Little Pitchers

Even though this is a recorded podcast, you can always call us anytime. The number is 877-929-9673.

Leave your questions and stories about language, and you might just end up discussing them on the air with us. Thanks for listening. If 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.

I’ve always been a voracious reader, but recently I find myself drawn to one genre in particular, and that’s poetry. And it sort of crept up on me. I just noticed the other day that every single book on my nightstand was poetry, like Natasha Trethewey and Katie Ford and Billy Collins, Audreon Rich and Kay Ryan.

And I’m not sure why I’m gravitating toward poetry above all the other forms. But I’m thinking that maybe part of it is that we talk so often on the show about grammar. And poetry pushes against the rules of grammar.

And I think because of that, it’s a great way to learn how to do any kind of writing better. I think poetry is such a great teacher. You spend some time with it, and you realize how much the style in which you say something can make your writing pack so much more of a punch, even when you’re writing prose.

And Grant, recently I’m hearing about more and more teachers who are using the poetry of hip-hop lyrics to teach writing in the classroom. They’re building on that poetry that their students already love. And so much of hip-hop really is poetic, isn’t it?

It is poetic. There’s a couple things to say to this. One is, if I can flatter you for a second. Oh, go write it. There is wisdom that comes with maturity. And I think poetry requires life experience to get the most out of it.

Yeah, I agree with you. Because these ideas and concepts are so dense in there. To unpack them, you must have lived a good life. That is very true. A thorough life at least, right? I think that’s very true. That’s a nice way of saying I’m getting older, right?

No, I mean, we all get older. It happens. May you continue to grow older. Thank you. And the thing with hip-hop, it tends to be more emotional, have a higher impact. It’s not very subtle, right?

And this reminds me, this is going to sound like a tangent for a second. RapGenius.com just got a $15 million investment. $15 million. What RapGenius.com does is annotates the lyrics to hip-hop songs. And it might not be fully academic, and you might disagree with it, but you have people who are considering this as an art form.

They’re going into this site and saying, well, this is what I believe that this artist is saying with these words, or this is what I took away from it, or this is what my life experience shows me these lyrics to mean. That’s significant that somebody should see this merging of pop culture and, frankly, the forensic exercise of analyzing a text in a humanities class.

Somebody should see it worth putting money into that. So who’s behind it? Who’s doing the analyzing of the rap lyrics? Is it crowdsourced? Yeah, it’s the community. No kidding. It’s the people who love it, the people who enjoy it.

And there’s something important happening there. And I love that you’re into poetry now. And I’m so happy to hear you share poems on the show. You have one for us later, I hope. I do. I have a couple, in fact.

If you have a poem that you’d like to share with us, something that really moved you, we really want to hear it. 877-929-9673 or send in an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hello. Hi, who’s this? This is Veronica Hennessy, Bethlehem, New Hampshire. Hi, Veronica. Welcome to the show. Thank you. What can we help you with?

Well, I’m from England, and I heard this word used by a couple of people on television, and I’ve never heard it here before. And the word is kerfuffle. Kerfuffle. K-E-R-F-U-F-L-E. And David Brooks from The New York Times on PBS, Chuck Todd on NBC, and a woman reporter. They used it, and it was really around, you know, this time of the election and all.

And when I used to hear it at home, you know, in England, it used to be my mother saying, what’s all the kerfuffle? And what she meant was the fuss or the confusion or something. And whoever was, you know, the three people I mentioned, they were pretty much using it that way as well. You like all the carry-on about the election and all. But I was really fascinated because I’d never heard it here before.

Yeah, it’s become much more popular since the 1980s. But you’re right, it’s used primarily in Britain. Where did you live in Britain? I was born and raised in Liverpool. So you’re surprised to be hearing it here, Americans adopting this term. Right, yes.

Well, I would say that here in this country, if you’re using the word kerfuffle, you probably are exposed to more kinds of media and read more widely than most people because it’s not all that common and it’s a little bit self-conscious. And those people who do use it do tend to be journalists because they’re more likely to be consuming British media as they contemplate world affairs.

Right. But one interesting thing that happens often in the United States is people will call it kerfluffle. Like it’s F-L-U-F-F in the middle, which is not one of the usual spellings. And there are many usual spellings. Right. And I truly, I think it’s of Scottish origin. You’re absolutely right. Yes. In Scotland, it’s C-U-R-F-U-F-F-E-L. And it just means to sort of, you know, mess up something.

Huh. Yeah, well, that’s it. That’s what my mother would come home and say. What’s all the kerfuffle? Thanks, Veronica. Oh, you’re very welcome. It’s a pleasure. And I do enjoy the program. Thank you so much. You too. Bye-bye.

You know, one reason I think that kerfuffle has really taken up in the last few years is because of one of my favorite series ever, Little Britain. You’ve watched this. Little Britain is a comedy sketch series with David Walliams and Matt Lucas. And there’s one sketch where these guys are supposedly stranded on a desert island.

And you know how people on a desert island will spell out help or SOS so that somebody flying over can see them? Well, poor David Walliams’ character is working so hard, and you finally see that what he’s spelled out on the beach is, help, we’re in a bit of a kerfuffle. Which doesn’t really work.

