Lousy with Diamonds (episode #1346)

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

And I’m Martha Barnette. Grant, I have something I’d like to share with you.

Yes, please.

Martha never ever makes ornery noises in church.

I should hope not. What would her father say? What is that?

Well, let me try another one.

Make new epiphanies merrily, only never include cupcakes.

You’ll never be a Hallmark card writer.

Damn, that’s why I lost that job.

What are those? What are you telling me?

Those are mnemonics.

They’re mnemonics for how to spell the word mnemonic.

Do you need that?

I used to.

You know, a mnemonic is a formula for remembering something, like Roy G. Biv for the colors of the rainbow.

Right.

And it’s an oddly spelled word, you know, M-N-E-M-O-N-I-C.

Anyway, I was thinking about mnemonics recently because I saw one on Facebook the other day that impressed me so much.

It was created by a high school student to help her remember all the U.S. Presidents for her AP history exam.

Really?

All right.

Oh, my gosh.

Let’s hear it.

I’m not going to do the whole thing, but it starts out, when a jolly man makes a joke, vexed hags tell people that fat people beat lambs.

And then it goes on and on.

And I just thought, my gosh, you know, you need a mnemonic for that mnemonic, don’t you?

I mean, it’s picturesque.

What does it sound like since Kennedy?

Can you do the end of it?

I’ll give you the last three.

Curb badness, ogres.

Curb badness, ogres.

I love it.

Curb badness, ogres.

Well, what are your favorite mnemonics?

Something useful, maybe you’re in the health sciences or music and you’ve got a great mnemonic you want to share with us.

The number is 877-929-9673.

Or you can send your stories about language, any kind of language, to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello.

Hi, who’s this?

This is Brenda from Chico, Texas.

Chico, Texas.

All right, well, fire away.

What can we do for you?

Well, I have a mother-in-law who’s 97, and for her Mother’s Day gift this year, she asked all of her children and grandchildren to give her a pounding.

And I wasn’t familiar with it.

It sounded kind of mean, but it turns out it’s where you bring people food, primarily staple goods, canned goods.

And I was sort of fascinated by this term since I’d never heard it before.

And I did a little Internet search and couldn’t find anything really other than a sort of an Amish connection.

But my real wonder was, is it a pounding because people would give a pound of flour or sugar or anything like that?

Yes, that’s exactly it.

A pounding in that sense isn’t about beating somebody up.

It’s about bringing a pound of this or that to people who need it.

It’s a lovely small town, often southern tradition of bringing stuff to people in need, newlyweds and people who just moved to town, neighbors whose house burned down.

Yes, you said the right thing, Brenda.

It’s staples usually.

It’s not like you’re going to bring prepared lasagna in a dish.

You’re going to bring stuff that can be used to make other food, right?

Wow.

Yeah.

I had never heard of that before.

Isn’t that great?

Well, she loved it.

She cleaned up.

She got lots of things in her pantry now.

But is it really Southern?

It has a long history, at least in terms of the dialect.

I think it’s used mostly in the South.

In fact, I can remember my grandparents getting a pounding.

My grandfather was a Baptist preacher in the hills of Virginia, and we went to church with them one Sunday.

And the verb to pound in that area often means to pay the preacher in goods rather than money.

And so we got a pounding after church where there were all these bags full of groceries and fresh corn and fresh tomatoes and all that.

So I think it’s largely in the South, although the tradition may be much more widespread.

And in fact, I don’t know if you ever read The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings.

She has a short story called The Pound Party.

It’s also called A Pound Party.

And it has to do with that kind of thing.

Everybody’s supposed to bring a pound of something, or it doesn’t necessarily have to be a pound anymore.

I gather it’s coming back.

Well, I hope so.

It’s a lovely tradition, isn’t it?

Yeah, it reminds me of stone soup.

Everybody bring a little bit.

We’ll all eat together.

Yeah.

Excellent.

Well, thank you so much.

Yeah, but it must have been weird when your 97-year-old mother-in-law asked you.

Well, and I’m not young.

I’m in my 50s.

I had just never heard the term before.

You were rolling up your sleeves and making a fist, right?

Yeah, exactly.

Seemed kind of mean to do for an elderly woman, but all right, we were in.

Take out your dentures.

So she was happy with her pounding.

What did she get?

I don’t know, boxes of canned goods, and she also got some frozen things.

And, you know, I guess now we don’t need staples to last forever because we have ways to preserve things.

But, yeah, she got loaded up.

Great.

I love that idea.

Lots of good things, yeah.

Well, thank you so much for calling.

Well, thank you.

Have a great day.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Bye.

877-929-9673.

Or send your questions in email to words@waywordradio.org.

You probably know that there are thousands of terms in English for being drunk, right?

Yes.

There’s a whole book on that, right?

Yeah.

By Paul Dixon.

Tons of them about alcohol and drinkers and drinking and being drunk and so on.

Being squiffy.

Squiffy, yeah.

I’ve got a few here that are still used on college campuses.

Oh, yeah.

Blackout, Schmammered, Schwaisted, Thrashed, Slizzard.

