Loaded for Bear (episode #1531)

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. Perhaps you’ve noticed a trend among some businesses to use an ampersand between two nouns, like crate and barrel. Or here in San Diego, we have a couple of wonderful restaurants, Cloak and Petal, and Soda and Swine. I was thinking about this because I had a few laughs yesterday when I stumbled across hipsterbusiness.name, which is on the web, and you can just keep hitting refresh, and it will generate all these business names that look perfectly plausible that have ampersands in the middle of two nouns. So like zebra and, well, day and bucket, or anger and pearl, or rainstorm and egg. I would go to a place called rainstorm and egg.

Yeah, what do they sell there? Plumbing supplies?

I had a few laughs. It’s really fun to visit. But that sent me down a rabbit hole of reading about ampersands. And they are so cool.

Did you know that it used to be that they were regarded as sort of the 27th letter of the alphabet?

I did know that they used to be included on the, like when they were demonstrating scripts, they would often throw them on the ends, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Or you can find books from the 19th century, kids’ school books, you know, where they have all the 26 letters written out. And then the last thing on there that the kids would memorize was that little symbol at the very end. It was sort of more or less the 27th letter.

Then I was thinking, well, why is it called an ampersand? And that’s really cool, too. We’re talking about that squiggly symbol that looks sort of like a treble clef, right?

Right.

And it was pronounced and, but when the kids were reciting their ABCs, they would conclude with the words and, per se, and. That is per se meaning by itself from Latin. So and, per se, and. And that eventually became shortened to ampersand.

How about that? Because also when they were reciting the alphabet and they were reciting letters that could also be words like A or I, then they would say A per se A, meaning A itself, the letter itself.

Gotcha.

So and per se and became ampersand.

How about that? How cool is that?

That’s very cool.

Yeah.

But it’s got a long history, many centuries in the language, right? And you’re reminding me when I was in the second grade, somehow I had learned to use a plus sign instead of and, and I was told not to do it. I’d learned it from my father because my father did that. So it was just a weird habit I picked up when I was in the second grade. And I still feel the sting of being told not to use the plus sign for and.

Oh, wow.

Now, was it a plus sign per se or did it have that little loop between the two? Where the pencil or pen never quite leaves the paper.

I think it probably was more like that.

Yeah, now you’re making me remember that moment when you learn that that’s a thing.

That’s a thing, yeah.

You can do that adults do.

Well, then you overuse it because you’re a kid.

Right.

Kids don’t have control.

And, and, and, and.

We’d love to talk to you about anything related to language. How you write it, how you say it, how you read it, where it is, who says it, and why. 877-929-9673. Email words@waywordradio.org.

Hi there.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha. This is Heather from Sacramento.

Well, hello, Heather. What’s going on?

Yes, I’m calling about a phrase that my husband uses and that my mother has heard of that I didn’t grow up using. So I have a three-part question about this phrase. First, the phrase is loaded for bear. And I suspect it’s regional because my husband is from New York. My mother is from the Midwest, but I was raised in California. Even though I collect idioms, I don’t remember using this or hearing it when I grew up. My real question, my more core question, is about its origin and its meaning. Because I did a little bit of research and just came up with more questions than answers.

That’s the internet in a nutshell. More questions than answers.

We are happy to be your arbiter on this. So, Heather, what’s your sense of the meaning of that phrase, loaded for bear?

So that’s interesting because my husband uses it in the sense of geared up, raring to go, totally overprepared. So he can use it in kind of a more positive way as well as a negative way. Like you could go into a meeting with lawyers loaded for bear, but you could also go on a hike loaded for bear if you were like had all your gear ready to go. But when I asked my mother about it, she’s from Chicago, and she understood it to mean more of a belligerent, negative connotation. Like, you wouldn’t talk about going for a hike loaded for bear, but you would definitely talk about going into a fight loaded for bear. So that was interesting.

My husband also insisted that he thought of it as being loaded with, like, guns and ammunition to shoot bears. And that’s where he thinks it comes from. And listening to your show so often, I know that etymology and origins can be a little bit more complex than the most obvious reading. So I looked online and I couldn’t find anything satisfying. And my husband came back and he looked online and he said, well, I went to the Urban Dictionary and it bears me out. And the great part about this is that my kids were in the car, they’re 11 and 14. And they both just jumped on him. They’re like, you can’t cite the Urban Dictionary. That’s like citing the Onion for news.

Oh, I mean, the Urban Dictionary has its uses, but it is not your go-to source for like true answers.

That’s right.

Yeah.

So we didn’t get any farther than that, but I’m not satisfied.

All right.

We can knock this out pretty quick. Like so many other words in English or so many other expressions in English, there’s more than one meaning. So it’s very easy for loaded for bear to mean all of these things. In general, loaded for bear means very prepared. But the question is, what are you very prepared for? Are you very prepared for an angry animal? Are you very prepared for just a regular old neutral situation? Are you very prepared for life?

So to that. The other thing is there’s one meaning you haven’t mentioned, which is worth throwing out there because it’s still in use for some people. Loaded for bear can also mean intoxicated. You’ve had a lot to drink.