No. Call us with your language stories, 877-929-9673. Grant, you know that conversation we had about baldness? Baldness, yes. Yeah. Well, I just learned something about how you can make baldness work for you.

If you have hiccups, there’s this traditional cure that I never heard of until recently, but I researched it, and there are lots of different versions of this. If you have hiccups, you are supposed to think of six bald men. Or ten bald men, or four, or three. But the idea is you focus on thinking of people who are bald, you know, Gorbachev, Yul Brynner.

So it’s about distracting you. Yes. So this is like the fear cure for hiccups as well. The fear cure? Yeah, where you scare somebody or startle them. Yeah, only it’s more contemplative. Oh, I’d rather think of bald babies, though. Well, I can’t wait to get the hiccups again, just so I can try this.

A pairless cat. Do they work? A pairless cat. I know this is a language show, but tell us how you get rid of hiccups. words@waywordradio.org, or call us with your language questions, 877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hi, this is Megan from Tallahassee, Florida. How are you? Hi, Megan. How are you doing? Doing well. What’s going on, Megan?

Well, I have a question about a phrase that I grew up with. The phrase is to high-grade, and we’d use it. So my sister and I, if we were sharing a bag of trail mix, and she was picking out all the M&Ms, I would say stop high-grading all the M&Ms, as in to take out the good stuff.

And so my question is, where does that come from? Because I grew up thinking it was normal, and then once I grew up, I found out it wasn’t. To use high-grade meaning to steal. Where did you pick that up, Megan? Not necessarily to steal, but to take the good stuff out of something. Okay. Take the best ones.

Take the best.

Right.

And any idea where you might have picked that up?

So my parents used it.

And I just grew up with it as a normal phrase than I thought it was.

And it wasn’t until I went off to college and used it around my boyfriend’s family that everybody turned and looked at me and said, what did you just say?

Are your parents gemologists?

Both of my parents are science educators.

And so I have a little bit more to add to my story, which is I’m a biologist.

And when I was an undergrad, I was taking a class which included some forestry.

And so I learned forestry, or at least in forestry, they use the term to hydrate us and to like go in and take out all the big trees right before, say, land is sold or something like that.

And my grandfather on my mom’s side was a forester.

So I thought that that’s where it came from.

But when I asked my mom, she said that it was actually a phrase more that my dad brought into the family.

Was your dad, by any chance, from the western part of the United States?

Oh, yeah. So I grew up in Oregon.

Okay. Bingo. That makes sense.

Because the idea of high grade comes from the mining industry in the early 1900s.

And the idea of going into a mine, I mean, it’s basically gold miners stealing from their employers.

Going into a mine and sort of picking out some of the very best stuff and maybe just sort of tucking it in your pocket or your lunch pail or some handy orifice and walking out.

I mean, it’s sort of like those stories you hear of people building entire cars by…

Oh, the song.

I built it one piece at a time.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

So the idea is you take out the high-grade or you take out the best stuff.

You just take a little bit, you know, from your employer for yourself.

Because you’ve got this vein of precious metal right in front of you.

It doesn’t require a lot of refining.

You know, you’re not going to have to put this in giant machinery, right?

Right.

Knock off a few pieces, pocket it, get a little bonus.

Right.

Or you’re down there doing awful, dirty, sweaty work, and you happen to see a new vein of ore that nobody else has seen, and you just kind of keep going back to that and taking the high grade.

So, Megan, your sister was picking out the M&Ms and leaving behind, like, the flakes of junk?

You know, like the Cheerios and the peanuts.

Oh, the Cheerios.

Yeah, those are low grade.

I often high-grade mixed nuts.

I go for the Brazil nuts, which a lot of people don’t like, but oh, yum, yum.

Oh, you can have them.

I’ll take all the Brazil nuts.

I was going to say, we should eat nuts together because I hate Brazil nuts.

There we go.

I knew we were compatible.

So high-grading, I love the idea that this word trickled into your family and you’re not quite sure where it came from.

You said your parents are science educators.

What kind of science?

General natural history and biology.

Okay.

And so my dad grew up in Oregon and definitely had a lot of background in general, I don’t know, mining or forestry.

He didn’t really work in those industries, but was around them.

I could see how this word, this verb, high-grade as a verb, would just be in the ether and be something that your family would pick up in this community that has a lot of loggers and miners.

Yeah. I sure never heard it until recently.

It’s a great word. It’s perfect for use all the time.

I think people, you should use it more.

Yeah, don’t let your boyfriend scare you off of it.

You should keep your oddities of speech.

I’m not with him anymore.

Oh, there we go.

You’re going for a higher grade of guy or what?

Even high grading the fellows, I see.

Great.

Hey, Megan, thanks a lot for calling.

Okay, thank you very much.

Take care now. Bye-bye.

It’s great to know the real story.

Now you have it.

Take care.

Okay, bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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

Grant, we are still hearing from listeners following up on that quiz that we had about people’s names, afternems, you know, what do you call the guys standing next to a hole with a shovel?

The answer was supposedly Doug, I think, or Barry.

But Stephen Markley wrote us to say that obviously the guy’s name is Phil.

