Little Shavers (episode #1538)

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. Even if you don’t know a word of Greek, you may be tempted to start learning that language after reading a book by Mary Norris called Greek to Me. The subtitle is Adventures of the Comic Queen, and you may remember her earlier book called Between You and Me, which is about her adventures as a comic queen that is wielding a copy editing pencil at the New Yorker magazine for three decades. Her book Greek to Me is about her passion for both ancient Greek and modern Greek. And it’s a deeply personal love letter to the language and this exuberant account of falling in love with both the ancient and the modern version. And she writes about making multiple trips as a solo traveler in Greece and around the Aegean. And I know very little modern Greek at all, so I was especially excited to pick up some from this book. For example, I didn’t know that the modern Greek word for plastic wrap is something like diaphani membrani, or this is so poetic. Diaphanous membrane? Yes. Yes. Wrap your sandwich in that diaphanous membrane.

Oh, that’s very cool. Yeah. Diaphanous coming from Greek words that mean light shining through. And the modern Greek word for newspaper is ephemera, which means…

Ephemeral something? Yes. Yes. It’s related to the English word ephemeral. It means lasting but for a day. Isn’t that pretty? Yeah, it truly does. Yeah, yeah, the modern Greek for day is hemera. You know, people say kalimera. Kalimera, good morning, yeah. Yeah, yeah, but it’s related to ephemeral. So if you have a fan or a potential fan of ancient or modern Greek on your holiday gift list, I would recommend Greek to Me by Mary Norris. Outstanding. It sounds wonderful. I had a wonderful trip there years ago where I went there on an unexpected adventure where I gave some coworkers some money and said, buy me a ticket. Don’t tell me when I’m leaving or where I’m going until the day of the trip. And gave them a month-long window and they sent me to Greece.

Are you serious?

I did, yeah.

Wow.

I didn’t like Athens, but I love the islands.

So do you recommend that kind of…

I absolutely would. Absolutely would do that. I mean, now with the family, it’s harder, but it was amazing. Yeah.

Wow. The things you find out when you talk about books. Maybe we can recommend some more books later in the show.

We will recommend some more books later in the show. We’d like to hear your books, the things that you think we should be reading, the things that we should tell everyone else that they should be reading, 877-929-9673. Email words@waywordradio.org or tell us about your books, the ones that you want us to read, on Twitter @wayword.

Hello, welcome to A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Jesse calling from Newport News, Virginia.

Hi, Jesse. Welcome to the show.

Hi, thanks for having me.

What can we do for you, Jesse?

I was wondering about a term I heard a lot, particularly online, something being potato quality or referring to it being bad quality.

What were you looking at?

Well, it’s something that I just kind of hear in slang, like, you know, something being, oh, did you take that picture with a potato? Or, you know, maybe if computers old, it could be like you couldn’t run something because computers are potato.

So pictures in particular?

Yeah, pictures in particular.

So we’re talking about pictures where they’re heavily pixelated or something?

Yeah, or just something maybe referring to like old electronics.

Okay.

And the phrase specifically is potato quality? Or you mentioned a computer that’s not very good and you just call that a potato?

Yeah, both actually.

So you would say something like, here’s a photograph of me, but it’s kind of potato quality?

Mm-precisely.

Mm—

Yeah, well, for at least a decade, the phrase recorded with a potato has been in YouTube comments, you know, where people are talking about something that Grant was describing earlier, an image that’s blurry or pixelated. And the notion is, you know, as if you had used a camera made out of a potato to record it.

Yeah, that’s what I always thought of. It kind of made me think of like a potato battery clock or something like that. But I was just wondering how that.

Yeah.

Now, have you made one of those, a potato battery clock? I have to ask.

No, I actually never did. I’ve seen them a lot on television shows.

I know. I’ve always wanted to do that, you know, where you stick the wires and the nails in the potato and you can power a little digital clock. But, yeah, potato quality recorded with a potato is often seen in YouTube comments as well as other just improbable objects like toasters or microwaves, people might say, recorded with a toaster. And it goes back to just online jargon like that.

So it does only go back like 10 years or so?

As far as I know. I looked into it in 2012. I found it first in images and then later noticed it had been in videos. And by 2012, it started showing up as the phrase potato quality. And I started seeing it with images. And so a lot of times what happens is people steal videos and images from each other and they re-upload them. And when you re-upload them, they lose quality because there’s a recompression. And when you recompress something, there’s something called lossiness.

Artifacts.

Yeah, artifacts. You lose pixels. And so you just get this lumpiness. And I always think of it as kind of looks like it’s mashed potatoes.

Oh, that’s interesting. Some of these images have been passed around for almost 20 years, and people are still re-uploading them for karma on Reddit. It’s just ridiculous.

Of course.

So potato quality really does apply. You put a pad of butter on them, you could eat them almost.

Oh, my gosh.

Indeed. Well, thanks for taking my call.

Sure.

Yeah.

Glad to talk with you, Jesse.

All right.

Take care.

You too.

All right.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hey, Martha. This is Jerry from Lutherville, Maryland, which is part of the metropolitan area around Baltimore.