Oh, loaded.

But again, the idea there perhaps is, in some cases, the idea is you’re loaded for bear, meaning you’re intoxicated, you’re drunk, and you’re belligerent, and you’re willing to fight. You’re ready to fight the slightest provocation, and you’re going to lash out. So there’s loaded like having your gun loaded and loaded like being drunk loaded.

Yeah.

It’s an etymological coincidence kind of, but yes, more or less here. The other one is, and the poker players are all waiting for this, it can also mean having a very good hand. But again, you’re very prepared for something. You’re very prepared to take the pot, maybe. So all of these in some way mean very prepared for a thing. All of these meanings, I’m willing to accept everything that you said that your husband or whoever says, thinks it means, that’s totally fine. And it’s not regional. It’s just old-fashioned. So it’s got little pockets of use here and there around the country. It dates back to the 1860s. And just to be clear here, the reason we use loaded for bear is because you do need specific kinds of ammunition and weapons when you go after bear. You do not go after a bear with a .22. You’re not going to do anything but irritate it. You need the right caliber of weapon, the right kind of gun and bullets and so forth. And frankly, you need to have your brain checked because you shouldn’t be out there fighting with bears in the first place.

Well, that’s great. And I thought, you know, looking at the word bear and B-E-A-R has so many meanings and even to bear a burden that I thought this could go other ways, you know, given English.

Yeah, yeah, it’s definitely the big animal.

It’s not like loaded for mouse or anything.

I mean, that would be really different.

You know, you wouldn’t have to take too much.

So maybe tell your husband next time he has a question about language, there’s a radio show he can call.

Oh, yes, he knows.

He was really excited that I was going to be able to speak with you today.

All right, thank you so much for your call.

We really appreciate it.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

And we really enjoy the show.

The whole family gets a lot out of it.

Thank you, Heather.

That’s great to hear.

Take care.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Well, what’s the word or phrase that your family’s been kicking around?

Call us about it, 877-929-9673, or send us an email.

That address is words@waywordradio.org.

Hi there. You have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name’s Emma, and I’m calling from Texas.

Welcome, Emma.

What can we do for you, Emma?

Well, I had a question because me and my dad argue all the time about, because I say ol, and he says like oil or something.

Yeah, and so he always gets mad at me, and so we were wondering, like, is there a correct term or, like, you know.

All right, two things.

Spell that word for me, and can you say it in a sentence?

Okay, so, like, O-I-L.

Mm—

So, like, I need to change my oil.

I need to change my oil.

Do you, what about when you want to make water, you put it in a pan, you put it on the stove, and you turn it on high, what are you trying to do with that water?

Make it bowl.

You say bowl?

Bowl?

Yes.

Bowl.

Okay.

And the long, very thin, micro-thin sheet of metal that we have in the kitchen that we wrap leftovers in, it’s made out of aluminum, it’s aluminum.

Bowl.

Okay.

And that thing in the bathroom that starts with a T?

Toilet.

Toilet.

Okay.

Okay.

All right.

These are all, we’re just trying to get and see if this phonetic thing that’s happening with you is consistent, and it looks like it is.

And so your father, I love the way you describe that.

He says oil or whatever.

And where is he from?

He’s from Louisiana, actually.

Okay, and you’re completely Texan.

Yeah.

That was kind of a question, but I’m just, based on your pronunciations, I’m saying you’re probably completely Texan.

And so your argument is that you don’t sound like your father.

Yeah, no, I don’t.

Why does he expect that?

I don’t know.

Do you agree with him on everything else?

Almost.

Oh, really? Okay.

What I’m getting at here is people tend to sound more like their peer group than they do their parents.

Particularly when it comes to the sounds of words, not necessarily vocabulary, although some of that.

So the way that you say the words, the phonemes, the phonetics in there, you’re going to sound like your friends, the people you went to school with, the people that you hang out with, far more than you are going to sound like your parents.

And your father’s expectation that you should sound like him is a fair one.

I get that.

We want our children to be like us because we think of ourselves as awesome, but it’s just not the way that language works.

So you sound more like some people in Texas than you do like your father who’s from Louisiana.

And that’s just the way it is.

Because that vowel pronunciation is very common through parts of the American South.

And as a matter of fact, if you look up the word oil in a dialect dictionary, there’s one dialect dictionary that has eight different pronunciations of the word oil, O-I-L.

And they’re all kind of dependent on where you are, what part of American culture you grew up with.

So I just would like to encourage you to tell your father that you’ve got seven other people he needs to meet.

You don’t say oil like he does either.

What are you going to do and go back and tell your dad?

I’m going to say in your face.

That’ll be nice.

That’ll go over well.

He always tells me to cite my sources.

I’ll be like, okay, my sources is your favorite talk show.

Here we go.

Here we go.

I’m going to give you a book that he can look up, although maybe it’s in the library.

It’s called The Linguistic Atlas of Gulf States.

Abbreviated as LAGS, The Linguistic Atlas of Gulf States.

That’s the book I was referring to that has eight different recorded pronunciations across the Gulf region for the word oil.

Okay.

And I’m not just talking one person said it.

I’m saying they’ve got data.

