Mischief Night (episode #1684)

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.

When it comes to books, the right title can make all the difference.

But choosing that title can be a real challenge, so I’m always curious about that process and especially why a working title gets tossed away and replaced.

For example, what about the working title Trimalchio in West Egg.

Is that I don’t know I don’t know what that is.

Is that Tristan Sh shandy?

I don’t know what that would be.

Oh it’s a f Fscott Fitzgerald.

Yeah.

There we go.

The w The West Egg was the giveaway.

You got it.

Yeah, Tremalchio was a character in an ancient Roman work.

It was this ostentatious nouveau reiche guy and but yeah, I think Tremalchio in West Egg is a dud.

So yeah, so then better title is The Great Gatsby.

Exactly.

And in one other case, there was an author who had a really hard time making up her mind.

Here are some of her working titles, Milestones, Tote the Weary Load, Not in Our Stars, Tote, Bugle Sang True, Another Day, and Tomorrow Is Another Day.

Tomorrow is another day.

Is it gone with the wind?

Yes.

Yes.

Nice.

That’s very good.

You know, Martha and I read a lot, and we read a lot of what you recommend.

So if you want to send us book ideas, stuff, we should put on the bedside table.

We’d be happy to take a peek at it.

You can call us and tell us about it eight seven seven seven nine two nine nine six seven three.

That’s toll free in the United States and Canada, or email words at waywordradio.or Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Well, thank you very much.

I think that honor belongs to you guys though, really.

He was waiting for the moment.

Okay, this is Jeff Jeff from Jacksonville, Florida.

Hi, Jeff.

Jeff.

What’s up?

So the language news is is a dis not a dispute, actually a discussion between my wife and myself.

We she has an expression that she blames her mother for, that I’d never heard before.

It’s jolly on the spot.

And she re she means what I understand to be Johnny on the spot, like you’re doing something and you’re Johnny on the spot on getting it a response to someone.

And she will say Jolly on the spot.

She blames her mom for that and I sh she’s not sure that it it is anywhere else and I didn’t know if it was anywhere else and I haven’t been able to find anything remotely associated with that.

So just to thought I throw it out to you guys.

Is that something that is heard of before all right so in anywhere in any other context.

Let’s fill this in a little bit.

Just to be clear for people listening, she’s saying J O L L Y as in upbeat, happy.

Jolly on the spot.

And you’re saying Johnny, like the diminutive form of John, J O H N, J O H N N Y, Johnny on the spot.

Yes, sir.

And you’re not referring to a portable toilet.

You”rere you referring to being the one who’s right there and who can get the thing done and you’ll maybe do it with good spirit.

Yes.

Okay.

And so the dispute is interesting because she’s got a version that you don’t know about.

Correct.

Okay.

I just want to tell you, there’s an older version that’s earlier than both of those.

Hers is real.

It exists.

People use it.

John on the spot is a little bit older, but even older still is Charlie on the spot, which was the original version as far as we can tell, with the exact same meaning.

Somebody who’s right there who will cheerfully jump right in and help.

So yes, hers is a real thing.

Yes it exists.

It’s nowhere near as common as Johnny on the spot.

And both of them are newer than Charlie on the spot by a number of decades.

So why there’s a Jolly on the spot?

My suspicion is that somebody associated this cheerfulness of helping with the name Johnny?

So they got a phonetic similarity and a emotion similarity and chose Jolly just to kind of emphasize the point.

So here’s a quick question, given your reference to the the portable toilets.

Yeah.

Is Jolly on the spot post the advent of portable toilets as a as a John?

And is there some association that people like one of them steer away from that?

Oh no.

So Johnny on the spot is a double pronged wordplay that is much, much newer than the old meaning of Johnny on the spot, meaning helpful person cheerful, helpful person.

Although if there are portable toilets with no line for the women.

I am Jolly on the spot.

Exactly.

So yeah, so Johnny on the spot as a toilet is a relatively new term.

I think 1950s.

Wait, so Johnny Johnny on the Spot as a as a toilet is the nineteen fifties, but Johnny on the spot as an expression older than that?

Yeah, Johnny on the Spot as an expression goes back to at least the eighteen eighties, and Charlie on the spot goes back to at least eighteen oh five, much earli It sounds like you and your wife are gonna have an interesting conversation.

I wanted to be able to tell you you’re both wrong and Charlie on the spot’s the correct term, but that would be an etymological fallacy.