I love it.

And then a listener from Madison, Wisconsin, wrote us to say, what do you call those two guys over a window?

Curt and Rod.

I’m not going to let go of this until we get to the end of it.

There’s no end of it.

We’ll never sleep.

Curt and Rod.

I thought that was brilliant.

That is brilliant.

877-929-9673 or send your questions about language to words@waywordradio.org.

Support comes from the Ken Blanchard Companies, celebrating 35 years of making a leadership difference with Situational Leadership 2, the leadership model designed to boost effectiveness, impact, and employee engagement.

More about how Blanchard can develop your executives and leaders at KenBlanchard.com slash leadership.

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

And I’m Grant Barrett. And on the line from New York City is John Chaneski. Hello, John.

Hi, Grant. Hi, Martha. I have for you today sort of a repeat game, something we’ve done before.

We’ve talked about the license plate game. Remember that?

There are several kinds of license plate games. You could try to find different states.

But the one I like is where you take the three letters on a randomly passing car and you try to find a word that contains those three letters in order.

They don’t have to be together, but they have to be in order in the word.

For example, if you see a car with the license plate MMT, you can say mathematics.

That’s perfect.

Right?

Good.

Oh, that’s a good one.

What we’re going to do is I’m going to give you three letters off a passing car, and you have to give me the shortest answer possible.

The shortest answer possible.

Yes.

Okay.

If you come up with a longer one, that’s fine, but I think the shorter one is a little more challenging.

Okay.

Okay?

Here we go.

The shortest answer.

A license plate.

Vroom.

Here comes a car.

There it goes.

A-H-V.

A-H-V.

Achieve.

Achieve.

Very good.

Martha, you want to throw one in?

You can wait for the next car if you like.

I think I will.

Here’s one that doesn’t start with a weather vane.

That’s kind of a long one, but I also had adhesive and anchovy.

Oh, okay.

Okay.

I have a couple on my sheet here.

Let’s look for the next car.

Here comes MMX.

Ooh.

MMX.

Oh, flummox.

Flummox, very good.

Oh, good, Grant.

That’s good.

That’s good.

I’ll take that as an answer.

The shortest one I could find was imix, I-M-M-I-X.

What is that?

To mix something in?

The word for mixing things up.

There are so many words for those.

Also comix, which is another word for mixing things up.

Oh, yeah.

And I also found temporomaxillary.

I was going to say that.

Show up.

I know.

I’m sorry.

I jumped in ahead.

Let’s try another car.

Here comes NYG.

NYG.

Annoying.

Ooh, nice.

Very good, annoying.

Anything shorter?

No, I can’t think of anything.

What did you just say?

Oh, is that it?

Anything.

Anything is perfect.

I love it.

Very good.

The subconscious comes to the rescue.

Very good.

You weren’t really thinking that?

Nope.

Oh, my gosh.

I should have said, oh, yeah, absolutely.

No.

Oh, yeah, sure.

The shortest I found was undying.

Oh, good.

That’s good.

I also found otorhinolaryngologist.

Of course, yes.

Just in case.

That’s the second medical word.

What are you doing?

Yeah, okay.

How are you spending your evenings?

Dental school?

Scanning textbooks is all I do.

Let’s try another car.

Here comes FSM.

FSM.

Yes.

Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Fascism.

Yeah.

Fascism works fine.

There are a couple of isms that work for this.

Fovism, right?

Fovism, right?

But I also found a word for things that you throw off a boat.

Flotsam?

Flotsam, yeah.

That’s another one I found.

How about D-Y-L?

Dasipigle?

What’s dasipigle?

D-A-S-Y-P-Y-G-A-L.

It means having a hairy butt.

Oh, yes.

Very nice.

I was just thinking of dactyl, but mine’s not as good.

Oh, dactyl.

Dactyl is mine.

But it’s shorter.

Dactyl’s good.

Exactly what I have on my list.

Yeah, it’s very nice and short.

Yeah.

I did find a four-letter word.

A four-letter word?

What’s your four-letter word?

I found ideal.

Oh, very good, of course.

Perfect.

Should have known.

Okay.

Let’s try one last one.

Let’s go with K-N-P.

K-N-P.

Knapsack is one.

Knapsack is good.

Or just nap, K-N-A-P.

Just nap is good.

Very good, Grant.

And any more?

I had kidnap, kneecap, and kingpin.

Good.

Sounds like a story.

Just so you can compare your answer with me, those at home can compare their answers with mine.

Yeah, but Grant again got the shortest.

So, vroom, there go the cars.

They’re gone.

So we’re home.

We’re here.

Thanks, John.

Are we there yet?

Fun quiz, guys.

I particularly love the ones where I just know people are playing along at home.

As long as you’ve got a pen and paper, you can go to town, right?

Yeah, and if you’re in a car right now, go ahead and play your own version of the game.

Thanks, John.

Talk to you next week.

Thanks, Grant.

See you there.

If you’d like to talk about grammar, slang, punctuation, you name it, anything related to language, give us a call, 877-929-9673, or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Whitney from Dallas.

Hi, Whitney. Welcome to the show.

Hello, Whitney.