Yeah, cool, because he’s a very statistical person.

Well, it sounds like our kind of guy, even if he’s wrong this once.

And you’re our kind of gal, Anna.

We appreciate your calling.

Thank you.

All right, take care.

I’ll call again sometime, all right?

Yeah.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Well, we’d love to hear your linguistic questions, so call us, 877-929-9673, or send it to us in email.

The address is words@waywordradio.org.

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 that handsome, dashing man, John Chaneski, our quiz guy in New York City.

Hi, John.

Hi, Grant.

Hi, Martha.

Yes, I always wear the tux every time I come into the studio.

With a little boutonniere that squirts water, right?

Well, yeah.

You’ve got to add a little bit of fun in there.

Speaking of fun, you know what they say.

There’s nothing like a good proverb.

I think that’s probably my favorite proverb right there.

But I think I can improve proverbs with a little wordplay.

Now, I’m not going to go too far in this quiz.

I’m just going to anagram one word of a classic proverb, okay?

For example, now I’m going to give you a description of a scene that can be illustrated with this proverb.

For example, if I stated, I had a friend who owned a string of pottery franchises, but the whole enterprise came to nothing when one of his ovens fell apart.

That would illustrate the proverb, a chain is only as strong as its weakest kiln.

Link.

Link, yeah.

Okay.

Link, that’s right.

Link and kiln, those are anagrams.

Here we go.

Here’s the first one.

A tardy lawyer I knew ran through the courthouse and finally burst into the courtroom and blindly yelled, I’m not guilty, Your Honor, only to realize he was in the wrong courtroom.

Let that be a lesson to any future lawyers.

Look before you appeal.

Plead.

I plead.

Before you plea.

Martha’s got it.

Look before you plea.

Yes.

As opposed to look before you leap.

Speaking of dairy, typical family drama.

My son takes the last pint out of the fridge for himself.

When I make him pour half into a cup for his sister, he gets upset and weepy about it.

So I tells him, I tells him, don’t cry.

Over split milk.

Yes.

Don’t cry over split milk.

Very good.

I was skateboarding the other day with Zeus and Poseidon.

They wanted me to show them how to do a frontside ollie and a backside tail slide.

And I said, you know what?

You can’t teach.

An old god new tricks.

That’s right.

Can’t do it.

Dog is correct, right?

Now, I’m trying this new exercise theory where you just think about working out, and it’s supposed to help you get in shape.

What I didn’t count on is how horrible it is to imagine yourself hot and wet.

You know what they say.

A mind is a…

Terrible thing to sweat?

That’s it. Yes. Very good.

Here’s the story of the unpopular astronaut.

Nobody liked him until he left on a trip to Mars, and suddenly the entire world liked him so much more.

I guess it’s true that…

Absence makes the…

Let’s see.

Earth.

Earth, yeah.

The Earth grow fonder, yeah.

That’s it.

Absence makes the earth grow fonder.

Now, when I was on vacation in Aruba, my so-called friends played a trick on me.

They told me I had to scuba down to some coral to find my sandwiches.

I’m so dumb.

I should have known that.

There’s no such thing as a reef lunch?

That’s it.

There’s no such thing as a reef lunch.

Boy.

Now, soccer’s Lionel Messi, the forward and captain of the football clubs Barcelona and the Argentinian national team, lives in a beautiful mansion.

However, no matter where he is, he never feels truly comfortable unless he’s got his football footwear on.

That’s why they say a man’s home is his castle.

His cleats.

His cleats, yeah.

That’s it.

A man’s home is his cleats.

Nice work, you guys.

John, this was fantastic.

Thank you for a really hard puzzle.

My pleasure, guys.

Thank you.

If you’d like to talk with us about any aspect of language whatsoever, and that includes slang and grammar and word origins and the things you say at work, give us a call, 877-929-9673, or send us an email. That address is words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha.

Hi, Grant.

Hey there.

Who’s this?

This is Jarrell, and I’m calling from San Antonio, Texas.

Hi, Jarrell. Welcome to the show.

Hi.

So about a month ago, I was listening to a political talk show on the radio, and there was a conversation between the interviewer and the guest, and they were talking about immigration.

And the guest said, well, immigration is important in this country, but we can’t just let people in helter-skelter.

And I was caught off guard.

I’m like, helter-skelter? What does that mean?

And I thought, well, it probably means willy-nilly.

And I’m like, wait, wait, wait, what does that mean?

So that’s why I’m calling you guys.

And you’re wondering why we have all these rhyming compounds in English, I guess.

Yes, and like the history of it, where does it come from, and what parts of the country use it.

Let’s focus on helter-skelter, shall we?

Yeah.

Okay, because we don’t want to do this higgledy-piggledy.

Helter-skelter is just standard English.

There’s no regionality to it whatsoever.

Dates to around the 1500s, late 1500s.

Origin mostly unknown.

There’s one dictionary that has a theory that perhaps it’s from a Middle English word that means to hasten or to hurry.

But we don’t have any evidence of that.

These double expressions, though, are really worth looking into, these rhyming expressions.