Well given exactly given your your history of saying that you know language is changing.

I mean you know you know how it goes, right?

Yeah.

But no, but they’re all valid.

They’re all still in use.

John M.

Spot currently is the most popular one.

I’m switching to Jolly.

Jeff, thanks so much for calling.

My pleasure.

Thank you guys.

All right.

Take care now.

Bye.

All right.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

Do you have a language question?

Call us and we will be Jolly on the spot eight seven seven nine two nine nine six seven three.

Mary Serpey of Greensboro, North Carolina wrote to us to say, my mom was raised on a farm in Newfoundland, Canada, and when our rims were messy, she used to say, a cow couldn’t find her calf in here, which is a great picture.

Yeah, it’s interesting because there’s that special mother offspring bond, right?

She’s gonna find her calf amongst all the other calves except in your tornado of a room.

Oh I didn’t even think about that.

I was just thinking about the size of the mess.

Oh I see.

Yeah, yeah.

But you know, I tried to find that phrase online and I couldn’t find that exactly, but there was a another phrase that was more popular that went a cow couldn’t find its calf in this room, and that was popularized by a guy named Addison Meisner, who was an architect from Palm Beach who kept a book full of witticisms and he co-authored something in 1908 called the Cynics Calendar that included such gems as Where There’s a Will, There’s a Lawsuit, and the wages of gin is breath.

We’d love to hear your catchy aphorisms and sayings and the things that your mother and father pounded into your head when you were a child.

Words@waywordradio.org or call or text toll-free in the US and Canada 877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Well, greetings from the land of ten thousand lakes, Martha.

This is Cindy from Minneapolis.

What’s on your mind, Cindy?

I was asked to help edit a soon to be book and came across Brownie Points.

I understand that to mean the some kind of advantage.

Yeah.

Mm-

Cindy, the way that you’re describing this makes it sound like it’s not an expression that you use and you learn from somebody else and that’s why you’re confused?

No, I’ve heard it before, but I wanted to know its origins.

One of our linguistic colleagues at Word Histories.net, he he turned up this really interesting article in the Los Angeles Times from 1951.

And this article by Marvin Miles is titled Brownie Points A New Measure of a Husband.

And he lays out this concept that husbands get points for doing all the husbandly things, like going home on time and helping with the housework and remembering anniversaries and appointments and stuff and stuff like that.

They’re supposed to do the stuff they’re supposed to do.

And we’re talking about the nineteen fifties here, for heaven’s sake.

It’s not extra credit.

Right It’s not a bonus dude.

It’s an obligation.

It’s what you signed on for.

You don’t get a pat on the back for fulfilling your obligations.

On one hand, the sense is a dude should be doing this stuff in his household, right?

He should be a full member of the family and fully participate.

But on the other hand, this Marvin Miles guy writes this up as if it’s an impossible goal.

That a husband can’t get ahead with with this brownie point system.

At best he can keep even.

And it’s because, as he calls it, of pixie mathematics.

And by pixies, he’s referring to these mythological kind of fairy like characters that get up to mischief and are sometimes invisible.

And Brownie is another character just like that.

So he talks about genie geometry or elfin calculations.

So really what he’s basically saying that it’s unfair to judge the husbands on this invisible scoring system.

The invisible being a notion that that’s what these pixies and and brownies are.

These, again, these little female fairy-like characters from mythology.

So in any case, he goes on and on about this, and after a while you just want to kind of reach through the the time machine back to 1951 and smack Marvin Miles outside the head, frankly.

But the if there’s even an illustration, it shows a pixie with a a clock kind of hanging over this dispirited married man, kind of judging him for what he did and didn’t do.

So again, so this article which was syndicated, and that means published in other newspapers, may have been, if not the source of Brownie Points, the popularization point for Brownie Points, because he he has this very colorful kind of argumentative and very debatable opinion on what a fellow should do around the house.

Very and then it got conflated with Brownies the the young girl scouts and they’re earning Yeah, he does mention brownies in the in the piece, but it’s because he’s kind of just like lumping in all of these mythological characters who are who are invisible and up to mischief.

Leprechauns, pixies, brownies, kind of all together.

He mentions them all.

And so that’s that’s where the brownie so the brownie does come just like the brownie girl group, which are a subset of the Girl Scouts in the US and the Girl Guides in the UK, they get their name from that brownie, that little feminine character who was believed to get up to good deeds in when humans weren’t around, perhaps at night or when they weren’t paying attention, like solving problems, cleaning things up, doing doing odd jobs, that sort of thing.