Thank you. Hi, Martha. Hi, Grant.

Hello. What can we do for you?

Well, I hope you can clear up a family debate for me.

We will try.

My mom’s family is hysterical when they get together, and especially when they’re playing cards.

So this was a few years ago.

It was my grandmother, her three sisters, some of their children, including my mom, me and my two sisters.

So we were playing a card game, and someone used the phrase, chomping at the bit.

So I think it was in the context of, in this game, you buy cards, and you have to wait.

If someone else wants to buy the card who’s ahead of you, you have to wait on them.

So that started to debate whether or not it’s chomping at the bit or faunching at the bit, because there were certain family members who were just had never heard of chomping at the bit, and that was a ridiculous phrase.

It was faunching at the bit.

So what I found interesting was that a room full of family members could all have been using different versions of this phrase, which I kind of think of as a colloquialism.

And, in fact, there was even another word.

I can’t remember if someone else had another version instead of chomping or faunching.

So my question was, which was the original?

And to me, I’ve always thought chomping at the bit made sense.

I can’t even think of what faunching at the bit, how a horse would faunch at the bit.

Yeah, and the idea is that we’re talking about somebody who’s really, really eager to do something, like a horse that has a bridle and a bit in his mouth, and he really wants to do something, so he’s like chomping at it, chomping at that metal bit in his mouth.

And, yeah, the older version of this, the other one that maybe you were thinking of, is champing at the bit.

Oh, champing.

Yeah, champing, which is considerably older than chomping, but we don’t hear it unless it’s in that phrase now.

I mean, we hear about chomping if you’re chomping down on something.

But the one that’s far more common is chomping at the bit.

Well, good, because that’s the one I use.

So I think it’s more appropriate.

So you win.

You sound like a very competitive card player.

But we have to talk about faunch for a minute, don’t we?

Yeah, how are you spelling faunch?

F-A-U-N-C-H.

F as in Frank.

F as in Frank.

And was there any dividing line between these groups of people?

Was there anything in common about the people who said faunching at the bit?

The two that were adamant about faunching were one of my grandmother’s sisters and then her daughter.

But they all came from a similar area in Oklahoma.

They grew up so close together that I couldn’t understand why one would have heard one phrase and another a different phrase.

Interesting.

There is a slight difference in faunching and champing at the bit or chomping at the bit.

And faunching tends to imply a little more anger and aggression.

Yeah, irritation.

Irritation.

And not just impatience, but like just frustration.

And it always pops up over the last 100 plus years in context related to cattle drives and cowboys and farmers.

In any place, there are animals or animals that need to be driven by a horse.

Oh, okay.

So it’d be interesting to know if they meant something different.

There’s a slight difference there.

And faunch is often used to apply to people as well.

It’s not just for horses, though.

And that’s another difference.

You can be faunchy even.

Yeah, or faunching.

Yeah, you can be faunching.

Why are you faunching?

We’ll get there in a minute.

Okay, so it has a little bit more of an angry tone.

Yes, yes.

Okay.

A very strong western and southern word, far western, or southwestern word, almost unknown in the northeast and the southeast.

Yeah, when you said Oklahoma, I had bells going off in my head.

So who won the game?

Probably my grandmother.

I don’t remember who won the game.

Yeah, she was probably the one who was chomping at the bit.

Yeah, yeah.

Age goes with skill.

Well, thank you for clearing it up.

Sure thing, Whitney.

We’re glad you called.

Interesting history.

Take care now.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Grant, do you know how most horses like to eat?

Standing up.

Yes, and without a bit in their mouths.

We’d love to hear your family stories about language, so call us 877-929-9673, or you can always send them an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hi, Yavoy with words.

Hello, my name is Omar Hines. I’m calling from Arlington, Texas.

Welcome, Omar.

My mom and my grandma would constantly tell me, well, not me, I guess, I would hear them say all the time that little pictures have big ears.

And I kind of have an idea what it means, just the context they were using it in.

I was just wondering where it might have came from.

-huh. So your family said little pictures have big ears?

And how would they use that? What do they mean by that?

Like when the adults were talking and there were kids in the room, they would say, well, let’s wait a little bit later because, you know, little pictures have big ears. Yada, yada, yada.

Okay.

Very good, very good. And what did you understand that to come from?

In your mind, what did you see when they said that?

I just assumed they were talking about the little kids in the room.

Yeah, yeah.

Little pictures.

Yeah, it’s interesting. The original saying is little pitchers, P-I-T-C-H-E-R-S.

And it refers to pitchers like you might pour water out of.

And the handles tend to be shaped like human ears.

This kind of big at top and small at the bottom with a kind of half kidney bean shaped curve.

Yeah, big ears.

Yeah, big ears.

And it’s been used exactly the way that your family used it since the 1500s.

So that when adults were talking about something only for adults, let’s say money or sex or war, they would just stop and say little pictures have big ears, meaning let’s stop talking about this until the kids are out of the room or out of the way.

But over the years, it has been misunderstood as pictures, P-I-C-T-U-R-E-S, so many times that many people spend their whole lives not even knowing that the original saying and the more common version is pictures.

And also, the other reason I asked you what you saw in your mind is many people think it has something to do with, like, baseball.