Sometimes they’re called rhyming jingles or reduplicatives or rhyming reduplicatives or flip-flop words or echo words.

We’ll just call them reduplicatives because that’s the most boring one on the list.

But there are three kinds of these in English, and this one falls into the third kind.

The first kind is the one where both syllables rhyme.

So choo-choo, right?

Exactly the same in both syllables.

Or doo-doo.

They’re exactly the same.

The second kind is where there’s something called an ablaut.

An ablaut.

A-B-L-A-U-T.

This is where the vowel change.

So clit-clop or chit-chat or wishy-washy.

They’re exactly the same, except the second vowel is different.

The helter-skelter kind is the third kind.

This is where there’s a rhyme, but the initial sound is different.

So besides Helter Skelter, there’s things like Super Duper, which is one of my favorites, lovey-dovey or hurley-burley.

And there’s a ton of these.

I have a list somewhere of hundreds of these.

Well, yeah, one of my favorites is Boris Norris.

What’s that?

I don’t know that one.

Yeah, you can find it in 19th century dialect dictionaries.

It means careless or reckless, sort of like Helter Skelter.

And it may come from Anglo-Saxon terms that mean without safety or security.

Boris Norris.

So, Jarrell, the key is in the helter-skelter category, if we can call that, and the third category is you can’t read too much into any part of it because typically it’s a nonsense phrase at this point.

It has a meaning, but it can’t easily be broken down etymologically.

That second rhyming part often is just fabricated for the rhyme.

Fabricated is that real basic kind of wordplay that people like to do in English and every other language.

We play with languages.

That’s what English speakers do.

That’s what all language speakers do.

So that’s the short version of it.

That’s the very short version of why we do that.

And there’s a ton of these.

If you want to Google rhyming reduplication, you’ll come up with many, many, many word lists on the Internet.

And in this instance, Helter Skelter, he was using it in a way of like unmonitored.

Like we can’t let people in helter-skelter.

I’m guessing that means unmonitored.

What do you guys think?

Typically, it just means in a haphazard way or in a disorganized way or even just hurriedly in a way that means you’re not being careful.

That’s not just fast, but fast and likely to make mistakes.

With wild abandon.

With wild abandon.

That’s a pretty good synonym, yeah.

But like all words, it’s completely context dependent.

You always have to look at the company that a word is keeping to really truly know what it means.

So standing alone doesn’t tell you enough about it.

You have to see its friends.

Oh, yes.

Thank you guys so much for your help.

Our pleasure.

Sure thing.

I’ll call again sometime.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

So it’s not as if you look up the word helter in the dictionary.

No.

You’re going to find the word helter, right?

No, right.

Or namby-pamby or anything like that.

You just, it’s idiomatic.

So you look it up as a phrase and don’t try to read too much into the individual parts of it.

Right.

Like willy-nilly.

It’s not about willy and it’s not about nilly.

It’s about willy-nilly.

Yeah, it’s about willy-nilly.

And it’s about time you called us, 877-929-9673, or send us an email.

That address is words@waywordradio.org, or hit us up on Twitter at Wayword.

I was having a conversation with friends the other day, and somebody mentioned that she had a shirttail relative.

Do you know this term, shirttail?

Yes, I’ve heard this.

It’s just somebody that you’re vaguely related to and you’re not sure how.

Yeah, yeah.

Or maybe you’re not even related to them at all.

Right.

But apparently the idea goes back to another sense of shirt tail, like not literally the part of your shirt, but the idea of something little.

Because you might bring somebody a shirt tail of sugar, you know, if your neighbor asks you.

Oh, that’s right.

You make a little, like when you collect acorns, you make a little pocket out of the hem of your shirt.

Yeah, a little pouch.

So like a shirt tail boy is a very young boy.

And a shirt tail can just be, you know, a little shirt tail of a garden.

That’s how William Faulkner used it, a little shirt tail of a garden.

So you’re saying shirt tail family can be, well, we’ve had, for example, my grandma’s neighbor’s kids.

I’m not related to it all, but they’re a shirt tail family.

Picturesque, right?

Yeah.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Well, hi, this is Tara calling.

Hello, Tara.

From Westby, Wisconsin.

Welcome to the show.

Hi, Tara. What’s up?

My question for you today is I have a word that has been in my family since I can remember, but it’s only in my family.

Okay.

And it’s a word that we use when we want just a tiny bit more to drink.

So if we’re sitting at the dinner table and my mom wants a little bit more milk, she’ll say, can you just put a little, just a schluck?

And that just means like just a sip or not a full glass, not even a half glass.

It’s just a schluck.

And I have a feeling, a little suspicion that it probably has some German roots, but I’ve never heard it said in any other family except ours.

Terry, your instincts are good about relating it to German because the German word for to swallow is schlucken.

And a schluck is a swallow.

So if you’re if your mom’s asking for just a little schluck of something, she wants just a little swallow of it.

And that’s exactly it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

A lot of people use it, especially in your area.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Really.

And it was so funny because it’s its my aunt’s family also uses it.

And I was just with one of my cousins recently.

And, you know, I said, you know, just a schluck.

And and she said, our family is the only family that says this.