Okay.

Now it’s coming back to me.

It’s been a long time since I’m my question is: how do I get some of these brownies to do all this stuff around the house?

I try to be a good house husband.

I don’t know where I’d stand on this this score sheet that Marvin Miles has laid out.

Well thanks for the information and link to that article if we can find a linkable source for it in the in the LA Times.

Yeah, and good luck with the editing.

That’s exciting.

Yeah.

Being asked to edit somebody’s book is like a kind of real badge of honor.

Not a brownie badge, but a Girl Scout badge.

Girl Scout badge.

Yeah, the book editing badge.

Cindy, thanks for calling.

Take care, Cindy.

Bye.

Thanks.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

Email us with your word questions words at waywardio dot org I was pleased to see that the Merriam Webster Dictionary Online now has an entry for TLDR.

You know what that means, of course.

Oh yeah, too long, didn’t read.

Usually followed by a semicolon.

Right, between the L and the and the D, T L D R.

It could also mean here’s a short summary, you know, just setting up a short summary.

But I’m waiting for them to add the variant that I’m seeing more, and I’m definitely using myself, which is AIDR.

Oh, AI didn’t didn’t read.

Yeah.

Yeah, I can tell this is AI slop, so I’m not gonna read it.

AI.

I thought you were gonna use the TLDW too long didn’t watch, which is kind of my predicament.

I’m like you know, I I live in a quiet environment here.

I’m not gonna fire up YouTube every time you wanna give me a twenty two minute video that could have been could have better been a you know a, five word sentence.

Share your words with us.

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, and arriving by Catapult and sticking the landing, it’s our quiz guy, John Chaneski.

Whoa!

Oh look at that.

I’m holding up the card with 10 on it.

And the judge’s score.

Yes, of course.

So let’s have to tell you guys something weird that happened to me recently.

I had a dream, a fabulous dream in which I was transported to an alternate dimension where everything was exactly the same as it is here, except for one thing.

In writing English, everyone in my dreams still uses the long S.

The long s if you’ve ever looked at old documents, you’ve likely seen the long s.

It was a way of writing the letter S that to modern sensibilities looked just like the lowercase F.

For example, the Bill of Rights uses the word subjected, but it looks like fobjected.

And the Constitution says Congress, but it looks like congrefs, and they have the power to make all necessary laws.

Do you guys know anything about the long s you’ve no bit, yeah it was definitely gone by the mid eighteen hundreds and it alternated every other letter so you’d have a long s and then the next s would just be a regular s and then the next one would be a long s sounds good sounds like you do know about it now in my long s dream there were times when I was taken aback by a common word that looked out of place, but it just had a long S.

For example, I read about children who have winter fun on a snowy hill, but I thought they ran away.

What did they really do?

Oh, that’s right.

They sled, whereas I thought they fled.

Okay, gotcha.

So both of the choices are gonna sound like a modern real word.

Yes, exactly.

Okay.

Okay.

Now I was reading the TV guide they still have TV guide there too, and I thought I saw a show about an open plan apartment with exposed brick and beams, but it was an old show about a mysterious island.

What did I think I’d see and what show did I see?

Mmm.

Well it wasn’t Soul House, that’s not a thing, or Santacy Islands, that’s not a thing.

How about Loft?

I thought I’d see the show Loft, but instead what did I see?

Loft.

Lost.

Lost.

Yes, lost.

It was loft and lost.

Very good.

I was texting a friend about a party we were planning and he asked me for a ride to the airport.

Then I realized he just wanted me to jot down everything we’d need for the party.

What did I think he wanted and what did he really need?

Oh you thought he wanted a lift but he needed a list That’s right.

Instead he just needed a list.

A lift and a list.

And I was reading a weather report, and I thought that an armada of ships were predicted for the next day, but it was only icy rain.

What was I expecting and what did I get?

You were expecting a fleet, but you got sleek.

That’s correct, exactly Martha.

You were expecting snow, but you got phone.

No.

That doesn’t work.

There we go.

That is my my quiz about the long S that doesn’t really exist.

Well, we’re cranking this catapult, John.

We’re gonna put it back down to the launch position.

We’ll send you off home to your family.

Say hello for us.

Oh man.

Well, I’ll I’ll fee you next week.

We’d love to hear from you.