Hi, Jerry. Welcome to the show.

What’s up?

Well, I have a question. I have a two-part question. The first part is about the word hipster. I associate the word hipster with maybe the last 10 or 15 years in our culture. I always have a visual image of a guy with trim little hats, beards, skinny pants that drink exotic coffee. They also have an attitude that they know something that we should also know, but they are not going to tell us. Before hipsters, I thought there were beatniks, which wore different hats. Then I read a recent and great biography about Nelson Algren, the author who wrote The Man with the Golden Arm. In the chapters covering the late 30s of Algren’s career, he was briefly involved with a man called Lawrence Fallon, who led a group called the Fallonites. Fallon described his group as hipsters in artistic revolt against the establishment. I was very surprised to see the word hipster being used in the late 30s.

And then the second part of the question came up, which is, what is hip all about? How do we associate a joint near our center of gravity with being culturally aware?

So tell us more about the Fallonites. What kind of hipsters were they?

They were actually pretty violent and drunkards. They were part of the sort of proletarian writers that were around in the 30s. They were actually pretty uneducated. Mostly they got together after complaining about their jobs or not having jobs through the 30s. And they did a lot of drinking and they got into a lot of fights.

When was that book written?

This book was written in 2018. It’s a great book. It’s written by a guy called Colin Asher.

Colin Asher.

So is Asher using the word hipster or is Algren using the word hipster?

The guy Fallon was quoted by Asher as using the word hipster.

All right. So it isn’t a surprise to find the word hipster in the 1930s. What surprises me is that there isn’t more in your description about jazz, because a hipster in the 1930s was really an aficionado of jazz. It was about African-American nightclubs and swinging and hepcats and people in the know who knew where to go for the good time and who knew what musicians could really send you and really knock you out.

Who knew about the best smoky rooms where to get the good vibes, that sort of thing.

So you can find hipsters being talked about as early as 1930s, mid-1930s for sure.

And I’m sure it’s older than that, but it was very African-American. Shows up in New York newspapers and small African-American newspapers and descriptions of nightclubs and descriptions of nights out and music and reviews of touring musicians and bands and that sort of thing.

And it kind of moved on from there.

And even still being used in the 1960s, and it is where eventually we get the word hippie. Probably does eventually come from hipster later.

And then it kind of fell out of use in the 1970s and 1980s until it was resurrected in the early 2000s, maybe a little later in the 2000s, to refer to somebody else who, you said something earlier that I want to applaud, which is somebody who seems to know something that nobody else does, because that was the thing about the hipsters.

They seem to have this special knowledge about jazz. There was a description I saw that I want to share with you from 1940, describing a hipster. It says, everybody doesn’t study music, but through some unknown intuition, the younger set has become musically smart. And whether it understands the technical points or not knows it’s good. And I think that’s kind of what you were saying about the modern hipster as well.

They seem to know a thing about fashion and hairstyles and beer and the right whiskey and axe throwing and fixie bicycles and that sort of stuff and quality denim and good flannel and books and literature and the correct podcasts and just this whole set of things that the rest of us just are behind on, right?

Yeah. The word hip comes from jazz. I imagine that that would have something to do with dancing or rhythm.

So the word hip, often spelled, by the way, hipster was often spelled hepster, H-E-P, and hip, H-I-P, was often spelled H-E-P. So there’s some confusion about the origin of it.

But it is generally believed by word historians that it was originally a pun about somebody who could really swing their hips and move. And a lot of the earlier mentions of hipsters do refer to great jazz dancers, people who could just swing their hips in a beautiful way to the rhythms of the music.

So, yeah, we do believe it’s directly to hips. Now, there is a very false myth that I want to debunk here that has to do with the Wolof language, and that it came from the Wolof language of Africa. It does not come from the Wolof language of Africa. That is incorrect.

So just to debunk that and stop that email cold.

Yeah, well, that makes a lot of sense.

So is there a connection to beatniks also for music?

Yeah, beatniks, yeah. So the nick suffix comes from Eastern European culture, probably through Yiddish into English, and nick means a person who is an aficionado of something, so it’s an aficionado of the beat, and so it’s a beat poet, so beat poetry.

Yeah, that’s very cool.

Thanks for calling. Really appreciate it.

Okay, thank you.

Bye.

Thanks, Jerry.

Bye.

877-929-9673.

More of what we say and why we say it as A Way with Words continues.

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

I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

And we’re joined by our quiz guy, John Chaneski.

Hi, John.

Hi, Grant.

Hi, Martha.

It’s so good to hear your voices again.

It’s time to look at notable news stories from the past year through the lens of limericks.

That’s right, as we do. I’ll read you a limerick about something that happened in 2019, and you’ll finish it for me.

Now, you might need to supply one word, a phrase, a name, or something else. You’ll figure it out. Are you ready?

Sure.

Good. Here we go.

In China, the scientists croon a triumphant space-faring tune. They’re fans of Pink Floyd, or So I Have Hoyed. They landed a craft… on the moon.

Specifically where on the moon?