Totally, totally.

Now I can tell the family, they’re saying it wrong.

Well, yeah.

They’re saying it wrong.

It might be a hard habit to break, but good luck with that.

And it goes way, way, way back, centuries.

So it’s a great tradition.

Take care now.

Thank you so much.

Okay, bye-bye.

Bye, Omar.

Bye-bye.

There’s a rhyme about this saying.

Do you want to hear it?

Sure.

Of listening children have your fears, for little pitchers have great ears.

Isn’t that the truth?

Yeah, and it’s similar in Dutch.

The Dutch have the same expression.

I didn’t know that.

Oh, that’s very cool.

Yeah, it’s sort of like when you spell things out, you know.

And they learned them, though.

Well, I know.

I used to say, I want some CKK, because I thought that’s how you spelled cake for the longest time.

I knew if they were spelling something, it had to be good, right? My little ears were just perked up.

Tell us your stories about language from your family. Call us 877-929-9673.

We were talking earlier about high grading, that is taking out the best of something, like the best of M&Ms, and it coming from mining and taking the best gold ore out of a mine.

There are a lot of stories about this in a book I ran across called The Man Who Moiled for Gold.

Moiled? Yeah, I had to go look up moiled. What is moiled? M-O-I-L-E-D, moiled. To moil is to become wet and muddy from work. You’re working so hard that you’re just becoming sweaty.

And then the dust is sticking to your body. Yeah, it comes from a Latin word that means to wet or moisten or soften. It’s related to mollify, for example, to soften.

And since the 16th century, people have talked about toil and moil, meaning a day’s work. Going off to my toil and moil.

You could actually put gold dust in the dirt on your body and wash it off into the drain at home and be a millionaire.

Good idea. Why don’t we do that?

What word has caught your ear? Call us 877-929-9673 or send it an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hi, you have A Way with Words. Hi, this is Claire.

Hi, Claire. Where are you calling from? From Dallas, Texas.

All right. What can we do for you?

Well, I have a word that I’m interested in finding information about. When my first child was a newborn, if he squirmed or wiggled either in his crib or in our arms, my in-laws would say he was ritching.

And I had never heard that word before, but we adopted it. It’s actually a very useful word.

Don’t tell me. Let me guess. Maybe your in-laws were from, I don’t know, Pennsylvania, someplace like that?

You got it. From York. York, Pennsylvania. From York, Pennsylvania.

Okay. And they probably have a Germanic last name. Stein.

Okay. The reason that we know these things is because this word tends to appear in places that were settled by Germans. Because it is originally from German.

And there are a variety of forms of this. But generally, they all mean either slipping and sliding or scooting around or even just disturbing something.

And we have ruts and roots and rooch and rooch and all these different ways of saying it as well. As it was borrowed into English, it was borrowed multiple times in multiple ways.

They also referred my second son wiggled and scooted, as you said, a lot more than the first. And they said he was a roacher.

Yeah. He used it as a noun as well. In part of the country, the word is transformed a little more. So now it would mean to rummage around or to root around in something.

Probably also influenced a little bit by the sound of it. It sounds a little bit like root or rut.

Yes, very interesting. Very interesting. Well, thank you so much.

Yeah, our pleasure. Thanks for calling.

Okay, I appreciate it and love your show. All right, bye-bye.

Great. Bye, Claire. Bye-bye.

Yeah, the original has to do with sliding. And in German-speaking countries, if you want to wish someone a Happy New Year, you do that.

And then you wish them einen guten Lutsch, which is a good slide. Have a good slide into the New Year. Isn’t that great?

I love that. I’m going to borrow that in English. Well, if you’re in parts of Pennsylvania, therefore, another form of the word, ruch, is ruchy, which is a sledding place.

Oh, okay. Or a sliding place. Yeah, that would make perfect sense.

So I’m going to go out to the ruchy and go down. And retch around. And retch around.

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

Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hi, this is Alan in Indio.

Hi, Alan, how are you doing? Hi, Alan, welcome. What’s up?

My question has to do with a word I have heard several times on Mythbusters. And when they are doing something and it goes wrong, they say everything went pear-shaped.

Now, I have looked up pear-shaped, and the only reference Webster’s 10th Collegiate has is related to vocal production.

Oh, I thought you were going to say body type. I think, you know, you eat too much trifle or something, you get pear-shaped.

Right. Then I went to an etymological online dictionary, and it said we don’t even know where pear came from.

The name of the fruit? Yeah. It’s an older word. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are probably a lot of theories about where it came from.

Right. But pear-shaped is itself a really interesting term. Did you look further into it? Did you get the connection to the Royal Air Force?

No, no. Yeah, it’s funny about pear-shaped. It’s long since been borrowed into many other fields.

I’m not surprised it shows up with those knuckleheads on Mythbusters. What, as opposed to the knuckleheads here? It sounded very British to me, but I couldn’t figure out why.

Well, it pops up in the lexicon of the Royal Air Force basically during the Falkland Islands War. And it refers to aircraft that have crashed.

Because they go from being these sleek, long devices to being really big on one end when they hit the ground. Oh.