877-929-9673 is a magical toll-free number in the United States and Canada.

You can call or text or find all of our past episodes and lots of ways to reach us on our website at waywordradio.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Wayne Oliver from Lacrescent, Minnesota.

And I I was just wondering about the word cat soup, how it evolved into ketchup and how that all came about was I was listening to a old time radio show from nineteen fifty, Rocky Jordan, where Del Monte was the sponsor of the show and I had to listen to it three times but they clearly said cat soup and all the years I just thought cat C A T S U P was pronounced ketchup too.

I never knew the difference.

And was just wondering maybe you had some ideas.

All right, so let’s clarify this for a second.

So you’re hearing that last syllable for this tomatoe red condiment.

You’re hearing it pronounced like S O U P.

Absolutely.

That’s exactly I mean I replayed that announcer on the Rocky Jordan episode at least three times.

So just to be clear, Larry Thor, I listened to old time radio too.

Larry Thor was the announcer for the Rocky Jordan show for a couple of years.

When Del Monte was the sponsor.

And he used the word C A T S U P a lot.

And I didn’t I never heard him say soup.

It was always sub S U P.

I’d be happy to send you the episode.

Oh yes, please, because it would me so what it would mean probably Martha, correct me if I’m wrong, that he probably just misspoke because he usually says SUP SUP.

Yeah, I wonder if he misspoke or was making a joke or something.

I mean there were commercials on television by the Del Monte people where they talked about cat sup.

I remember being really that vowel is a schwa sound, right?

Not a long ooh sound.

Catsup, yeah, yeah.

Back in the seventies and eighties.

In fact you can find these commercials online.

But yeah Del Mani switched after a while.

And the whole story is pretty interesting, Wayne.

Because you may know that that the history of catch up goes back gosh at least 500 years to China, and the fact that Chinese seafarers encountered this fermented fish sauce when they visited places like Vietnam and Ca what’s now Vietnam and Cambodia and they called it something like ketchup or something like that that meant fish brine.

And then when British and Dutch traders came across this stuff and brought it back to Europe in the 17th century, people couldn’t quite agree how to spell the name of this fish sauce in their own languages.

And in English it was spelled catch up K-E-T-C-H-U-P and catch up like you’re catching up with somebody and CatsUp C-A-T-S-U-P and a couple of other ways, and none of those was really correct, so to speak, because it was an anglicized version of a Chinese dialect term.

Any idea how it went from a fish sauce to tomato?

Well that’s very interesting because originally when it was distributed in Europe it was more like a soy or a Worcestershire sauce and then over time the recipe went through all these changes and particularly in the eighteenth century people started adding tomatoes and and by the nineteenth century sometimes this stuff was called tomato soy, which is really interesting and then well into the eighteen hundreds catsup was actually the dominant american spelling and there was a Pittsburgh entrepreneur named Mr. Heinz, who in 1876 launched a new product that he called Heinz Tomato Catsup.

And what happened was that Mr. Heinz deliberately switched to ketchup, K-E-T-C-H-U-P, to stand out from his competitors.

And over time, Heinz began to dominate the market and ketchup became the national standard and Del Monte actually held on to ketchup until nineteen eighty eight and then just gave up and started calling it ketchup.

It finally caught up.

Yeah marketing of its finest.

But do send us the audio of Larry Thor saying it is soup.

I think he probably misspoke because all the ones I’ve heard on the Rocky Jordan show, which by the way, everyone is this kind of action-packed program about a hard boiled detective in Cairo.

Just really kind of wild stuff.

But most of the time I think Larry Thor says SOP instead of soup.

Yeah.

Well I will I will be happy to send that to you, Grant.

I really appreciate you taking the time to get involved and answer the question for me.

All right, take care, Wayne.

Appreciate the call.

Thank you.

Thank you both very much.

Bye.

Bye.

We will link to that Rocky Jordan episode when Wayne sends it to us on the website.

You can also find tons of Rocky Jordan episodes on archive.org, Internet Archive.

And if you want more information about language, pretty much all the major FAQs about language have been answered on our website.

We’ve got a great search function.

Just got a waywordradio.org.

Here’s another book title that didn’t make it.

A week with Willy the Worm.

With a week with Willy the Worm?

Is this the hungry caterpillar?

Yes!

Yes, Eric Carl’s book.

You know, I never liked that book and it’s a probably to my detriment.

It’s probably like a bad characteristic about me that I didn’t like that book.