I’m not sure about that one.

Schmammered.

I like that.

You know these?

No.

Of course not.

It’s not really about being drunk, but it’s a drunk game.

It’s called the Tour de Franzia.

It’s a drinking game in which you try to finish a box of Franzia wine.

It’s like one of these boxes of wine.

Narstie.

Yeah, Narstie, yeah.

And you try to do it while riding bikes and other things.

So it’s a Tour de Franzia.

Not a good idea.

It’s terrible.

And so my question for you, the listener, is what do you call being drunk now?

What’s the new term for you?

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

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is John Vincenzo from East Hampton, New York.

Hi, John. Welcome to the show.

Thanks.

Well, there’s this phrase that I was always curious about.

I only heard it in one part of the country, and then somebody used it recently and I asked her, what does that mean?

She said, I don’t know.

And it says, cold as all get out.

Meaning what?

Meaning it’s really cold.

I was on this bike trip in Oregon and one night it got really cold and everybody was saying it was all cold as all get out.

And all those people were either from Northern California or from Oregon.

And then I used it for a little while and then people made fun of me.

They did.

I stopped saying it, and then a friend of mine said it a few weeks ago, and I thought of it.

And I said to her, do you know what that means?

And she said, I guess it just means it’s cold.

But I’m like, yeah, but what’s all get out?

That’s interesting that you were made fun of.

I thought that was fairly widespread.

It is.

When it’s cold in New York, we say things about how cold it is, but never all get out.

Yeah.

There’s things that we say I don’t think I could say on radio.

Yeah, I was just thinking of a couple of those.

This body part and that body part freezing.

Yeah, right.

And places and actions.

We understand each other, John.

Yeah, you’re speaking the same language.

I can hear this.

That’s funny.

I remember the shock of hearing cold as all get out.

You do?

Yes, absolutely.

I grew up in Kentucky, John, and I moved to Florida when I was in my teens for a little bit.

And somebody said, it’s cold as all get out, which was probably, you know.

You know, that’s actually where my friend is from.

She’s from Florida.

Oh, really?

Oh, very interesting.

But I do remember the shock of hearing that for the first time.

I just thought, wait, I mean, was there a skip in the record or what happened?

Because it just, it doesn’t make any sense, right?

It doesn’t.

Right.

Yeah.

What I understood from reading the slang dictionaries on this, there’s two theories and one of them I really like.

And that is if something gets out in front of everything else like its kind, like today is cold as all get out.

It gets out in front.

It’s the winner of all cold days.

It is like a pack of dogs at the track, right?

It’s literally getting out in front.

I liked that theory a little bit.

It’s still very weird and doesn’t seem to work well in the syntax of English, which is why it’s so odd.

That’s the odd thing about it.

But the other theory was proposed by Farmer and Henley, these two slang lexicographers.

Their idea is that it’s actually two expressions combined.

And I really like this.

So you have, well, doesn’t that beat all?

And then you have, and it sounds very modern, but it’s actually very old.

Then you have get out as an expression of disbelief.

And their idea is that it’s a combination of doesn’t that beat all and get out.

So it sounds like doesn’t that beat all get out.

And then you have all get out.

All right.

So that’s a theory.

But the surprising thing here actually on the side is that get out is actually much older than we think it is.

Get out.

Like get out of town or get out of Dodge.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh, we say get out of here a lot.

Yeah.

Get out of here.

Forget about it.

Forget about it.

Yeah, exactly.

Did they say that in East Hampton?

I thought they were more refined out there.

Well, yeah.

Well, I grew up in New York City.

Okay, there we go.

Okay, and then you got out.

Yeah, then I got out.

So, John, that’s about as much as we can do on that one.

All right.

Well, thank you very much.

Thanks for calling, John.

Much appreciated.

Take care.

All right.

Thanks a lot.

Bye-bye.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Granted, there are other words and expressions like that that have been formed that way with the collision.

That’s the problem with this.

This is why John was right on the button to call about this because it’s so weird.

It just, to all get out.

Yeah, I’m trying to remember another.

There’s one, and we’ve talked about it quite a while ago, and it’s even rarer, much rarer, and that is to who laid the rail.

Oh, yeah.

That’s like, boy, she was just eating those mashed potatoes to who laid the rail.

Yes, I was.

It means that she was eating them a lot.

What are you talking about?

I have cameras.

But again, it’s another one of those where the idiom is unparsable.

Yeah, it makes no sense.

You’ve got to take it as a unit.

Yeah.

What word or phrase has caught your attention lately?

Email us about it.

words@waywordradio.org.

Grant, one person you don’t want reviewing your new novel is Dorothy Parker.

Is she still alive?

Fortunately, well…

From the grave.

Yeah, for the sake of novelists, you don’t want Dorothy Parker reviewing your novel.

Because I just came across this great line from her.

This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly.

It should be thrown with great force.

Isn’t that awful?

And then I was also reading this passage where she was talking about something that she thought was terrible.

And she said, this wasn’t just plain terrible.

This was fancy terrible.

This was terrible with raisins in it.

That’s very good.

Isn’t that great?