Again, she brought it up to me and said, nobody else I know has ever said that.

And people look funny at me when I say it.

And so I haven’t heard anybody else use it, but it’s one we use often.

Yeah, yeah.

And it’s often spelled, in English, it’s often spelled S-H-L-O-O-K.

In German, it’s S-C-H-L-U-C-K.

There’s an expression, I was so scared I nearly schlucked my Adam’s apple.

Which is pretty scared.

You almost swallowed your Adam’s apple.

Right.

Oh, no.

Oh, that’s funny.

Yeah, it’s funny.

My grandmother, she’s German, so that would make sense.

Yeah.

There you go.

Because I asked my mom, I said, where did you hear?

Because it’s always my mom.

It’s never my dad that would say it.

It was always my mom.

Huh.

Well, thanks so much for sharing your family word.

Yeah.

Well, I appreciate it.

It’s fun to hear that.

All righty.

Well, we’re glad you called.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Remnants of history everywhere we walk.

Yep.

Everywhere we go.

It’s interesting there’s the family split there, but that’s often how it is.

That doesn’t, there’s no meaning necessarily that the mother says it and the father doesn’t.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Schluck.

I like that.

Oh, schluck in my juice.

877-929-9673.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Jonathan.

Hi, Jonathan.

Welcome to the show.

Where are you calling from?

I’m from Fall River, Wisconsin.

All right.

Well, what can we do for you, Jonathan?

In 2001, 2002, I was a student missionary for a year in Zambia, Africa.

And while I was there, I met a lot of people who had the name Born Face.

And the explanation given to me by the local people was that they were all born face up.

Of course, that’s like a lot of people who are born face up.

So both girls and boys can have this name.

And there were quite a few of them.

In Zambia at the time.

Now I’m a pastor in Wisconsin, and one of my church members is from Zambia, and he said that his name is the same, but he really clearly says that his name is Bonface, as opposed to Bourneface.

And so all those other names that you were hearing when you were in Zambia in 2000, 2001, they were clearly pronouncing that R, right?

Yeah, and giving this explanation.

Right, yes.

And they were all English speakers.

Well, English is a second language, you know, or it’s a British colony, you know, North and South Rhodesia were, but…

Former British, yeah.

Yeah, so, you know, the language of trade, usually their first language is their tribal language that they learned growing up.

Right.

And then the English is the one you work in and go to school with, right?

Right.

Yeah.

So they’re both correct.

Really, you’re just hearing that lack of R, which is common to the former British Empire.

The interesting thing to me is I wonder if you as an American were hearing the R in Bourneface, or they were over-articulating so that you could hear it, or that you were just encountering people who had more experience with American English rather than British English.

But I could see either one of those taking place there.

I mean, there’s a lot of missionary presence in Zambia, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So you might simply just be hearing people with their English was reinforced in different ways by two different English-speaking cultures, American or British.

But I want to talk about the larger question, which people might be thinking right now, which is why would somebody name their child after the position of the birth?

Do you have an answer for that?

I have no clue, and it kind of struck me as funny because, you know, that’s like probably one-third of the population or more.

So, you know, everyone could have this name.

It might be more than that.

So I’ve done a little reading on the subject, and there’s an author named Ashikari Johnson Hodari who’s got a book called The African Book of Names.

It’s good.

It’s basically a name book.

You pick names out for your kids with some explanation.

But one of these things that he says, what I really found significant, is that throughout sub-Saharan Africa, names tend to explain the circumstances exactly as they were at the time of a birth.

So it might be born at the time of a wedding, born during a time of grief, born during a conflict with another group, born after the father has died.

And sometimes the names can reflect the birth itself, being born as a twin, coming too soon after the last birth, or being a breech birth, or being born face downward.

So all of these, and they’re different, and this happens in Nigeria and Ghana and other places in sub-Saharan Africa.

So there’s a lot of names in the tribal or regional languages that literally mean these things, like born face downward or second twin.

And sometimes children get a new, not quite a name, but more like an honorific after another child is born, and they’re now the older child, and they’ll get a new name.

So anyway, it’s not something that we do in the naming culture of the West.

Our names tend to be more abstract and less specific and less reflective of the actual literal circumstances of birth.

Yeah, I love that these are names that tell a story.

So one thing that struck me as quite funny when I was in Zambia was that people often name their children after whoever happens to be in the newspaper that day.

Oh.

So you get a lot of people named after famous Americans or world leaders from Europe or different things like this.

Yeah, it’s true.

I’ve seen news stories.

Occasionally, I’ll browse the African news just to see what’s happening in the world.

And there’s all these Bill Clintons who now have grandkids.

I love it.

It’s fantastic.

In any case, there’s more to be learned about this if you want to look up African naming traditions.

Really interesting stuff here.

They go a different direction.

It’s their own thing.

And to us, it might seem odd at first, but it starts to make a lot of sense when you think about it.

So that book was The African Book of Names by Ashkari Johnson Hodari.

And I highly recommend that as a place to start.

Thank you very much.

Thank you for your call.

Jonathan, thanks for calling.

Call us again sometime, Jonathan.

Take care now.

Bye.

Bye.