Dark side of the moon.

On the dark side of the moon, yes.

Correct.

Nicely done.

Here’s the next one.

The bells in the tower are calm, but the workers proceed with aplomb. Months after the fire, the scaffold climbs higher, foretelling a fresh… Notre Dame.

Notre Dame.

Oui, oui.

Well done.

This region of space time’s a tease. You can even say please on your knees. It won’t sit for a pick. But Caltech found the trick to convince a black hole to say cheese.

Cheese.

Click.

Well done.

Nice picture.

Here’s another one.

A Florida reptile locator said to his friends, see you later. I’m off to Chicago. Take care of my doggo. Humboldt Park is the home of a… gator.

Gator.

Yes, exactly. I was looking for something more complicated than that.

No, that’s all it was. Chance the Snapper was the name that the Chicago community bestowed upon this four-foot-long gator that was in Humboldt Park.

Here’s another one.

I’m so sure that you’ll find this nifty, especially if you are thrifty. A senior discount for a decent amount. If you were born at Woodstock, now you’re?

50.

50, yes. You don’t usually get a senior discount of 50, but around 55 or so. But yeah, Woodstock, if you were born there, you are now 50.

Here’s another one.

Tyrion, Daenerys, and Bronn, Arya, Sansa, and Jon, snow said goodbye. The last crow left the sky. Now that winter has both come and gone.

Come and gone, yes. Goodbye to Game of Thrones.

Some parents had sneaky ambitions to increase their children’s positions, but they all got caught, and that’s how we got a scandal re… college admissions.

College admissions, yes. Shame, shame.

The song Old Town Road was a whopper, a country music billboard chart topper. Lil Nas X sang the hit Cash the Checks and saved some from Miley Cyrus’s… papa.

Papa, that’s right. That’s right. Billy Ray Cyrus was in on that Old Town Road.

Here’s the last one. Here we go.

An Aussie named Wally bred pets, but it’s 2019. Now he frets. That one dog is mean. It’s a real Frankenstein. Labradoodles are the ones I… regret.

Regrets, yes. He expressed his regret at breeding the Labradoodle.

Thanks very much. Those are my limericks for 2019.

Thanks, John. Really appreciate it.

Take care, John.

Bye.

We had fun talking to John, and we’d love to talk with you. So give us a call, 877-929-9673, or send your questions and stories about language to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, welcome to A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Matt Armson from Portage, Wisconsin.

Hi, Matt. Welcome to the show.

Hey, Grant. Thanks for having me on.

What can we do for you?

Well, I had a question for you guys. It has to do with your ability to kind of turn off the linguist and participate in, I guess, casual and normal everyday conversation.

It kind of stems from me being a musician. So I know sometimes it’s hard for me to just sit back and enjoy music, to turn it off and not analyze guitar riffs and time signatures and key signatures and actually just see and listen to the music for what, you know, maybe the artists intended it to be.

And I’m wondering about you guys and language. Obviously, you guys are experts in your field. And is it ever hard for you to just turn it off and sit back and just enjoy conversation without having to analyze it?

Yes.

Yes, yes, yes.

But I want to hear about you. You’re a musician. Do you teach or do you tutor or something? Do you play bands, do shows, that sort of thing?

I’ve been in a lot of bands in my life and just grew up around a lot of music. My parents were musicians as well. So, you know, I actually am in marketing. I don’t do anything with music today. It’s a hobby of mine. But I’ve spent so much time studying it and around it. It’s just sometimes hard for me to just shut it off and sit back and enjoy it.

But I do love music and play music today. So what’s that feeling like? You’ve got somebody says, here’s a CD I think you’re really going to enjoy. You pop it in. You’re trying your best to enjoy it, and you can’t.

Yeah, it’s hard. Sometimes you have to, for me anyways, I have to actively be like, you know what, I’m just going to kind of go to my happy space and just almost like immerse yourself in the music.

Just kind of let it wash over you.

Do you guys ever run into that with language?

Are you in social situations where you’re like, you know what, I need to sit back and enjoy it and not analyze what’s going on linguistically?

Yeah, Matt, I’m so glad you’ve raised this question because I’ve wondered about other people like film critics.

Can you go to a movie and just let go and enjoy?

Or even gourmet cooks.

Is it too difficult to go to a restaurant and you find yourself overanalyzing the food?

But speaking for myself, I would say absolutely I’ve had that problem.

In fact, when I was in college and I was taking both ancient Greek and Old English at the same time, I found it so difficult to read fiction in English.

I would get so distracted.

My mind would just ricochet off the individual words because I was seeing potential connections and etymologies, and my mind would just go caroming off this word or that.

And then I would think about the word carom and how it may come from a Spanish word that means the red ball in billiards.

And then I would get completely distracted from that and completely distracted from the plot.

And there was a time in college for quite a while that I had real, real difficulty just sitting back and enjoying fiction.

And I actually went to one of my professors, one of my English professors, and I said, I cannot focus on the narrative because I’m so distracted by the language.

And she suggested reading mysteries and cliffhangers and things that were more simple that I could just sort of let go and be propelled by wondering who done it.