It wasn’t applied to literature.

It was realizing that she had a birthday.

But still, terrible with raisins in it.

I love it.

Nice.

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

Stay tuned for more word geekery and your language questions.

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

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

You’re listening to A Way with Words.

I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett, and we’re joined once again by that quiz master, John Chaneski.

Hello, John.

What do you have for us today?

Well, this puzzle reflects what it’s like for kids to learn English.

We all agree that English is not so easy to learn, but certain things make it more difficult.

For example, silent E at the end of a word can be confusing.

When you watch a child read a book, you’re very much prepared for the fact that the first few times they encounter silent E, they’ll read the letter sound.

For example, a preschooler might look at the word bone and say what?

Boney.

Boney or Bonnie.

Right.

I’ll give you two definitions.

One defines a word that ends in silent E.

These are all four little words.

The other defines what word the preschooler would say when he or she reads it.

For example, a kind of walking stick and good at judging situations.

Cane and canny.

Cane and canny.

Very good.

Here are some more, or maury.

Maury.

Here’s the first one.

To approach and red menace menace.

Come and commie.

Come and commie.

Very nice.

An open river valley and to be slow in doing something.

Dale and dally.

Dale and dally.

Very nice.

To erase, to remove something put in type, and a place to get pastrami.

Wait.

Oh, I thought you knew the answer, Grant.

The deli is the last one.

Right.

And the first one.

Oh.

But deal and deli?

Deal and deli.

Though, to be fair, if your preschooler is reading text that includes the word deal,

They’re probably not going to make that mistake.

No, no.

Here’s the next one.

At an end and half of a 70s singing duo.

Dunn and Donnie and Marie.

Dunn and Donnie.

Yes.

Very good.

Place for papers and winning colors or genuine risk.

File in Philly.

File in Philly is right.

Nice work.

A noble title and a bathtub waterfowl.

Duke and Ducky.

Duke and Ducky.

A strong storm and a ship’s kitchen.

Gale and Galley.

Gale and Galley.

Nice work.

A fast-moving mammal of the genus Lepus and Mr. Potter of fiction.

Harry and Harry.

Harry and Harry.

How about a grand leap in ballet and a place for boats to dock?

A jeté and a jetty.

Jeté and jetty.

That’s a little different than the others, but you did it very well.

Sneaky.

I think these last two might be a little more challenging.

Okay, good.

Let’s see if it works.

Good.

Put away and the ability to understand and judge situations.

It’s not file and filly again.

Is it save and savvy?

It is save and savvy.

Very good, Grant.

Oh, good.

Nice working.

Okay.

Something to spin and to count up.

Tale and tally.

Tale and tally, right.

I was going to say to count up like coconuts, but you didn’t need it.

Nice work, Grant.

Those are my…

Tally me bananas.

That’s tally me bananas for sure.

That’s my quiz.

E will not be silenced.

E sure won’t.

Thank you so much, John.

Thanks, John.

Thank you, Grant.

Thank you, Martha.

If you want to talk about words and how we use them, this is the place to do it.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello.

Hi.

My name is Deborah Horn.

I’m calling from Seattle, Washington.

All right.

Well, welcome, Deborah.

What can we do for you?

How are you doing?

Great.

Well, I’m calling because for the last couple of years, maybe three years,

I’ve been trying with my friends to decipher this police report that I found

As I was looking through the historical records of the Tacoma Washington Police Department.

And we’ve tried to figure it out, but we feel we’re stumped.

So I wanted to ask what you think it means.

So you were at the station going through records for some purpose?

Yes, I’m a television reporter in Seattle,

And I was there actually waiting to talk to the public information officer for the Tacoma Police Department.

And he was taking long enough that I actually had time to look through in the lobby of what I consider to be their brand-new station.

They have the history of the Tacoma Police Department.

And so they have some of the – they tell about the history, but they also have, which was more fascinating to me,

Some of the old police reports.

And as a reporter, and I’ve been a reporter a long time, I’ve seen a lot of police reports,

But I’ve never seen one quite like this one.

Let’s hear it.

Now, this was written July 13, 1946, and it says,

This Jasper picked up a punk on the stem and took him topside of a flicker.

After a bit, he gave the boy’s pork a fumble.

The boy didn’t think that was so hot, so he took it on the lamb and made a beef to the boss.

I answered the call, and the boy fingered him at 10th and Broadway.

The manager has several beefs on this same bird and has the handle of the beaver.

So you and your friends have been trying to figure that one out, huh?

So what have you figured out so far? Have you figured out some of it?

Well, we feel like we have.

I’ve talked to my co-workers who are journalists and some are editors and photographers,

And it turns out all of us care about words.

And so some of them had some idea of what they thought it was.

So one of my coworkers said that he thought punk on the stem means that the person is gay.

He’s gay himself, and he said punk was a pejorative and that it was not a positive,

And so it was used as a negative about people who are gay.

So whether that’s so, we don’t know.

And then Topside of a Flicker, the only thing we could think of there was that Flicker is a movie theater,

And maybe Topside was in the balcony.

And then gave the boy’s pork a fumble where we think he touched him where he didn’t want to be touched.