Well you probably would have liked it less if it had had its original title, A Week with Willy the Worm.

The very hungry caterpillar is definitely a better title than Willy the whatever.

Call or text toll-free eight seven seven nine two nine nine six seven three in Canada and the United States.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Leela.

I’m so excited to be on.

I’m a longtime fan.

This is such an honor.

Hi Leela, welcome to the program.

Yeah, we’re glad to have you.

Where are you calling from?

I’m calling from Ridgewood, Queens, New York City.

Okay, I know where that is.

Right.

Well Leela, what would you like to talk with us about today?

So I was curious about the word default or default.

I was looking at some language about a loan that was like, you know, the term to default on a loan and then I was thinking about the word default like default settings on your computer and I wasn’t sure if these were the same word or just two pronunciations of the same word, or maybe there was a different origin.

And then I was thinking about how default settings I really only hear in a tech or computer space.

So I was wondering if maybe that was a newer usage of the word.

And I was curious to hear your thoughts.

They are the same word.

They do come from the same root.

They’ve got a Latin root through a verb phalare, which means to deceive or fail or escape notice.

And then this prefix day, the DE, meaning away.

So we kind of roughly loosely might gloss that as emphatically get away from one’s attention because both of these are generally about not acting.

They’re about in action, failing to do something.

That’s where we get the connection to the Latin root.

So with the loan, if you don’t pay or fulfill the agreement, you face a default judgment, right?

Or some kind of legal recourse.

And there are other places we see this happen outside of courts and finance and and computers.

For example, a sports team defaults if they fail to appear or if they fail to meet the criteria for appearing, such as not having enough players or the right kind of players.

And the computer sense comes from this because it’s about failing to act on the settings.

So it’s still a failure.

It’s a little bit of inaction really more than it’s a failure.

There’s no negative judgment left in the word in the computing world because it used to be really common in software that your software would arrive, you would install it, and before you could do anything, you had to set your settings.

You had to put things in place otherwise nothing would happen now for the most part the defaults are there you don’t have to do much and you can kind of just go with the the baseline of what they set up for you when you first installed you don’t have to do any customization at all.

And so this default is you don’t act, you’re inactive, you’ve failed to act.

Therefore it is the default, just like the loan.

The defaulting on a loan is failing to act, failing to meet your obligations.

Wow, that is a really fascinating explanation and totally answers my question and everything I was wondering about.

The other final thing, and Martha’s probably fully on board this one, defaults had an L added back into it because the way we inherited it from the French was without the L.

It was D E F A U T and the French still spell it like that.

But later there was kind of a scholarly consensus to put the L back in there to better reflect its Latin roots.

Oh, that’s very interesting.

Yeah, we’ve done that quite a few times with words.

Sometimes correctly, sometimes incorrectly.

Yeah, and there are plenty of those verbs that and nouns that change the stress, right?

Like record and record and subject and subject and conduct and conduct.

I mean it happens a lot.

And you’ll notice that many of them do have those ancient roots that go back to some of the oldest years of English as we know it today and often have Latin roots.

Cool.

Yeah.

I guess there’s a lot more than I thought.

Oh, that’s always the story with it, isn’t it?

Yeah.

Thank you.

I’m I’m a big fan of the show.

I’ve been listening for years, so this is totally a dream come true.

Take care of yourself, Lita, and thank you for calling.

We appreciate it.

Yeah, thank you both.

Have a good day.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Well, hi.

Hi, what’s this?

This is Jennifer, and I am calling from Tucson, Arizona today.

Tucson, just down the road from us.

What’s on your mind, Jennifer?

Yeah, I am reaching out because I’m eager to understand the origin of a phrase my father used throughout his life that I’ve only heard one other person ever use and it was a gentleman about his age.

But truth be told, it was a phrase that my brother and I had no idea what it really meant and it kind of drove us a little bananas because it didn’t make sense in our child’s mind.

But the phrase is a couple three.

And he would often use it, most often in reference to quantity, but sometimes in reference to time, such as, hey dad, how long did it take to get there?

And he’d say, Oh, a couple three hours.

They really had no idea how long it took to get there.

So my brother and I would look at each other and kind of like do a little eye roll and just kind of get on with things, but it’s a little more challenging when it was quantity and we were maybe helping him with a project and he said, Hey, go get me a couple of three nails and we’d look at each other like, What’s that?

How many is that?

Right.

