would think of it as.

I think that would be my general sense of it.

Excellent.

Well, you’ve just about gone right back to the original Latin, which was infradignitatum, which means under one’s dignity, beneath one’s dignity.

Okay, that makes sense.

Yeah.

Yeah, it’s a shortening of that.

And infra is like infrared is the wavelength that’s not visible.

It’s below the spectrum that we can see.

So infraredig was something that you heard among your family.

Yes, and I really don’t think anyone outside of my family, certainly not in Hawaii, I’ve never heard it.

It’s pretty rare being a Latin phrase originally, and you’re probably only going to hear it among people who are fairly literate.

Well, that would have been my mom.

And what throws people when they first hear it, or even after they’ve heard it for a while, is that the dig sounds so contemporary.

It just immediately calls to mind the slang, do you dig it or can you dig it, right?

Oh, okay. Never thought of it that way.

Yeah, or dig. But it’s just a shortened form of dignitatum.

I think my mom may have studied Latin in high school.

There you go. Yeah.

Among schoolboys in the UK, there was a fad and a custom at one time for the longer Latin phrases that they had to learn when they were studying the various classical texts.

They would just shorten them.

And some of these abbreviations became very standard, and this is one of them.

Thank you so much. It’s been great.

Thanks, Eva. Bye-bye.

Take care. Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

words@waywordradio.org.

And find us on Twitter and Facebook.

A few more similes from this old book for you, Martha.

Okay.

Easy as winking.

That’s pretty easy.

Yeah, it’s pretty easy.

And fast, yeah.

And fast.

How about this?

Easy as breathing.

Usually.

Usually.

Unless you’re climbing the stairs.

Or you’re not underwater.

Yeah.

And how about this?

As difficult to grasp as a shadow.

Right?

You might say that I tried to learn Mandarin Chinese, but it was as difficult to grasp as a shadow.

Yeah, yeah.

877-929-9673, words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is David.

I’m calling from Kingston, Ontario.

Hi, David.

Welcome to the program.

Hi, David.

Hi, thank you.

What’s on your mind?

I’m wondering if you can help resolve a debate that my wife and I have had over the last several years.

It surrounds an expression she used, which I claim isn’t a real expression.

She described something or someone at one point as being as slow as Moses.

I thought she’d misspoken and meant as slow as molasses, but she claims, no, that it’s a real expression.

I’ve never heard it, and I’m wondering if you’d ever heard it.

And are you both from there?

Yes, we’re both from, well, not from Kingston, but from Canada, although part of my wife’s family, her maternal grandmother, was from Richmond, Virginia.

-huh.

Interesting.

Yeah, that’s very interesting.

So she’s thinking slow as Moses, who was pretty slow getting to the promised land, right?

I mean, 40 years?

That’s what she uses to shore up her argument.

-huh.

You make it sound like that shoring’s not actually working.

I remain unconvinced at this point.

Well, and you’re saying that slow as molasses is obvious, right?

Because it’s such a viscous fluid.

Exactly. Slow as molasses, or my preference is slow as molasses in January.

In Canada, yeah.

Indeed.

Well, so would you be disappointed then to hear that other people do use the phrase slow as molasses?

And they haven’t all made a mistake.

Perhaps, but I wouldn’t be surprised, I don’t think.

Yeah, yeah.

I think it is a direct biblical connection, though.

It is people who, this idea of 40 of something being so biblical about meaning a long time.

It doesn’t necessarily mean 40 days or 40 years or 40 weeks.

It means just a very long time.

And that’s the big moment for Moses, right?

That’s one of his big moments anyway.

Yeah, he didn’t quite get there, but yeah.

Yeah, but it’s not nearly as common as your phrase, though.

Not nearly as common.

But you do see Moses in a lot of different sayings, too.

I mean, I don’t know if you did this when you were young, but if somebody told a corny joke, we would all say, that’s old as Moses’ toes and twice as corny.

I’ve heard that.

No, I never said that.

And you’re not even laughing, David.

Old as Moses’ toes, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

There was a reference I did see, a biblical reference, that Moses apparently described himself as being slow of tongue and slow of speech.

Right, right, right, right.

Yeah, yeah.

So he wanted Aaron to do all of the work for him.

Yeah.

What do you have invested in this answer?

Well, my win-loss record with these kinds of debates is well below 500.