Yeah, so they literally have one big end and another thin end, and they’re roughly the shape of a pear.

Wow. So if something is pear-shaped, it has gone splat because of gravity. I knew that it had gone awfully wrong, but I didn’t understand that connection.

So when you’re in a really boring presentation at work and somebody’s on slide 100 of their slideshow and they use the word pear-shaped, you can just have a really nice moment and you’re like, he doesn’t even know.

-huh. Okay. But pear-shaped has got this great backstory.

What’s really interesting to me is it seems like a term that should have come up in the 1920s when aircraft became a thing. They were really common.

But no, it wasn’t until the 80s that we really started to see it show up in print. It could be older than that, but I’ll be darned if I can find anything earlier than that.

1980s. Yeah. Falkland’s War. But that’s really fascinating because it seems like such a benign term, and it’s got this really grisly origin.

It’s sort of like blockbuster. We think of that as being a great movie, but it’s also from the military, right? Ammunition that can bust a block.

Yeah, a whole city block. Cool. Well, how do you do, Alan? That’s wonderful.

Take care, Alan. Thank you so much for calling. Bye-bye, Alan.

Thanks a lot for having me. Bye-bye.

877-929-9673 or words@waywordradio.org. Let the word love flow as The Way With Words continues.

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, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. Earlier we were talking about poetry and just how much meaning and imagery and sensuality you can compress into very, very few words.

And for a great example of this, I highly recommend a poetry collection I’ve been reading. It’s called Poetry 180, A Turning Back to Poetry.

And the editor of this anthology, this literary bouquet, if you will, is Billy Collins, the former poet laureate of the United States.

And I wanted to share a poem from there. It’s by Robley Wilson.

I wish in the city of your heart you would let me be the street where you walk when you are most yourself.

I imagine the houses. It has been raining, but the rain is done, and the children kept home have begun opening their doors.

You know that moment when the kids have all been inside and they’ve been having to do indoor things and then the moment opens up.

Yeah, I remember being both sides of that equation, that situation. That’s really great stuff.

We’ll put a link to this book online. It sounds like some wonderful stuff in there. Somebody took a lot of care picking those poems out.

Yes, Billy Collins did. If you’ve got a poem that you really love, maybe something that you shared at a wedding or some other family celebration, send it to us an email, words@waywordradio.org.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, thank you for taking my call.

Sure thing, who’s this?

This is Donna Morgan, and I’m in Fort Worth, Texas.

Hi Donna, welcome to the show.

What can we do for you?

In 1968, I took a test in my social studies class, and I remember it distinctly because it had a picture, and there were several words that would match it. And so like there was a picture of a sofa and you would say, did you think it was a sofa or a couch or a Davenport or a DeVan? And then there was a picture of a Coke and it was, did you say Coke or soda or pop or cola or whatever? And so just depending upon our responses, our teacher told us where we were from.

But I do remember that the picture for purse, there was handbag or pocketbook or purse. And about two months later, this girl came into our school and she called it a pocketbook. And the teacher said, well, then she would be from the Boston area. And sure enough, she was. And so I just have always wondered if you’ve seen a test like this and if that test could still be used today or is our word choices so ubiquitous because of television that we don’t tend to use different words for the same item?

Ooh, I love this. So you’re talking about a dialect quiz where the teacher basically told you where you were from. And let’s just assume that it wasn’t some kind of conjurer’s trick. It is still possible to determine where people are from by the words that they use and by their accent.

Absolutely. We, believe it or not, American dialects are growing more different from each other rather than more similar.

Really? Yes, and it’s hard for people to accept that. I get people refuting it when I say it, but all the evidence show this to be true. There are a few exceptions, but in the large, the large mass of data that we have shows that we are growing more different from other regions rather than more like them.

There is one minor exception to that, and that’s that we tend to pick up faddish words much more quickly through the media, especially with social media. And if you leave those out, then when we’re talking about family words and community words and regional words, those are we’re differentiating. And part of it is this kind of local pride. We still learn our language from the shopkeepers and our grandparents and our parents and our schoolmates and people. Even though we’re a very mobile country, we still tend to stay pretty much near home. And we tend to consume the same kinds of media, right?

Yeah, the same kinds of media. So the Coke pop soda map, there’s a famous one online, we’ll put it on our website, is still very strong. The Davenport sofa couch divan map, Chesterfield map, still very strong. And this is not even bringing up the stuff that doesn’t have to do with the Lexus. If we just look at the way that people change their vowels, their vowels alone can show you where somebody’s from.

My favorite question to ask people is I try to get them to say the word B-A-G, bag. And if I can get you to say the word bag, I can probably get pretty close, at least on a regional level, to figuring out where you’re from. Because if you’re from the Great Lakes or the North Midlands, you might say bag. And if you’re from the South, you might say bag. And if you’re from somewhere in the middle, you might say bag. And those vowels are subtle, but if you can hear the difference, you can just, I’ve just divided the country in three, and I’ve got a 33% chance of figuring out roughly where you’re from.

And then, you know, if I think you’re, if you say bag, I can say, oh, you’re probably from around Chicago. And if I get within a couple hundred miles, you’re going to give me credit for it, aren’t you?