And then the boy didn’t think that was so hot, so he took it on the lamb.

Now, I always think went on the lamb, but I never thought of took it on the lamb.

But then we concluded that meant he ran away and made a beef to the boss.

Well, we got that, so we complained to the boss.

To the manager of the theater, right?

Presumably.

And then he says, I answered the call, and the boy fingered him.

Well, I’ve said that on television myself at 10th and Broadway, so we know what that is.

And then the manager has several beefs on the same bird.

So we’re thinking he has several complaints on the same person and then has the handle of the beaver.

Well, that one was a bit baffling.

We didn’t know whether that was the handle we thought was named because we’ve used that.

And then, but is the beaver referring to the kid or to the bird?

I’m thinking maybe not, but we weren’t sure about that.

You’ve got almost all of it.

There’s a couple places where I would translate it differently.

This Jasper picked up a punk on the stem.

Jasper is a rube or a hick or somebody not from town.

And the punk probably just means a young kid.

It doesn’t necessarily have to mean a gay man.

And on the stem is old hobo language for on the main street or the main drag of the town.

So the stem is like the primary artery of whatever the city you’re in.

Oh, my goodness.

Yeah, that was what we got hung up on on the stim.

We couldn’t figure out what that was.

Let me do the whole thing for you if I would translate it, all right?

You’ve nailed so much of it.

Just all together, it would translate as,

This Rube picked up a kid on the main street of town and took him to the balcony of a movie house.

After a bit, he gave the boy’s crotch a feel.

The boy didn’t like it, so he took off and complained to the manager of the theater.

I answered the call, and the boy recognized the offender at 10th and Broadway.

The manager has several complaints about the same dude and has the name of the kid.

So in other words, the last part about the beaver, the handle of the beaver, he knows who the complaining kid is and therefore can tell the police, go talk to this kid if you want information about what this guy from out of town tried to do to him in the theater.

Oh, my goodness.

That is amazing.

Well, you know what made me so interested in this was, this was just, what, 66 years ago.

And so I mean, I know that language changes, obviously, is constantly evolving, constantly changing, and that we don’t say things that we said in the 50s now.

But to have something that seemed so incomprehensible, at least on first reading, was what was so striking to us.

Well, you said something very important when you first spoke to us today, and you said it’s so different from all the other police reports and you nailed it.

This is artificial language.

Nobody has ever written like this without a great deal of effort and trouble and kind of making a stunt out of it.

It’s a little bit of a performance.

Somebody said, I’m going to write this with all the slang that I know and really just pile it on, just spread it on thick.

Lots of icing on this cake, right?

And a few cherries and we’ll do rosettes and candles and, you know, and we’ll put a bride and groom up there, too.

Yeah, sparklers.

Yeah.

Somebody really laid it on this police report.

Somebody was having a ball.

I’ll tell you, Debra, what it reminds me of most of all is when newspapers and magazines do reviews of slang dictionaries, and I’ve read a million of them,

They often have as their very first paragraph something that looks very much like this, where they try to horn in as many, just shovel them in there as many words as possible.

And they come up with this really unnatural sounding, very dense, opaque passage.

And this looks exactly like that.

I’m 99% sure that this event probably happened, but the police report is probably not real.

Does that make sense?

That this isn’t the one that was actually put into the records.

It was one that somebody probably wrote and then pinned to the bulletin board above the desk.

Saying, hey, look at this.

And then they wrote the real report that they would go to the sergeant, the duty sergeant.

Well, exactly.

Exactly.

Well, that’s so interesting.

I’ll have to ask them sometime.

Deborah, let us know what else you find out if you do, okay?

I absolutely will.

Thank you so much.

It’s been such fun having you decipher this for me.

Our pleasure.

Thanks for calling, Deborah.

Bye-bye.

What language have you come across that puzzles you?

You can ask us about it.

877-929-9673 is the number to call.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, hi.

This is Roger.

I’m calling from Indiana.

So what can we help you with today, Roger?

Well, my daughter, we adopted from Vietnam when she was eight years old,

And she didn’t speak any English at the time.

And I’ve heard that when she goes off to college,

She’ll pick the Vietnamese back up that she lost, at least up to an eight-year-old’s level.

She doesn’t care one way or another.

Actually, I’ve even asked her about it.

But she’s 18 now, and so it’s been 10 years,

And she doesn’t speak any Vietnamese except maybe to count, and that’s about it.

Okay.

So she’s planning to take courses in Vietnamese then?

No, I’ve just always heard that from several people, in fact,

That once she gets off to college and interacts with other people from Vietnam

Who speak the language, that she will likely pick up a speaking level.

She’ll get back to the same level she was when she was a child in Vietnam really, really quick is what I’ve been told.

I don’t know how true that is.

That’s true, Roger.

The people telling you that have told you something that is borne out by the data and the studies that I’ve read.

There’s a chapter in a book by a professor from Hong Kong.

Her name is Terry Kit Fong Au.

And it’s about the study of kids from Korea, I believe in Australia, who had pretty much the same circumstance.

They moved to Australia when they were young.