I’m sure that some people are wondering about the name Boniface, you know, in the Catholic tradition, but that’s a whole other etymology.

That’s right.

It’s just a coincidence that Boniface and Boniface look similar and sound similar, but they’re not related.

It’s not the name that’s being used in Africa.

Right.

It’s from Latin Bonum Fatum, which means good fate.

877-929-9673.

Here’s a word that I’ll think you’d like if you don’t know it already, Grant.

Wonderclout.

Wonderclout is a term for something or someone that looks amazing but is actually completely useless.

It seems amazing but isn’t.

Yeah, it just looks like something really great.

So what is the clout doing in there?

Clout is an old word for a handkerchief or a rag or something that’s just like a useless piece of clothing.

That’s right.

I did know that.

So what that might be?

Something that looks like gold but isn’t?

I don’t know.

Right.

Or somebody who’s a big talker but doesn’t really deliver.

Or a beautiful cake, but then you realize it’s made out of fondant, which is not very edible.

Something like that.

I’d rather have an ugly cake than a beautiful one I can’t eat.

Any day, right?

A wonder clout.

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.

You remember our conversation about thin places, those spots in the world where the walls of reality seem to just sort of grow thin, and you can almost feel another dimension on the other side of it?

That prompted a whole lot of responses from our listeners.

On our Facebook group, Roger Perrault wrote,

I never heard the term thin places before the segment this week.

I live in Ireland, and I was actually walking my dog in one of my thin places along the canal in our town when I heard you use the term.

At my turnaround point, there’s an old abandoned cottage overgrown with greenery.

It’s that kind of mystical spot where I can almost feel the presence of the last people to walk out the door and leave it empty.

I wonder about the whys and hows and where they went.

On certain hazy, misty mornings, I almost feel like looking over my shoulder to see who is there.

And on our Facebook group, he posted this beautiful photo of that very canal with an old stone bridge and all this greenery and trees.

And he said, there’s a 120-year-old photo of the same area taken from the same angle.

A man and boy are fishing.

And I can feel at times like somehow they’re still there.

This place is so thin, in fact, that one particularly foggy morning, I could hear the church bells, and my imagination nearly convinced me that when the fog cleared and the church bells stopped, it would be 200 years ago.

Thanks so much for identifying that strange feeling.

Wow.

Isn’t that cool?

That exactly exemplifies the term thin places.

Yes, yes.

And we got an email from Johanna Polsenberg, who lives in Standard, Vermont, and she wrote,

In 2014, I was in Glasgow, Scotland for a conference and stole away for about 36 hours to drive up to the Isle of Skye.

I didn’t really know what to expect, and I’d mapped out a long day hike, but the rain was blowing sideways and it was in the mid-40s, even though it was August.

I started to drive around the island and the weather started to clear, and I actually found myself at the start of where I had intended to hike.

I decided I’d do an abbreviated hike, so just set off for a bit of a walk.

Within minutes, I felt totally transported, or more so, expanded, as if time dropped away.

I’m not easily influenced by the mystical.

I have a PhD in biological sciences.

But I felt spiritually and physically moved.

It felt like I was connected to something primordial.

I felt a tug of belonging with absolutely no reason whatsoever for that.

I’m not Scottish. Scotland has never been a place for me.

It just moved me.

And she said, I wasn’t looking to be moved.

I’d expected it to be beautiful and all.

As I walked further along the trail with the lichen-covered rocks and dusty green bracken ground and steel-colored ocean,

It just felt so light or perhaps thin.

Isn’t that beautiful?

I love the responses we’re getting about this.

I did. It’s really brought out the great writers among our listeners, right?

Exactly.

People can put pen to paper with some success.

Nice.

They must enjoy shows about words, right?

They must have a way with pens, type biters, keyboards.

We still welcome your thoughts on the thin places of the world or the thin places in your reading and the things you come across where something happens for you, where you’re transported to another time and dimension, and maybe it’s something the author didn’t intend.

That counts, too.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org or talk to us on Twitter @wayword.

Hello, welcome to A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Chris Anderson from San Diego, California.

Hey, Chris, welcome to the show.

Hey, thanks so much.

What can we do for you, Chris?

I was calling about the word chossy. That’s C-H-O-S-S-Y. And the word is used in climbing and mountaineering to describe crumbly rock or unsafe rock that will fall apart if you pull it or stand on it. And it can be extremely dangerous.

So with a lot of climbing terms, a jug means a big hold like a milk jug or a small hold that you can only fit your fingers in, like a pocket. It’s called a pocket. But this word chossy is not exactly related to the definition, at least in English. And I’ve never understood the origin of it or why we describe chossy to be dangerous, crumbling rock. And I’ve been climbing for 10 years. And this is widespread throughout the climbing community.

That’s correct.

Okay.

Yeah, if you say that rock is chossy or it’s a choss pile, that just means it’s really bad rock and you shouldn’t be climbing there.

Probably one of the worst places I’ve climbed and scariest climb I’ve done is in Temple Crag in the Sierra Nevada.

And Crag is a place that you go climb, and it was this 1,400-foot spire, and it was very chossy.