Trust me, Donna, he’s great at parties.

Well, that’s why he brought up that. That’s why he wanted to know if it was a conjurer’s trick, because a little bit of this game, and all linguists kind of goof around with this a little bit when they’re in get-togethers. It’s a little bit of like a cold read, like a tarot card reader would do, or a supposed psychic. A little bit of us looking at the person in front of you and saying, what do I already know about this person? What can I tell by their dress and their carriage and the people that they’re with and their automobile? If you have an LSU sticker on your car, I’m going to figure some stuff out about you. If you have a Jayhawk sticker on your car, I’m going to know a few things about you, right?

But in the classroom, that’s just great. What a way to get kids inspired to think about language differently. So Donna, we have a wealth of links that we will provide on our website to these kinds of surveys and dialect maps and lists like that. I think you’ll really enjoy them.

Thank you. I’m so glad to hear that and know that because this is something, like I said, I’ve been interested in for a while, and every time I hear Way With Words, I always think, I want to call in and ask this question.

All right. Well, thank you.

Thanks so much for calling.

Thank you for calling, Donna.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

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

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Jared Kelly calling from Canfield, Ohio.

Welcome to the show.

Hi, welcome. What’s up?

Thank you. Well, I’ve been a football fan all my life, which is many decades. And the field that they play on is called a gridiron. And, of course, it’s one of those things you just accept the term, not saying I wonder why they call it that. This summer my family was vacationing in South Jersey, and they have a colonial historic village there called Cold Springs. And they hire people to enact the period. And as we were in where they do the baking and cooking, this woman was showing us the instruments they would use at the hearth to cook food. And one of them was rectangular with slots evenly spaced across the width. And I said, well, what is that? And she said, that’s a gridiron. And it occurred to me that it looks just like a football field when you’re high up in the stands. So I was wondering, is there a connection between the cooking instrument and the reason why a football field is called a gridiron?

It’s a good guess. You’re right. You’re right. You win.

Yeah, that’s exactly it.

Yep.

Oh. Yeah, the term gridiron itself for that kind of cooking instrument goes back all the way to, I think, the 14th century or so. Quite a ways back. Yeah, and it’s been applied to other things that resemble that, including at one point people were calling the stars and stripes a gridiron as well, flying the gridiron. So these horizontal lines alternating either colors or spaces between the metal or what have you, right?

Yeah, exactly. But there’s an interesting backstory to the word gridiron itself, right?

Yeah. There’s a misunderstanding there.

You mean about griddle?

Yeah. Yeah, that we think that it looks like it might come from griddle or be related to that, but they’re different. But the word iron is a mishearing add-on where people misunderstood a version of griddle and thought that the word had iron at the end because the device usually was made of iron. Iron, yeah. But it just turns out that we just misunderstood it.

Yeah, yeah. So it was applied to lots of different things, including an awful medieval torture instrument.

Yeah. I mean, exactly what you might think. Isn’t that what watching football is?

Only if you’re up in the nosebleed seats that Gerard was talking about. But, yeah, that’s exactly the origin of it.

Oh, great. You confirmed my aha moment.

Aha!

Congratulations!

Thanks for calling, Gerard.

Okay, thank you.

Okay, bye-bye.

Take care, bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Yeah, and we also get the word grid from gridiron.

Oh, I did not know that.

And therefore gridlock.

Gridlock, I see.

All going back to that cooking instrument. Amazing.

Isn’t that cool? We can give you an aha moment, too. Just call us, 877-929-9673.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Yes, this is Scott. I’ve talked to you before, and I’ve got another good question for you.

Oh, yes, please. Bring it on, Scott.

I can recall when I was a middle manager. My boss came to me and asked me if I would discipline an employee on my staff. And he told me, I don’t care if she just up and quits. And I hear this used a lot, this usage of up. But where does that come from? Why don’t we down and quit? Or just quit. Right. Why do we have to up and do things?

There’s an entry in the Oxford English Dictionary that dates back to the 1300s. It has uses of this. It indicates that at one point you would use up and followed by an action to indicate that you suddenly literally rose from your seat and started to do something. So in the morning, we up and went, something like that, right? I up and plotted on again. So you stood up. You literally got up physically. And then, as we tend to do in English, it became a little less literal and a little more figurative.

And by the 1500s, you could use up and say something. So I was sitting there with my mouth closed and she kept going on and on about what a terrible meal this was. And so I just up and told her to clam up. Right. That means I got up my gumption or I got up my will or I got up my motivation. And then I said the thing that needed to be saying. So it’s a little more intense. And it tends to be paired in the way that they’ve done it in the Oxford English Dictionary with a verb of speaking.

Right. And it’s interesting that you use this quit action because I love this idea that it is it requires a verbal expression or requires some kind of emission of sound or words in order to do this. But the thing is, where we have the modern use of up and a verb, they’ve got another entry, and this is a different part of the dictionary, to start up, come forward, to begin abruptly or boldly. And it so perfectly fits what you’re talking about.