They already spoke some Korean.

They were raised as English speakers and then were re-immersed back into an environment where they could access the Korean that they still remembered.

And by far and away, they were better with Korean.

They spoke the sounds more correctly.

They picked it up faster.

They felt more comfortable.

And I think your daughter will have exactly the same experience.

If she starts hanging out with people who speak Vietnamese well,

She will find these memories coming back, this language coming back.

There will be a re-flowering of what she knew as a child.

I think it would be pretty exciting.

She doesn’t care.

She says, I don’t care if I learn Vietnamese again or not, but I think it would be pretty exciting all of a sudden to pick up another language fairly quickly.

Yeah, definitely.

I’m with you.

I don’t know how you can make her excited about it, but it’s possible that when she gets to school and she realizes that a lot of other people agree with you and me and Martha that this is a valuable thing to have, that she’ll start to see it as an asset.

And maybe she’ll work hard at getting more formal training and education in the language and maybe even getting to the point where she wants to go to Vietnam and immerse herself in it for a while.

It’s great to have another language.

Any way that you can get it, whether you can get it partially or wholly, having a second, third, or fourth language is valuable to any human being.

But it’s one of those things that parents can’t really push on their children. Otherwise, the children tend to push back.

Well, I’m betting she’ll come around, too, about the language.

I think she will, too.

And, Roger, do keep us updated. Let us know how she’s doing and let us know whether or not she is able to access that Vietnamese that she knew as a child and whether or not she works on it.

She really should.

I don’t know how to make somebody study a language, but if Thoreau were away, she’d be perfect for it.

I think so, too.

You guys have a good day.

Thanks, Roger.

Good luck to you.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Mary Kate from Columbus, Ohio.

Well, hi, Mary Kate. Welcome to the show.

Hi, Mary Kate.

Hi.

How can we help?

All right, so I work with a bunch of former math teachers, and we need help with a math term.

Oh, you weren’t going to say a math problem. Thank goodness.

No. I was going to say math on the radio does not go well.

No, we’ve got those covered.

Okay, good, good, good.

Okay.

But a math term.

Okay, math term. Do tell.

All right.

All right.

You know the long division sign that looks like a seven kind of turned on its side? It’s like a little house and a quotient goes on top?

Oh, it’s ringing a vague bell.

Yeah.

It’s curved on the left and flat. Sometimes it’s curved. Sometimes it’s straight, right?

Yep, that’s it.

It’s kind of like a diagonal half of a rectangle.

Right.

Okay.

So we’ve got a name for it, but we know it’s not the real name.

Oh, really? What is it?

Well, a couple editors found the name Gazinta, and they didn’t get the joke right away, and the name has stuck around here.

Oh, that’s great.

They didn’t get the joke right away. That’s even better.

And how do they spell it?

I would guess G-A-Z-I-N-T-A.

Yeah, sometimes it’s G-O-Z-I-N-T-A.

But it’s from, you want to tell us the joke? It’s something like when you read the sign out loud, it would say, for Gazinta 2827, or for Gazinta 28710.

Right, exactly. It’s Gazinta.

So it’s these words, goes into, mash together, right?

Yeah.

Okay, so you’re in a kind of work where you need to refer to this term for long division.

Do they still do long division? I thought they got calculated.

They figured it all out.

There’s none of it left to be done anymore.

It’s all finished.

Martha, is it just as simple as long division symbol?

I think it’s long division symbol or division bracket is the only other one I’ve seen.

Those are really hyper-boring.

Yeah, Gazinta.

Maybe if you capitalized the G in Gazinta.

What about that?

Then it would look more official.

I think it would make everyone smile anyway.

I think it would, too.

And you could tell them that Gazinta was some 15th century mathematician.

Yeah, Italian.

Yeah, Italian who discovered the…

Just tell them Galileo made it.

And still it survives.

Well, the problem with this is that it’s actually kind of relatively a new piece of punctuation, right? A new bit of topography, right?

New-ish.

New math.

I don’t know.

It seems so old-fashioned to me.

Yeah, it does to me, too.

The thing is, when it started, it actually was two separate pieces. It was a parenthesis on the left, the vertical thing, and then a flat line across the top.

I’m going to mispronounce this, but it’s a…

Vinculum?

Vinculum, yeah.

It’s a great Scrabble word, by the way.

V-I-N-C-U-L-U-M.

And that’s the horizontal part.

It’s a Latin word that means something that connects other things.

Right, but you’re no better off if you say the parenthesis plus a vinculum than you are.

It’s a long division symbol.

That’s the standard term in the textbooks.

Yeah, or division bracket.

That’s a little shorter.

A little shorter.

But I think…

Are you in a position where you can make the policy and tell them it’s a gazinta?

You know, if you’re saying that’s how it appears in the textbooks, we could probably have a say in that.

The gazinta doesn’t appear in the textbooks usually.

No.

But the long division symbol is what it’s called in the textbooks.

That actual three-word phrase, long division symbol, really boring.

Oh, it’s a little disappointing.

English is better than that.

English can do better.

Come on, English.

That’s right.