And that was kind of the way that I rehabilitated myself.

And then later, becoming a writer, I also have trouble sometimes just reading, writing by really good people because I feel like I can hear the clanking of the machinery, as somebody put it.

You know, you’re analyzing how they put that together.

So, yeah, I feel you.

Yeah, that same here.

And I’ve got to say that I’m on a couple editing Facebook groups and I see this complaint time and time again from copy editors and editors who are like, I had some time off this weekend.

We set aside some time for the family just to sit around and read together and I couldn’t read.

I had this stack of books and I couldn’t do it.

And I have the same problem where sometimes the clanking of the machinery is too much.

And it’s not just for books.

I have this problem with podcasts and radio.

I’m like, I’m listening to this new podcast that I won’t name.

And the content is good.

And the spirit is good.

And I know what they put into it.

I know the money that they put into it.

I’ve just got to say that they fell down in like four or five different places.

And I just, I really want to write them a memo going like, here’s something.

And I know that Martha and I are always working to make our own show better.

So I feel hypocritical.

But I’m like, oh, oh, I just, oh, yes.

But Martha’s strategy about the pop boilers is one of my strategies that came up on my own, which is sometimes I just read the worst trash because it’s all about getting you to the destination to find out who done it.

Just this escapist junk because you don’t care.

And you just throw out the window any pretense at all that there’s any art there at all.

I will also say, paying a lot of attention to errors and bad plotting and different literary mistakes that someone might be making is the great cultivator.

It is the great pruner, the great weeder outer.

And so I can put aside a lot of books that I might otherwise waste my time on.

And so when I do find that one book that is so brilliant, so fabulously written, so beautiful, that I don’t mind the errors, I know that I have found a lifetime keeper.

I have the book that I can read and put on my shelf and read again in a few years.

And those are so rare and precious.

So it’s kind of a nice thing.

So having that inability to stick to something because I’m always looking for the typos and the mistakes and the bad writing, maybe it’s a good thing sometimes.

Well, yeah. Yeah. Matt, I’m wondering if it’s if the experience is like for you, like the difference between learning scales or learning exercises.

And then you finally get to that point where you can just let go of that and soar.

You know, you’re not even thinking about about what you’re doing.

Yeah, well, Grant, what you said about finally finding that piece or that composer or that album or creation of music that you can just sit back and enjoy, it’s very similar.

At least for me anyways, I come back to some early albums that I grew up with.

My mom played a lot of Chicago, so, oh man, there’s nothing.

I could put on some Saturday in the Park and I was like, there’s nothing wrong with this.

This is perfect.

I feel the same way about that stuff.

Same here.

Well, I’ve got to thank you, Matt, for this because I know this is going to open up some doors for a lot of other listeners who are going to have similar experiences with their own careers.

So thank you for that.

Pleasure.

Thank you for having me on.

Take care.

Take care, man.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

How do you handle that in your world?

How does it work for you when you need to turn off the professional brain and just enjoy things?

Let us know, 877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

Or talk to us on Twitter @wayword.

You know how sometimes in a novel, a character might say, let’s repair to the kitchen or let’s repair to the drawing room.

I never could understand why it was repair.

And I found out just recently that it’s a different verb, that there are two different repairs.

One of them is from the Latin reparare, which means literally to prepare.

And the other one goes back to late Latin repatriare, which means to go home again, like repatriate.

Right.

How cool is that?

That’s very cool.

Two different repairs.

Perfect.

It makes more sense now.

I never could figure out, you know, what are you going to do?

Repatriate oneself to the country of the library where the books are.

That is my home.

I know.

This is where I belong.

Yes.

Well, that’s what I always thought was that, you know, you’re repairing to the library so that you can sort of repair, you know, knit up your rabble sleeve of care or something.

Nice.

You know, repair to the kitchen to repair your hunger or something.

But it’s a totally different repair.

Hit us up with your language questions on Twitter @wayword.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Janie Hobson-Dupont calling from Nantucket, Massachusetts.

Hello, Janie.

Welcome to the show.

How can we help?

Well, thank you.

What can we do for you?

You know, Nantucket is an island 30 miles out to sea.

And we moved here in 1980.

And especially back then, there were very funny little sayings that I had not heard any other place of than Nantucket.

And one of those sayings, and you would hear it in the morning in a restaurant called the Downy Flake.

And people would be sitting around having their coffee.

And the old guys would be talking and one guy would say to another, well, that’s really some good.

S-O-M-E, good.

That’s really some good.

And that meant it was really good.

It’s pretty prevalent even up until this day.

Do you have any, is that particular to Nantucket?

Or are there other places that use that phrase, some good?

Yes.

As a matter of fact, there are.

That use of some as an adverb or as an intensifier, basically meaning really or very, is sprinkled throughout the United States.

There are entries in several dictionaries for it.

The Dictionary of American Regional English shows it from as far afield as New England all the way to Hawaii and in Texas and sprinkled in between.

It shows up in the Dictionary of Newfoundland English.

It shows up in the English Dialect Dictionary.