‘Cause you’re inevitably gonna pick the wrong number when you Yeah.

What we just bring the tray.

What about him?

Was he from Arizona or somewhere else?

No.

My dad was born and raised around the Fargo area in North Dakota.

Okay.

And then in his twenties, moved on down to Wall, South Dakota for several years.

Okay.

Interesting background there.

Martha, we know quite a bit about this.

Yeah.

Well a couple three is something that you can’t analyze too closely because it’s this deliberately vague small number that that means something like two or three or maybe a few more.

I mean I mean it it’s kind of a a squishy expression.

It’s sprinkled throughout the United States, particularly in the north, so I’m interested that he was in the Dakotas there.

And sometimes you see it as a couple or three or a couple three just just couple three.

Couple two three.

-huh, couple two three or couple of three different variations in the phrasing.

But it basically just works as a quantifying adjective like some or several or many it it goes right in front of the noun that it modifies and so you might say a couple three days or or like he like you said a couple three hours something like that.

Or you might call it an approximator.

It’s something that just gestures at the quantity without really committing to one.

So it’s not really trying to count anything.

But yeah, plenty of people use it and and Grant, I understand that that it’s this kind of construction is also seen in other languages.

Yeah, that’s right.

It kind of works as a range.

So in the Scandinavian languages, in Finnish, Estonian, Russian, Catalan, Latvian, they all have a construction, sometimes more common than than in one language than another, that almost literally translates to a couple three and then in languages like French, Spanish and Russian they also have well they’ll just say in French they’ll say do trois or Spanish say Dos Tres.

So they just put the numbers right next to each other are in Russian it’s dwratri or Polish Dva Shi.

It’s just the two numbers smashed together gives exactly the same impact as your father giving you these vague instructions for nails.

It’s just like maybe a little bit, maybe a lot, somewhere in between.

Very interesting.

Well thank you very much for taking my question and thank you for your show.

I learned something every single time I look.

Oh, that’s nice.

Well thanks for listening.

And call us again sometime, all right?

All right.

Thank you so much.

Yeah, give us a couple three calls in the future.

Okay, there it is.

A couple of three calls.

You got it.

All right.

Thank you.

Bye.

All righty.

Bye, Jennifer.

If you want to know more about these kind of approximate numbers, we have a great segment on hyperbolic numbers.

Just search for it on our website at waywordradio.org.

You know, we’re still hearing from people who are telling us how they answer the phone for fun.

Hello.

And we heard from Nilo Raphael Figueroa, who lives in Newport News, Virginia.

And when somebody calls him, he says I’m here to hear you have my ear.

I’m here to hear you have my ear.

Nice.

Call us and see what we say.

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.

News stories about dying languages tend to follow a familiar formula.

You find that last elderly speaker and you race to record them before they’re gone.

But the bigger story is how and why language loss happens in the first place.

It’s the story of how a language gets pushed out from schools and courts and public life and kitchens, and finally from the mouths of the next generation.

Well, there’s a compelling new book that does just that.

It’s called How to Kill a Language: Power, Resistance, and the Race to Save Our Words.

The author, Sophia Smith Gaylor, is a British journalist.

She speaks several languages, and in the book, she writes about what’s called linguicide.

That’s the erasure or suppression of a language.

Sometimes that erasure is brutally obvious as with colonialism and occupation or laws criminalizing a mother tongue.

But sometimes it’s quieter when a language is left out of classrooms or denied prestige or treated as backward or just simply ignor Her reporting for this book takes her all around the world.

In Ghana she finds climate change finishing what colonialism started.

The farmers there watch the rainfall become unpredictable and the land dry out, and neighbors leave for the south, and when they do they stop speaking Dogbani.

In Northern California she meets people trying to preserve the indigenous Karuq language after U.S.

Policies forced children into boarding schools and punished them for speaking their native tongue.

She acknowledges that languages are forever changing, but she adds, the great tragedy of linguicide is that a community finds it is lost an entire language it never chose to part from, through a change it did not author.

Those languages aren’t just dictionaries, she says, they’re encyclopedias of cultural knowledge.

Now, all of this is profoundly personal for her, because Smith Gaylor’s grandmother and mother both spoke to each other in a tongue that she grew up hearing but she never learned to speak herself.

They called it the dialect, and she had always assumed that it was simply a dialect of Italian, and it’s only as an adult that she learned that what those two spoke was actually an endangered language itself.