Fix it.

Let’s see.

LDS.

LDS.

No.

No.

No.

Mary Kate, if we hear from our listeners that there’s something even hotter than gazinta for this particular symbol, we’ll let you know, all right?

Great.

Thanks so much.

Sure.

Okay, thank you.

Thanks. Bye-bye.

Bye.

Language of the Workplace.

We love to hear about it, so call us with your stories.

877-929-9673.

Coming up, what we’re reading this summer.

Stay with us.

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

More at nu.edu.

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

And I’m Grant Barrett. Martha, it’s time to share our summer books.

Okay.

You know, I’ve been spending a lot of time lately, bear with me, thinking about female comedians in Hollywood.

And on television.

Yeah.

It turns out that you can follow these wonderful women on Twitter, and they’re hilarious, right?

And you can watch their shows, and you’re like, they’re great.

They’re like the Fanny Brices of our age, right?

Oh, yeah.

Great stuff.

They’re even better than the Tallulah Bankheads of our age.

Tallulah.

I’m reading her 1952 biography, and I’m finding these amazing correspondences between Tallulah Bankhead, and she was an odd duck in ways, and she had kind of a manly voice, and beautiful in her own way, and kind of crass, but at the same time incredibly hilarious.

Witty, witty, yeah.

What a life she led.

And then I’m reading Mindy Kaling’s book and Tina Fey’s book.

Mindy Kaling is one of the writers and actors on The Office.

Tina Fey, of course, is from 30 Rock.

And these three women have this great kind of overlapping in the way that they handled Hollywood, the way that they’ve handled success.

And that’s my summer reading.

Tina Fey’s Bossy Pants, Mindy Kaling’s book, which is called Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? And then Tallulah Bankhead’s 1952 biography called Tallulah.

Love it.

Yeah, good stuff.

I highly recommend that.

Are you reading them on your phone or?

I’m reading them in paper.

What?

Yeah.

Since when?

Well, Tallulah’s is not on e-book yet.

Okay.

Okay.

Grant, the reason I asked what you were reading it on is that I’m reading my first novel ever on a Kindle.

I finally broke down and got one.

Oh, what are you reading?

Well, of all things, I’m reading Moby Dick by Herman Melville.

You know, we were forced to read it back in the day.

But I saw a production of Moby Dick the opera at the San Diego Opera recently that was just terrific.

And it inspired me to go back and read the book.

And I am just loving Herman Melville’s voice.

I just I love his confidence.

He’s such a confident writer from the very first sentence, you know, call me Ishmael.

And I’m sort of dreading all the parts.

Oh, the 12 pages where he talks about processing the carcass, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, because I have a different consciousness now about those great majestic creatures.

But he’s such a confident storyteller.

And you know, if you know anything about the story at all, you already have this great fun of emotion that he draws on because it’s taking so long even to get on the ships to go out there.

But I just really feel like I’m in the presence of a great storyteller.

He is indeed.

And I love the way he captures the history of New York and of sailing and whaling.

It is a historical document as well as great literature.

Right. And he deals with matters of race and class and culture.

And in fact, there was a great article in Vanity Fair in November by Nathaniel Philbrick, who writes about why Moby Dick really is the great American novel.

And I read it years ago, but I am just delighting in going back through it again.

I may skip those 12 pages, but we will link on our website to that Vanity Fair article.

It’s great.

And we’ll list and link to all four books that we’re reading this summer.

That’s Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, Bossy Pants by Tina Fey, Tallulah Bankhead’s 1952 autobiography called Tallulah, and Minnie Kaling’s book, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Angela calling from Dallas.

Hi, Angela. Welcome to the show.

Hi, thanks for taking my call.

What’s cooking?

I was calling because my husband and I listen to the show either in Dallas or on podcast really frequently.

And we always end up discussing the same issue, which is what do we call the thing with wheels that you put your groceries in?

And where I’m from, which is northwest Louisiana, a lot of people I know, we call it a buggy.

And my husband always teases me about this because he says, no, a buggy is what you put a baby in. This is a cart.

And I haven’t met anyone from anywhere else who has ever called it a buggy except from northwest Louisiana.

And so I guess we were just wondering about the regional differences of those things and if it’s popular anywhere else.

And maybe get my husband to not tease me about it somewhat.

Where is he from?

He was born in Florida and grew up in rural Georgia.

And by age 18 had lived in Lubbock, San Antonio, Dallas.

He lived in Austin for a while.

So kind of all over.

Okay.

So, Angela, you call it a buggy, and he calls it what?

A cart.

A cart.

A shopping cart?

This is what we’re talking about, right?

Or does he say grocery cart?

He says shopping cart.

Okay.

What do you say, Martha?

I say shopping cart, I think.

Yeah, me too.

You, Grant?

Shopping cart.

Shopping cart.

Would your husband happen to be around?

Yes, he’s right here.

Would you like to speak to him?

Sure.

Oh, yes, please.

Okay.

This is Eric.

Hi, Eric.

Good afternoon.

So you make fun of your wife for saying buggy?

Yes, I give her a hard time about it.

She’s clearly incorrect, and I lovingly nudge her.