There are citations as far back in the 1700s in Aberdeen and Yorkshire and looks like Hampshire and a few other parts of England and the United Kingdom.

So there are a bunch of different places.

I have no doubt that Nantucket owns it and is very proud of it.

And it’s part of its very interesting speech pattern, though.

Okay.

Now, so let me ask you this.

You know, the Nantucket whalers traveled literally around the world whaling back in the whaling days.

When you mentioned Hawaii, you know, that I wonder if, you know, because the whalers went to Hawaii, I wonder if they brought that with them.

It’s hard to know. This is one of those things that because it’s dialect speech, we can mark it down.

We can see it in old texts. We can know that those texts have a date.

We can kind of see the historical record, but it’s hard to know provenance.

Have you picked it up yourself and added it to your vocabulary?

Kind of in a joking way.

Sort of a self-conscious.

Yeah.

Just, you know, there are a bunch of phrases that I think Nantucketers feel they own.

In fact, I was in our Nantucket Athenaeum library today, and one of my friendly librarians went into the vault and got me this sweetest little book.

It’s called Nantucket Scrap Basket by somebody named Macy.

I think it was from 1939, and it’s filled with really old-timey things about Nantucket,

And the back of it is just a whole collection of sayings.

Oh, I love that.

Now, some good was not in there.

There were other sayings that I’ve heard that were in the back of the book

That had really interesting descriptions, but not some good.

There’s one citation recorded in Louisiana that I like.

He’s some noisy when he eats.

Just for some reason.

Here’s another one recorded in Texas.

He was some ugly.

Yeah.

He was very ugly.

So we’re all out there.

Great.

Cool.

Thank you for sharing that with us.

We really appreciate it.

Okay.

Well, thank you so much.

Take care.

Call us again sometime.

Bye.

Bye.

Bye.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org or talk to us on Twitter at W-A-W-A.

Y-W-O-R-D.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Natalie.

How are you?

I am calling from southern Indiana, actually in the county of Du Bois County.

Oh, yeah.

Welcome to the show.

Over there in the West, yeah.

What’s up?

So what I was calling you about is some girlfriends and I were messaging on like a Facebook messenger,

And they were talking about all their kids and things, and I had made a comment saying,

Hey, you know, your little shavers sure are cute.

And one of them named Ashley, there was like total silence as soon as I had texted that.

And she’s like, I don’t understand what you’re talking about.

I’ve never heard that.

I’m like, oh, yeah, mom and dad has always referred to little kids as little shavers.

So I thought, well, this would be an excellent time to call in and get the meaning behind that.

So when you say little shavers, you’re referring to particularly little kids or what?

Yes, maybe people that are like under 8 to 10 years old.

Mm—

Yeah, it’s a fairly common expression.

And we can tell you off the bat that it doesn’t have to do with like shavings of wood or, you know, chip off the old block.

It actually goes back to the 1500s where the word shaver referred to a man, somebody who was old enough to shave with a razor.

And over time, that word has taken on different meanings.

It’s evolved in its meaning.

It later meant just sort of a fellow or a chap.

And then it came to apply to usually young boys, but sometimes girls.

And words sometimes do that.

You know, the word girl itself, hundreds of years ago, could mean either a little boy or a little girl.

It was generic.

And so little shavers are just little people.

That is so interesting.

Yeah, so around the 1600s, you can see in the historical record that some of the references to little shaver were a joke,

Where they were just joking that these boys who didn’t shave yet and had these smooth faces

Were little shavers kind of elbowing each other in the ribs,

Referring to these kids as if they were actually shaving and they weren’t yet.

The way that you might refer to a kid now as big man, and there he is about two feet tall, right?

Right.

Yeah.

Or the way that in some cultures they refer to little girls and little boys as mama and papa or mommy and papi, right?

They’re neither mama and papa nor mommy and papi, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, so it started out just being applied to a man, somebody of age, who’s actually shaving,

And then was later applied ironically to little kids.

Wonderful.

Thank you for the explanation, and keep up the good work.

We enjoy listening to you guys.

Oh, great.

Take care now.

Thanks, Natalie.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Joy’s Monday with the little shavers.

877-929-9673.

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

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

Earlier in the show, I recommended the book Greek to Me by Mary Norris,

And I’m wondering what you have in your pocket there, Grant.

I have a book that I’ve been really enjoying.

This is Jamie Attenberg’s latest novel, All This Could Be Yours.

It is a dark glimpse at a family who is in trouble.

The imperious, powerful father is in a coma.

And while this is happening, the mother and the grown children are coming to terms with who he is, what he’s done, and what he’s done to them and the world around them.

And they’re trying to sort themselves out over a very long day.

So from each of them,

We kind of get a point of view, we get dark wit, digressions, dysfunction, a lot of self-justification,

And we kind of get all of these problems that they’ve created for themselves, but a lot of it

Is through the lens of their relationship with this terrible man.

But again, there’s some wit

Here. I don’t want to make this too terrible and too dark.

What I look for in novels, just so you

Know is a sense of place and characters who seem to be headed to becoming something else and I like

Writers who seem to want to take them there without hesitation.