One of my friends actually pulled a refrigerator block-sized rock about 1,000 feet up, and it went crashing down this gully.

It was very scary.

Oh, my goodness.

Okay, so chassis is a very significant word in your world. That’s correct. Yeah, and it means exactly what you said, something like rock that’s crumbly, that it just won’t support your weight, and it tricks you into standing on it, right?

Yeah, even if you were to pull on it like my climbing partner did, it would pull out. And that’s really dangerous because if he was directly above me and that happened, that refrigerator-sized block would have hit me. But luckily, he was up and far to the right. So we both saw it careened down this goalie.

You know, in addition, not only pulling on it is dangerous, but if you were to place a piece of protection like a spring-loaded camming device or a passive gear like a nut or a tricam, if you fell on that, then the force that went on the sides of that crack would break the rock apart and then you would keep falling.

Okay. Very significant. Okay. All right. So very bad news. Chausse is a really weird word. I would have guessed that it was some old French term or something like that because there’s so many mountaineering terms that come from French or just some kind of geology term.

But I haven’t seen it any farther back than the 20th century.

Have you, Grant?

It’s not that old at all.

No, I think we probably know the same resources, right?

And it means what you described.

And all we can tell is that it comes from the word choss, which may be a humorous variant of chaos, which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to ears in this part of the world, but maybe in Britain it does.

Yeah, there’s some suggestion that it’s—people say choss instead of chaos is a joking pronunciation because that hard ch as a k sound is just not native to English.

It’s not normal English.

So I don’t know.

It’s very, very mysterious. But everyone and all the resources confidently explain that it comes from the humorous pronunciation of chaos.

And I’m like, huh? Yeah, really?

Of course, if you’re if you’re stepping on unstable ground and you’re sliding down, that’s going to feel like chaos, I guess.

It is a chassis. If you’re if you find yourself amongst the chassis rock and you start falling amongst that, then that would be that would be extremely chaotic.

I tell you from firsthand experience.

Oxford English Dictionary has a letter from Margaret Mitchell, the author of Gone With the Wind, not in the book, but in one of her private letters, where she uses the word choss to mean a chaotic situation.

So that’s from 1937.

And then I found the phrasal verb choss up in a 1945 citation from the slang lexicographer Eric Partridge is a military term meaning to wreck.

And I could see the relationship there possibly if you choss something up and you’re introducing chaos.

Sure.

Well, Chris, thank you for introducing us to this term.

No doubt if our listeners use this term outside of climbing, we will hear about it.

But thank you so much for bringing it up.

Hey, thank you so much.

Thanks for answering my question.

I hope you all have a great day.

You too.

Take care.

Thanks, Chris.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Bye.

Join the CHAS, 877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org or send us a tweet @wayword.

We’re still hearing from those of you who have written pangrams, that is, sentences that use every single letter of the alphabet, and the shorter the better.

We heard from David Drale here in California who wrote, how skillfully my acupuncturist jabs a needle into quivering flesh, exacting a zing.

Oh, nice.

Yeah.

That’s just 13 words, 72 letters.

And I was listening for the Z, and there it was at the end.

Right again.

X and the Q. Where are they going to be? Will they happen? 877-929-9673 or email us your pangrams words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Amanda and I’m calling from Indianapolis.

Hi, Amanda. I had a question about the phrase counting coup.

Counting coup.

Counting coup.

What’s on your mind?

So there’s a little bit of context to when I heard this story.

So my mom said it. She’s from southern Indiana.

And a few years back, we were on a trip to Spain, and we were at the Alhambra.

And we were waiting in the courtyard, ready to go into the palace.

And there are a lot of feral cats there.

And we were watching these cats.

And one of the tourists had a little tiny chihuahua.

And one of the feral cats, who was bigger than the dog, ran up to him, stuck out his paw, masked the chihuahua on the behind, and ran away.

And my mom said the cat was counting coup on the dog.

Yeah.

And what did she have to say about it?

She said it was like the cat wasn’t trying to, like, hurt the dog or anything, wasn’t trying to just, I don’t know, maybe get, like, a point in, kind of, like, one-up the dog, like, show him his boss.

I’m not sure.

Kind of like playing gotcha last.

My little brother used to do that.

Gotcha last.

Actually, let me ask you a question about your mom. What does she do for a living? Because it’s a perfectly appropriate term for this in some ways. But it’s curious to me that she’s using a term which I consider to be just not everyday English.

Well, she was a French teacher. And that might, like the word coup, that might be it. But I think I did ask her about it. And she said, like in her opinion, it was kind of a normal term. I don’t know. She thought there might be some etymology going back to settlers talking about natives.

That’s right. That’s exactly right. I’m not surprised to find that she’s a teacher, and I’m not surprised to find that she has some French in her background, because counting coup is a mix of an English word and a French word. The word is C-O-U-P, and it means a hit or a strike or a touch or a stroke, something like that. And it goes back to the Native Americans. There were a lot of Plains Indians, and still are, who have something called counting coup. This was a term first described in the European languages in French way back in the 1700s.