Oh, really?

And who does the grocery shopping in the family?

Generally, I do.

Oh, I see.

I’ll tell you, though, there is an army waiting to rise to her defense, and they live throughout the South and East Texas and Louisiana and parts of Georgia and Alabama, and they’re all buggy sayers.

It sounds like a war on the South.

No, it’s a war. The South will rise again and it will be about the word for shopping cart.

Well, my father’s from Massachusetts originally. My mother grew up in Arkansas, but her mother was an English war bride and was very strict about their language.

And so if it’s more a northern use, I wonder if that may be from whence it came in my vocabulary.

Well, actually, it’s pretty widespread all over the country.

Shopping cart is much more widespread, I’d say, than buggy.

So you’re in the majority there.

Also in Massachusetts, you see shopping wagon.

I don’t know if you ever heard that one.

I have not.

But there are large numbers of people who they shop with a buggy.

It’s the same device.

It looks exactly the same.

It’s just a different name, and it’s definitely a regionalism.

There’s nothing wrong about it.

Well, not morally wrong, perhaps.

Well, it’s not going to kill anybody, no.

No, it is one of the few disagreements that my wife and I have.

That’s excellent.

How lucky are you then?

That’s great.

Incredibly so.

Well, can you put Angela back on the line?

I’d be happy to.

Thanks for talking to us, Eric.

Hello.

Hi, Angela.

I don’t know if you heard that, but the short version is that buggy is used throughout the South, so it’s not just Louisiana.

Okay.

Well, that’s good to know.

I’ve lived in a few different places, and everyone I know who uses buggy is from Louisiana, and I’ve lived in a few places in Texas, but people here seem to say cart.

But maybe it’s because they’re more metropolitan areas?

Maybe. It’s not that common.

But it’s common enough that it’s been recorded in the dialect dictionaries.

It sometimes pops up in dictionaries of Southernism.

So you’ll find people in East Texas and Georgia and Alabama and Northern Florida.

Just bits and pieces of people here and there who say buggy.

And they have no shame in it.

They just go about their business and live the same lives that the rest of us do.

Well, then I’ll continue to hit shame free.

Thank you so much.

Okay. Well, thanks for calling.

Thank you.

All right. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Shopping cart.

And didn’t we get a call once about Bass Cart?

We did, yeah.

I think that was somebody from Louisville.

That was a brand name, right?

Yeah, brand name.

In fact, after we had that call, I went and read a long treatise on the development of the shopping cart.

It’s actually really interesting how they did that.

I have a question for you.

Are you a giant nerd?

Yes, I am.

Nerdus gigantus.

No, it really was interesting because the guy who invented the shopping cart couldn’t get people to use them because men thought they weren’t manly.

And women said, I’m not going to push another buggy after I’ve been pushing the baby buggy.

But he hired people to go into the store and push these carts around.

And people started to see these actors using the shopping carts.

Yeah, it’s brilliant.

It’s almost Mad Men, isn’t it?

877-929-9673.

Or send your questions an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Grant, do you know what a money cat is?

Is this the good luck cat with the waving arm that you see in restaurants?

On restaurants, yeah.

Well, that’s one use of it, but apparently in Maine there’s another use of the term money cat.

Oh, really?

And that is a calico cat.

Why?

Because they’re so unusual that they’re supposed to bring you good luck or bring you money.

So I’m living with a couple of calico cats, and they better get on the stick.

That’s all I have to say.

They’re falling down on the job.

Money cats.

I like that for a calico cat.

I’m sorry it’s just confined to Maine.

How can you go wrong with kitties?

You can’t, especially calicos.

877-929-9673.

Or send your questions about language to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, my name is Paul Urban.

I come from Cornwall, Vermont.

And my question is the derivation of the phrase hocks, like I hocks the front seat, sort of a strong dibs on the front seat of a car or something like that.

When I was a child in the 50s, that word was used by myself and my friends and children in my family.

Any idea where that came from?

Hawks.

You hawks the front seat instead of call shotgun.

Yes.

You don’t call shotgun or call shoddy.

Well, we were hawksing shotgun, yes.

Hawksing shotgun.

And did you grow up in Vermont?

No, northern New Jersey, Montclair.

Huh.

And any idea how you spell hawks?

I really don’t.

I thought it sounds like H-O-X or it could be H-O-C-S.

But I look it up in the dictionary and so forth and can’t find any reference to it at all.

I don’t know this term at all.

We did a podcast, a minicast, a number of years ago about a variety of terms related to this dibs and to hosie something.

You would say I hosie it or to finnie it, right?

But I’ve never come across to hox something before meaning to claim priority or claim preference.

Yeah.

Paul, did you do anything special when you did it?

Like move your hand or tap the seat or anything like that?

No, but usually, for some reason, the only recollection I have of it, and again, this is from the early 50s, was a position to sit in the car or something along that line.

But it was a term my wife is from the South, and she had never heard it, and she encouraged me to contact you folks.

What did she say?

She just, you know, the dibs or something of that sort. She had never heard the term.

Yeah, I think dibs is probably most common.