What I don’t like is writers who seem

To dither on their way to a point and dither on their way to an arc and Jamie Attenberg doesn’t

Do that here.

This book is everything that I want in a novel and if you know Jamie Attenberg’s

Earlier books like The Middlesteins then you’ll see here a lot of her same sharp writing.

She has

A good writer’s ear.

And you’ll see a lot more of that.

She seems to have grown quite a bit since

That novel.

And I appreciate that.

I like seeing the arc of a writer as well across their career.

This is a great book.

And I want to recommend it to you, Martha, and to everyone else.

This is All This Could Be Yours by Jamie Ettenberg.

It’s interesting.

My father always said it’s great to pick a writer and just kind of

Live with them for a while.

And I love the idea of following the arc of a writer like that.

Well, we can’t talk about book recommendations without recommending a couple of others that we’ve mentioned before.

The book that I am going to be giving as a gift to people this year is A Velocity of Being.

That’s edited by Maria Popova and Claudia Bedrick.

And it’s a collection of letters from famous people to young readers about the joy of reading.

And it also contains some amazing art with every single letter.

And I think the language book of the year, besides the Mary Norris one that you mentioned earlier in the show, that you and I both agree is the language book of the year is Gretchen McCulloch’s Because Internet.

This is a fun, fast read that will bring you up to speed with how language works on the Internet.

It’s about why English is as healthy as ever and why everything between the most formal and the most informal language has found a welcome home on the Internet, the most democratic of all media.

So that’s Because Internet by Gretchen McCulloch.

And we’d love to hear what you’re reading.

Give us your recommendations.

Send them to words@waywordradio.org or find us on Twitter at Wayword.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha and Grant.

This is Elijah from Akron, Ohio.

Welcome.

Welcome, Elijah.

Elijah in Akron, Ohio.

Yes. A little bit of story behind this. I started dating my girlfriend about seven months ago. Her name is Jenny.

And one day we’re out on a date and I’m pushing my hands through my hair, you know, like fixing it, making it look better.

And she says to me, you’re zhuzhing your hair.

And I’m like, what in the world is zhuzhing?

And she says, you know, zhuzh your hair.

And I said, no, no, I don’t know.

She says, you know, it makes it, you know, look better, fluffing it, whatever.

I said, I have never heard that before.

You made that up.

She said, no, I got it from my mother.

You know, we use it.

So it kind of became a joke with us that wherever I would go, I would kind of tick on it being not a word.

We would ask friends, have you ever heard of the word?

You know, what word would you use?

And no one had ever heard of zhuzh.

Until one day, I get a call from my girlfriend, and she says, I was talking with a friend, and she knew the word zhuzh.

And I said, of course you found someone that knew zhuzh when I was not there.

But the girl who knew the word judge, though, didn’t say it the way we say it.

I don’t remember how she said it, but it was definitely different, but the same kind of word.

Since then, I called her father to get more information about it,

Because I knew I was wanting to call you guys,

And you guys would want to know where the word kind of came from.

And he said that he wasn’t really sure,

And later he looked it up and actually found the word online on Webster Dictionary.

Though it’s not in the Webster dictionary.

It’s just defined on the website.

So now I’m calling to kind of know more about the word,

Where it came from,

And if there’s any way you could help me to still be right.

Oh, boy. Tall order here.

I got to say, I like you a lot.

You seem like a real fun guy.

Elijah, you’re dynamic and exciting.

You’ve got a wonderful radio presence.

You sound like a good guy, but you’re going to go away wrong.

Oh, she’s going to love this.

You probably have great hair, though.

Probably have great hair.

You’ve got great choice in girlfriends.

Yeah, smart girlfriend.

How about that?

Let me lay some of this down for you.

This word has an interesting history.

It really came to the attention of most Americans with the first edition of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, which launched in 2003.

There was a guy on the show, a fashion guru named Carson Kressley, who loved the word.

And he would always talk about zhuzhing things.

And he meant to straighten or to make it prettier, to clean it up.

Or like you might zhuzh cuffs on a shirt to make them more orderly or zhuzh just something to make it less wrinkled or something like that.

And the spelling, of course, is hard for this.

So it’s really hard to Google.

So I’m not surprised you didn’t find it right away.

But a lot of times it’s spelled Z-H-U-Z-H.

But there’s like nine different spellings for this.

Like Z-H-O-O-S-H or…

That’s the one I found, yeah.

J-O-O-S-H, something like that.

Yeah, there’s a bunch of these.

So anyway, Carson, on the first Queer Eye, he’s the guy who really launched this.

But it’s older than that.

And actually, it’s got connections to gay culture and a kind of secret gay language that was in the United Kingdom in the 1960s that has its roots in Romany, the language spoken by the travelers, sometimes called the gypsies.

Yeah, that’s a lot more than I was expecting.

Right? Yes. So we have mentions of this as far back as possibly the 1960s, but definitely by 1977, popping up in periodicals related specifically to gays in the United Kingdom as this kind of secret language or I won’t say a language.