And what it involves is instead of attacking your enemy to kill them or hurt them, you strike them or you touch them with your hand or your weapon or something known as a coup stick in order to show your bravery. So you get near the enemy and you touch them. And then when you go back to recount your deeds in war, you and the other people who are out there fighting support each other and say, yes, I saw him do that. Yes, he was very brave. Yes, this battle went very well. He was in the face of this horrible enemy. He stood strong and he represented the tribe well and he represented our people well.

And so coup is and was a very important idea of strength and masculinity and the warrior spirit and that sort of thing. If you Google counting coup plus Native American, you’ll come across tons of really fantastic books that talk about this and talk about how foreign it was to the Europeans, how the Europeans really didn’t understand why wouldn’t you just kill them? Why wouldn’t you just go after them with your weapon, your gun? And a lot of the Native Americans then, sometimes even now, according to what I’ve read, still see guns as cowardly because you’re shooting from afar. You’re not approaching the thing that’s dangerous. You’re not approaching the enemy.

And so this cat going after this chihuahua, it really looks like that. He’s going in, being tough, smacking the chihuahua on the rear and taking off just to show that he could, just to show that he was brave, just to show that he wasn’t afraid. I love it.

Oh, that’s cool. Yeah, it’s cool to know that it comes from an actual practice, that it wasn’t just a made-up, weird term. Yeah, I’m no expert on this at all. And what you’re hearing from me is kind of a layperson’s understanding of coup and counting coup and the recounting of deeds of war after the war is over, the battle is over. But I highly encourage you and everyone listening to Google counting coups. It’s C-O-U-P. It seems so strange now. We think of all battles as completely vanquishing the other enemy, completely overwhelming them and killing them or that sort of thing. And it didn’t always have to be like that, at least as far as some of the Plains Indians were concerned.

Wow. Okay. Well, thank you so much for teaching me about that. I hadn’t known. I just thought it was a weird expression, and I’m glad to know that there’s some substance behind it. Call us again sometime, all right? All right. Thank you.

Thanks, Amanda. Bye-bye.

Bye.

Yeah, so the first use that I find of this in print is from 1742 in French. Yeah, I’d be curious what the Native American term is and how they talk about that. I think it would depend on the language being spoken. I do know that the stuff that I’ve read when I worked at an anthropology museum about this subject, they do use the English slash French term for this. Unfortunately for a lot of Native Americans, English is their day-to-day language, and so they do use the English term for this. So not all the languages have been well-preserved and are in continuous daily use, although some are, which is wonderful.

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

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Mary.

Hi, Mary, where are you calling from?

I’m calling from central New York near Cooperstown.

Oh, nice. Welcome to the show. Well, the word that I am so curious about is paisy. Unfortunately, when I was little, it was used to describe my behavior.

Oh, no. By my mother, or if another little person in our neighborhood was acting up or acting whiny or whatever, she’d say, don’t be Pizy. So I was just curious.

Well, Pizy is not that common a word, P-I-Z-Y, but you do see it in the old dialect dictionaries of England.

No kidding. Yeah, particularly the northern and western parts of England, and it’s a term that means peevish or irritable.

No kidding. Mary, do you use the word now, Paisy, with other people?

I do not. I do not. Although I will say it gets used with my cats and kittens because I don’t have children. So it’s not just made up out of my mind. If it’s the same word, it seems to be exactly the same. It is strange to hear it come out of an American’s mouth after all these years because it is not widespread, but here it is. And maybe we’ll get calls confirming that other people use it still.

Well, Mary, thank you for calling us. If anything else from your childhood pops up and you need an answer, give us another call, will you? This is exciting. Thank you guys so much. This has been great fun. Take care.

All right. Take care.

Bye-bye.

Okay. Bye-bye now.

There’s no etymology given in the English dialect dictionary, but one thing that occurred to me is there is the pronunciation of poison.

Yeah. As Pison. I was thinking about that. And I was just wondering if that was an even more abbreviated form of having to do it. Because, did you see that entry about Pise as a kind of a swear, almost? Yeah. Where it’s something like you might say, like, well, a Pise upon him. Right. Or Pise upon him. Right. And I’m wondering if poison on him is what that means.

Yeah, poison or pox or pest. Something like that, yeah. All of those have been proposed for that. But, yeah. My dad used to talk about Pison. Pison. Pison. Taking Pison.

Yeah, 877-929-9673. One of the things that’s fun about talking with somebody who’s learned English as a second or third or fourth language is the way they make us look at our own language in a different way. Here’s a great example of this. This is a tweet from Bryn Houck. She says, apparently my Russian husband learned the word barefoot from me, talking about how I prefer to be barefoot and refusing to wear slippers. Which is horrifying for him, and he analyzed the word as barefoot, as in B-E-A-R, foot, because I’m stomping around all uncivilized with naked feet like a bear in the woods. Barefoot.

877-929-9673. Thanks to senior producer Stefanie Levine, director Colin Tedeschi, editor Tim Felten, and production assistant Tamar Wittenberg. You can send us a message, subscribe to the podcast, get the newsletter, or catch up on hundreds of past episodes at waywordradio.org. Our toll-free line is always open in the U.S. and Canada, 877-929-9673. 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.