If we up and do something in modern English, we are doing it with a kind of vigor or enthusiasm or sudden energy. Well, I’ve heard up and died. Yeah. He just up and died. Right, which was like 10 minutes ago he was fine and then he was dead. Yeah. It’s more like down and died. If somebody up and quits it, man, there wasn’t a lot of hand-wringing. There was not a lot of discussion. They just said, all right, I’m out of here.

So originally to up and quit, she would have to stand up from her chair and then quit, but now it’s just figurative and she could stay sitting down and quit. Chair, rock. Yeah, and the reason I said there’s kind of a story here is it’s difficult to prove that each one of these things led to the other, but the historical record dates them in almost the perfect order. So we can assume that there’s some kind of influence, or as I like to say, cross-pollination, and that each one naturally flowed into the other over the centuries.

Very interesting. It’s the suddenness that I like, the boldness. You quickly are doing something. You know, if you’re slow, or it requires a lot of contemplation, you’re not up and doing anything. Then you would be down. Exactly. So up is fast and down is slow. Got it. Scott, thanks for calling. Thank you so much. Take care now. Enjoy your show. Bye-bye. Take care.

You can up and call us by dialing 877-929-9673 to talk about language. When we spoke to Omar in Texas about the saying, little pitchers have big ears. Yeah, I love that. I was reminded of this book, Wisdom of Many, by Wolfgang Mieder. It’s called Essays on the Proverb. And he’s got a passage in there where he talks about people who misunderstand the origin of that expression. When they hear little pitchers have big ears, they think of 10-year-old little league pitchers on their mounds wearing baseball caps with giant ears sticking out. Kind of Alfred E. Newman throwing the ball. Yeah, Opie.

So they understand that it means that children are listening. But what they don’t understand is how the pitcher comes into it. Oh, my gosh. I never thought of that. With the giant hat and the giant glove. It doesn’t occur to them that it’s a pitcher for pouring liquid. Call us with your language questions, 877-929-9673, or find us on Facebook and Twitter.

Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hello. Hi. This is Nat, and I’m in Duluth, Minnesota, and I’m looking out at the sparkling Lake Superior. Beautiful here today. Oh, very nice. Thanks for calling. What can we do for you? Nat in Duluth, welcome. It occurred to me just out of the blue a couple weeks ago that I said the word ain’t. When I was growing up. And I said it among us children, and we said it commonly. It wasn’t, we just said it all the time, and then the teachers would beat it out of us. And our parents, we would not use it at the supper table. But I work with a lot of children, and I’m around a lot of children, including my own three who are in their 30s. They were born in the 70s. I’ve never heard them or young children say the word ain’t.

Nat, are you a teacher? No, I work with children now. And you never hear the word ain’t? I do not. So what happened? Did those teachers succeed? Or did nature take its course? Well, that’s a really good question. So is ain’t out of fashion? Is that what you’re asking more or less? I guess. But how did it do that so absolutely? You know, I asked this question recently in social media, and I had a really great response from Jeff Nunberg, who does the commentaries on language for the public radio show Fresh Air. And he had the same idea that I did when this first came up, which is ain’t is still used. We know that it’s still used across America. Sometimes it’s kind of canonized in idiomatic expressions. Sometimes it shows up in lower registers of English and it’s used in African-American vernacular English.

But where it isn’t used now, where it used to be used a lot, is in fiction and movies. I don’t know. You use ain’t in your scripts and your dialogues in order to indicate that somebody was a rustic or a hillbilly or that they came from an uneducated background. And I read a fair amount and I just and I see a fair amount of movies. I don’t remember seeing this at all. I mean, I haven’t analyzed this in a text form and looked at large bodies of data for this. And actually, ain’t would be difficult to do. But my impression in general is that ain’t is still widely used. It’s just not used in the arts as much as it was. And so maybe that’s part of the impression. Maybe the kids aren’t picking it up from, you know, our gang, right? Correct. I don’t know. That’s my thing.

But there’s a couple other things here. I do think the teachers had a little bit of success in stigmatizing ain’t. So that you knew that ain’t was a thing that you weren’t supposed to say around teachers and parents, even if you said it among your friends. Oh, absolutely. So that’s mainly what the teachers did. I don’t think they got rid of it, but they certainly made it very clear that there were certain places that ain’t should not be used. But another thing here is ain’t now is almost, I won’t call it ironic, but it’s attached to these phrases like say it ain’t so, or if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Or this ain’t your father’s Oldsmobile. So ain’t is now kind of fossilized in these expressions that we have, and we use it to drop out of our normal register of speech and demonstrate that we’re talking more casually or colloquially or in a more friendly way.

Yeah, and I’m wondering if it particularly got stigmatized because it’s so much easier to say ain’t is a bad word rather than don’t use this particular grammatical instruction. It was a taboo word almost when we were kids. This is the thing about ain’t. Criticizing ain’t has also fallen out of fashion, and now we have other peeves. Maybe it’s irregardless or hopefully at the beginning of a sentence. And those two at some point will fall out of fashion. And we will, as a society, adopt other peeves to get upset about. They will.

Nat, thanks so much for calling.

Well, I appreciate it.

And have a wonderful day.

Enjoy that lake while you’re up there, all right?

Take a swim for us.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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I think you did.

I did.

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Things have come to a pretty path.

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