It’s more like a lingo that they could use to kind of like do a wink and a nudge to let each other know that they’re part of the scene when being gay wasn’t necessarily accepted in large parts of society in the United Kingdom.

Now, the lexicon for Jonathan Green suggests that it comes from a Romani word meaning to clean or neat.

He spells it Z-H-O-U-Z-H-O.

So it kind of lingered in the speech of gay men in the United Kingdom, showed up in fashion culture,

Arrived in the U.S., showed up in fashion culture in New York, still kind of lingered among gay men.

And then before you know it, it’s in the gay men who were on the first edition of Queer Eye for the Street Guy.

And then Blamo, the success of that show, launched it larger into American culture as a whole.

Wow.

Yeah.

That is a lot of history behind it.

Right? That’s actually really neat.

It is really neat, right?

My girlfriend’s mother comes from that area up in the Pennsylvania, kind of New York-y area.

So I can kind of see where that may have come from.

Do you think she’s a part of the—is she a part of gay culture?

Or worked in the fashion industry or anything like that?

No, neither of those things.

Neither of those things, yeah.

Yeah, I remember that being so catchy at the time

Because we’re talking 2003.

Right.

And here was Carson being so exuberant.

I remember him doing zhuzhing with hair mostly.

Yeah, right.

Zhuzh.

And he was unapologetic about it too.

And people were doing little mini-glossaries

Of the language that they were using on the show,

Just like people still do for RuPaul and his shows.

And so, Elijah, I wouldn’t feel bad about your girlfriend being right because it is a great story.

It’s a pretty interesting word.

I’m delighted to find that you guys are connecting on this cool word with this cool history.

I’m very glad, too, and she’s going to love being right.

I actually don’t hate being wrong at this moment.

No, no.

That’s pretty interesting.

Thank you guys so much.

Consider it something learned, and you just give her her moment, make her dinner, and you’ve got something you grew on, right?

Perfect.

That sounds great.

Yeah.

Thanks for your call.

We really appreciate it.

Yeah, give her our best.

Thank you so much.

Have a good one, guys.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Here’s an observation in praise of brevity from the English poet Robert Southie.

If you would be pungent, be brief, for it is with words as with sunbeams.

The more they are condensed, the deeper they burn.

Ooh, nice.

Not much more to say, right?

No, absolutely not. No, except you need some aloe for that burn.

Right. I do need some aloe.

877-929-9673.

Hello. You have A Way with Words.

Oh, hi. Brian Regan here from Pittsburgh, PA.

Hi, Brian. Welcome.

What’s up? What can I help you with?

Well, I have a story that my mother used to say, or a saying, that basically fork to the floor, company’s at the door.

Which means if you dropped your fork while eating, she would say something like that.

Fork to the floor, companies at the door. Nice.

And I never, I don’t know if that’s just within her family or if it had something to do with where she grew up or lived on a farm or whatever.

But I also heard her sister and my aunt say the same thing.

If somebody drops a fork, she’d say, oh, company’s coming.

And I never knew, you know, the origin to that.

Never questioned it.

And she’s had other sayings, too, that if your hand itches, you’re going to come into money.

If your palm itches, you’re going to come into money.

If your nose itches, you’re going to kiss a fool.

And then the last one was on New Year’s Day, if the first person who enters your house is dark and gives you a piece of silver, it’ll be good luck throughout the year.

So she was one for these old superstitions and these bits of folklore then, huh?

Yeah.

And again, I don’t know the origins.

And I was wondering if you somehow never heard of these things.

Absolutely, yeah.

When I was a kid, I read all the folklore in the library that I could get my hands on.

And some of these, I still have some folklore books.

And I can tell you a few things here and there about this stuff.

For example, when you’re palm itches, you’re going to come into some money.

There is actually a mention in Shakespeare and Julius Caesar indirectly related to this.

There’s a line having to do with greed, though, where it’s the idea that you expect money to cross your palm.

But this is centuries old, this idea that if your palm itches, you’re expected to come into money.

Now, there are variations on it, too.

Sometimes if your left one itches, you’re going to give money out.

If your right one itches, you’re going to receive money.

There’s all kinds of variations.

A lot of people have mentioned that one, so I’ve heard that before.

That wasn’t as uncommon as the other one.

Now, the fork one, a lot of times what’s dropped varies.

Sometimes it’s a dishrag.

Sometimes it’s a spoon.

Sometimes it’s a knife.

But there are a lot of…

Yeah, she had one for a knife and a spoon.

She had a different saying for each one.

But it was a fork to the floor.

Companies at the door was the one that…

Yeah, I love that it rhymes because a lot of times these old saying, the old superstitions or the old folklore, they don’t rhyme.

So you can find that in Utah and North Carolina and the UK, throughout the European cultures and the Western cultures.

We don’t know where that one came from, but it’s so pervasive.

I often wondered about that, of why we have this idea that if you drop something, somebody’s going to come.

Is it that you’re about to be embarrassed and you need to wash the silverware more carefully?

I don’t even really know.

I feel like in these days that these sayings don’t get a lot of play.