So this wasn’t going to turn the tide.

So is it below the Mendoza line for you?

Hey, David, I hope we’ve helped.

You have.

Have we?

Okay.

You have. Thank you.

All right. Well, thank you for calling.

Thanks, David.

Okay.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Here’s a longer simile from this book of old similes. This one is about language.

Oh, great.

Written language is like a mirror, which it is necessary to have in order that man know himself and be sure that he exists.

It’s from La Martine.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

877-929-9673, words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, it’s Matt from Kalamazoo.

Hi, Matt. Welcome to the program.

Hi, Matt.

How can we help you today?

Well, I have a question.

One of my favorite bands is the Barenaked Ladies, and they’re pretty well known for their witty lyrics.

And in several of their songs, they use a bit of wordplay, where they use homonyms in the same sentence.

So, for example, broken to the old apartment, 42 steps from the street.

Here it is.

Crooked landing, crooked landlord, narrow laneway filled with crooks.

This is where we used to live.

Or another example, I wax poetic as you’re waxing your legs.

So you’ve got crooked in one little bit there, one little part of the lyrics, where crooked has two different meanings, and then you’ve got waxing in another part where waxing kind of has two different meanings, right?

Right. Actually, they use it three times in the first example.

So it’s crooked landing, crooked landlord, narrow laneway filled with crooks.

So I guess you could say that’s three times.

Yeah, and so one time years ago, I was thumbing through my dictionary, and I came across the name of this type of wordplay, and I’ve forgotten it.

And all I can remember is that it rhymes with the word ellipses, I think, and I was hoping you could tell me what is that type of wordplay.

But I want to mention something. You called them homonyms. I don’t think that we’re quite talking about homonyms here.

Right. Yeah, I was kind of wavering on that myself.

Okay, yeah. The technical term might be polysemes, which means a word that has more than one meaning, but they are the same word.

It’s just one word with multiple meanings rather than different words with the same spelling, which is what a homonym is.

Right.

I know that sounds a little awkward, but because of the weird etymological history of English, we have numerous words that look identical but are not the same word.

They’re completely unrelated even though they have the same spelling, and that is a true homonym.

Yeah. And I think that the word that you’re thinking of that sounds like an ellipsis is probably celepsis.

Does that sound right? S-Y-L-L-E-P-S-I-S.

Celepsis.

Okay.

And that is where one word is applied to other words in different senses.

Like you might say, John and his driver’s license expired last week.

Or she left in a huff in a yellow cab. That kind of thing.

Right.

If you Google that word, sylepsis, that’s S-Y-L-L-E-P-S-I-S, you will find a zillion of these, because people love collecting these, because some of them are hilarious.

Right, right.

I think I’d be in that group.

Cool?

Yeah, I think so.

All right, thanks for calling.

Hey, thanks, guys.

Appreciate it.

All right, bye-bye.

877-929-9673, words@waywordradio.org.

Grant, one more thing to say about that bedtime saying, good night, sleep tight, see you on the big drum.

We heard from Michelle Landcastle in Bow, New Hampshire, that’s just outside of Concord.

She writes, I had to share the lengthy laugh I had this morning thinking of future generations trying to decipher our good night ritual, which is, you ready?

Night-night chicken butt ham head woo-hoo.

What?

Night-night, chicken butt, ham head, woo-hoo.

Is this what they say in New Hampshire or just her family?

Just the Lancaster family.

She says, it’s something my daughter started saying when she was very small and it has persevered over the years.

Who knows if it’ll carry on to my children’s children and beyond, but I’m having a good laugh imagining it.

I am too.

That’s awesome.

What do you say to put the kids to bed?

Call us 877-929-9673 or send it an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Things have come to a pretty pass.

Our show’s over for today, but that doesn’t mean you can’t talk to us.

Leave a message anytime at 877-929-9673.

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A Way with Words is independently produced and distributed by Wayword, Inc., a nonprofit supported by listeners and organizations who believe in lifelong learning, better human communication, and the value of a thing well said or well written.

The show is recorded at Studio West in San Diego, California.

Thanks for listening. I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett. Bye-bye.

Au revoir.

You like tomato and I like tomato.

Potato, potato, tomato, tomato.

Let’s call the whole thing off.

But oh, if we call the whole thing off, then we must part.

And oh, if we ever part, then that might break my heart.

So if you like pajamas…

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