Yes, dibs by far is the most common way to claim something in the United States.

Yeah, or shotgun.

Well, shotgun specifically for the seat, the front passenger seat.

Yeah.

Well, I’ll tell you what we’re going to have to do, Paul. We’re going to have to ask our listeners about this. Find out if any of them know anything about hocks, if they use it themselves, where they’re from.

We’ll see if we can piece this together, all right?

Okay, that’ll be great.

Paul, thanks for calling.

Thank you, Paul.

Thank you as well.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

In other words, Paul saying, everyone’s headed for the car, you want the front seat or you want the window seat, and you’d say, I hox this seat, right?

Well, if you’ve used this term, let us know, 877-929-9673, or email us.

The address is words@waywordradio.org.

We’ve talked before, Grant, on the show about how if you’re saying something in a Southern accent and follow it with bless your heart, you can get away with just about anything.

I found a great collection of Southernisms online, and it included a criticism, a slight criticism of a preacher that went, each one of his sermons is better than the next.

Think about it.

The next one is not as good as the one before.

Each one of his sermons is better than the next.

I like the idea of applying that to other things.

Call us with your language questions, 877-929-9673, or send them an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Yes, this is Kay Thomas, and I’m calling from Mountain View, Arkansas.

Mountain View, Arkansas. Well, welcome, Kay.

Hi, Kay. How are you doing?

I’m doing good. Thank you.

What’s going on?

My question is an old phrase that my mother used, and my mother was born in 1911, and I’ve never heard anyone else use this particular colorful old expression.

But when my mother was playing cards or something and she’d be really played out about something, she would never think of cussing, but she would say this string of words, and it almost sounded like cuss words.

But her phrase was, I’ll be jumped up and down, bow-legged, and Johnny Bus Hart.

And Johnny what?

Bus Hart, like a bus and a heart.

Bus Hart, like it was his last name.

Whoa, well that sure gets the meaning across, even if we don’t have the etymology for that.

My goodness.

I know.

I asked her one time, I said, where did you ever pick that up?

And she said, oh, my mother said it.

So I’m sure that’s true.

And I thought maybe you all would know where that came from.

Well, I know shorter versions of it.

For a long time, for a couple hundred years, people would say, well, I’ll be jumping, a great jumping fire.

And there’s a lot of variants.

Jumping Jehoshaphat is related as well.

Or you’d say, I’ll be jumped.

Although that’s not quite as old.

Well, I’ll be jumped up is another one, too.

And all of these are expressions of surprise or dismay or that sort of thing.

Yeah, you want to stomp your foot or slap your knee or something when you’re saying that.

Yeah.

Right.

She would lose her bid and pitch, and that’s when she would say it.

I love that.

And it sounds like the bowlegged is an intensifier, don’t you think?

Yes, yes.

All of these, the longer form that she’s got, they’re hard to find because people kind of elaborate and emphasize and add to them over time.

And they develop their own particular varieties.

But I believe that they’re all connected back in history to this basic idea of I’ll be jumped or I’ll be jumped up.

And that itself is probably a euphemism for Jesus Christ and probably related to people saying things like Jiminy and Jingo and Judas and Jupiter instead, instead of taking the Lord’s name in vain.

But it’s so far removed that the connection is tenuous.

Oh, yes, she would never have done that.

Funny. That’s interesting.

And she said a lot of phrases where she did use, like you’re saying, something that modified it. It was longer.

A lot of people say, for crying out loud.

Well, she would always say, for crying out loud and weeping in public.

That’s a great one. I love that.

That’s terrific. And that we do know is for Christ.

Right? The crying is a euphemism for Christ there.

But I like that.

Oh, that is, I would never have picked that up.

Well, she probably didn’t know either.

Right, right. She probably picked it up independently.

Because after a while, it just becomes a thing that you say and has no religious or swearing connotation at all.

Exactly.

Well, Kay, that’s the best that we know.

It’s probably mostly hers with a little bit of connection to something that other people say, all right?

All right. Thank you so much.

Take care now.

All right.

You too.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

For crying out loud and weeping in public.

I love that.

I’m going to start adopting that.

Call us with your language questions, your language heritage, your linguistic heirlooms.

The number is 877-929-9673.

Over on our Facebook page, someone asked, why do we say lousy with to mean having a whole lot of something?

You know, she was lousy with diamonds, for example.

It’s a good question.

Yeah.

And it’s a good question because most people will be surprised by the answer.

They will be surprised because it comes from louse, you know, the singular of those things that get in your hair.

The tiny little creatures, right?

If you have them, you have a lot of them.

You are lousy with lice.

They’re teeming, yeah.

So not as picturesque a term as you might.

So if you go to a lousy hotel, it might literally be a lousy hotel.

It might be lousy, that’s right.

You know, I wonder if Bed Buggy Hotel will catch on.

This place is just bed buggy with hipsters.

She is bed buggy with diamonds.

877-929-9673 is the number to call about language.

Things have come to a pretty pass.

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

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

Thanks for listening. I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett. Take care.

Ciao, ciao.

Tomato tomato.

Let’s call it.

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