My impression is that they are relegated to the older generations and that they’re something of memory and not something with a lot of currency.

But perhaps I’m wrong.

I don’t know if there’s a reference to, you know, is it an old English custom or whatever?

Yeah, they go back.

I can find, if we look in the old folklore books, we can find these mentioned again and again, a hundred years ago, a little more than a hundred years ago.

There’s folklore has been collected again and again throughout the English speaking world.

A lot of times there’s no dates, unfortunately, but I can find mentions of it in old newspapers from the 1930s.

Definitely this is old.

Brian, thank you so much for calling and sharing these memories.

You’re welcome.

I hope you keep the show up because it’s very interesting.

Thank you.

Take care.

Call us again sometime.

Our palms are itching.

Yeah.

Okay.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Thanks.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Well, what’s the folklore that’s floating around in your family’s conversation?

We’d love to hear about it.

Give us a call at 877-929-9673 or send it to us in email.

That address is words@waywordradio.org.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi, yeah. So my name is Jordan Wallman. I’m from Steinbeck, Manitoba, up north in Canada.

Welcome to the show, Jordan. What can we do for you?

So me and my wife, we were in North Africa recently, just this summer.

Just, you know, just being part of this English program, teaching high school students out there, just English.

And we got to work with Americans.

What was funny is, you know, we’re sharing stories with these Americans.

And I was, you know, telling the guys that you should go check out a hamem, which is basically a spa.

And I told them, but you’d have to do it the way Tunisians would do it in your gitch.

And they would all look at me weird, and I realized that actually Americans don’t use the word gitch.

And yeah, it was shocking for me, because it’s just such a common word in Manitoba and Saskatchewan and Canada.

And what was even funnier is I actually found out that gitch is only a word in Manitoba, Saskatchewan area.

So I guess my question is, yeah, why is that?

Why is it only kind of around Saskatchewan, Manitoba?

And where does this word come from?

Jordan, what does it mean? What is a gitch?

I guess to describe what it means, it’s basically underwear.

So I’m in my gitch or something, that’s just kind of how you say it.

So to go to the spa, you had to be in your gitch.

Well, that’s how I guess they do it out there, right?

So it was just kind of, that’s how I said it, I guess.

But it’s just such a common word, you know, that we use.

It just means underwear.

And how do you spell it?

G-I-T-C-H.

Yeah, Jordan, your data aligns with what I know about this term.

I’ve done some digging on this and actually had an entry for it in my official dictionary of unofficial English because it was new to me.

So I had to do some research on it.

And there was an entry for it in the latest edition of the Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles.

And if that’s not a fancy name for a dictionary, then I don’t know.

But we can just call it the DCHP.

And this came out in 2016.

It’s an online dictionary.

And there’s a really fantastic entry for this, which confirms that it’s mostly Western Canada that uses this word.

But there are a lot of spellings for it.

So gotchies is a common name for it, G-O-T-C-H-I-E-S.

Gotch, gaunch with an N, gaunchies, gaunch, G-A-U-N-C-H, gotch, so G-A-U-C-H, and gitch as you say it.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

And the key here is this dictionary says what some of our commenters on our Wayword website have said as well, is that they believe, these lexicographers believe that it comes from Eastern European languages like Serbian and Croat, Hungarian, possibly Polish and Ukrainian.

There’s a word for underwear in those languages that’s very similar to that.

It might be spelled G-A-C-E or G-A-T-Y-A, depending on the language.

And it’s very similar to this word.

So it has to do with the immigrants from those Eastern European, those Slavic countries that came to that part of Canada and then spread the word.

Oh, my goodness.

That’s cool, right?

What I thought about, too, was like, because where I come from, it’s kind of a Mennonite and a Baptist community.

And a lot of Mennonites here actually are from Ukraine and Russia.

So, I mean, to me, that would make sense.

I thought it was actually a hockey word, like something to use for hockey, like a jock.

But that would make more sense almost if it’s kind of a Ukraine, Slavic kind of language like that.

So that makes a lot of sense to me then.

Jordan, thank you so much for this.

You have got to call us again.

You’re going to explain Canada to us once for all.

Yeah, yeah.

Take care now.

Yeah, thank you, guys.

All right, bye-bye.

Bye, Jordan.

Appreciate it.

And we do have a lot of listeners in Canada.

We absolutely do.

So we’d love to hear from you.

Call us, 877-929-9673.

Thanks to senior producer Stefanie Levine, director Colin Tedeschi, editor Tim Felten, and production assistant Caitlin O’Connell.

You can send us a message, subscribe to the podcast, get the newsletter, or catch up on hundreds of past episodes at waywordradio.org.

Our toll-free line is always open in the U.S. and Canada, 877-929-9673.

Or send us your thoughts to words@waywordradio.org.

A Way with Words is an independent production of Wayword, Inc., a nonprofit supported by listeners and organizations who are changing the way the world talks about language.

We’re coming to you from the Recording Arts Center at Studio West in San Diego, California.

Thanks for listening. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

Until next time, goodbye.

Bye.

Thank you.