It was indigenous to the mountains of northern Italy.

And so she writes movingly about what’s been called shared language erosion.

That’s when grandparents never master the language of their new country and grandchildren don’t learn the language of the old one, and the generation in the middle finds itself brokering between the two.

So grant this is a rigorous scholarly book, but it also packs a real emotional punch.

I had the good fortune recently to sit in an airport in Seattle next to one of the remaining speakers of a Native American language in Northern California.

And she is a dynamic, wonderful person who serves as an informant for academics around the world.

And she’s working so hard to preserve that language and make sure it’s recorded and accurate when it is recorded.

And when I think about lingua side, I think about her.

I think about the energetic ex,uberant, intelligent people who are out there trying to counteract the tide, who are trying to push back the ocean of ch of change that would wipe them out.

Mm-

Boy, that must have been some conversation.

It was incredible.

And was and we happen to be sitting next to a British radio announcer who had his own or to put in.

So it was very good.

Martha, that book and author again are The Book is How to Kill a Language, Power, Resistance and the Race to Save our words.

It’s by Sophia Smith Gaylor.

We will put Smith Gaylor’s book on our website at waywordradio.org where we always include a link to the books that we mentioned on this show.

You can find that all again at waywordradio.org.

Welcome to A Way with Words.

Hi Marta.

I am Laura.

How are you doing?

Hi, Laura.

I’m doing well.

How are you?

And where are you?

I am here in California, Davis, very close to Sacramento.

Mm-

Well, what would you like to talk with us about?

Yeah, because my husband and I, my kids as well, we are from Argentina.

I have many expressions we used in our country, but in the past, I am not sure this current generation are using them any longer.

Are you familiar with the expression la Verdad de la milanesa in Spanish.

La verdad de la Milanesa, the truth of the Milanesa.

Why do you ask about it?

What brought us up?

Because again, we are older people at that time we use it this expression very often to mean not only the truth but the real truth.

Nothing to do with meat, nothing to do with the special cuts we have in our country about meat but has to do with the way the lies and truth develop.

So when I am telling you the real truth, we use that expression.

Do you want to tell la verdad de la minadeza del real truth of something?

That’s the way we use it.

So I’m curious to see if you know the expression is still in use, if you have an equivalent in English, other languages that are using something similar to express the real truth of any story?

Yeah, I think I think I can help you with this.

There’s two possible origins.

One of the possible origins is there’s a dispute about where the food dish called a milanese comes from.

You know, it’s meat that is breaded and and either baked or fried.

And this has been a food item for for centuries, for a very long time.

And so some people say, well, it’s it’s from Italy, some people say it’s from Austria, and maybe that’s where the truth of the matter being decided comes from, is that dispute about its origins.

But the explanation that I prefer is that it’s more about this breaded coating of the milanesa, this food item that we have, hides the meat underneath.

And so you don’t know what kind or quality of meat you’re going to get until you cut it open.

And there’s often an insinuation that the meat under that breaded coating is maybe from vermin, like rats or house pets or or spoiled meat, just like meat that you wouldn’t really want to eat.

And so to get to the truth of the the milanesa is to to look at the meat and see what’s under that that really golden I see.

I see.

And what about expressions in English similar to this, covering something?

We would say it really depends on how Milanesa is used.

So sometimes it’s just straight up La Milanesa means a lie or a liar.

Sometimes we do they do use Spanish speakers do say La Verada de la Milanesa as a whole expression.

So it could be the bottom line, the bottom line being the total at the bottom of a invoice or bill that shows you all the cost added up.

Or it could be the heart of the matter, the really central concern, the thing in the middle that everything is connected to.

But I think the best translation, again it depends on context, is the English expression to see how the sausage is made, which we use to talk about.

Like sausage is a really nice food dish that tastes really yummy, but it’s often made of scrap meat.

And the insinuation sometimes is that sausage is made from eat that you meat that you would not want to put in your mouth if you knew about it.

And so I think seeing how the sausage is made in many cases is the best translation for La de la Minaesa.

It just depends on context and construction.

Oh, thank you so much.

That’s great.

Congratulations on your work.

Thank you.

Chao, Laura.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Chao Chao.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

In seventeen ninety-six, Jane Austen wrote a letter to her sister talking about a heat wave that had come through their town, and she wrote, What dreadful hot weather we have.

It keeps me in a continual state of inelegance.

I just love that.

You know, I’m sure she didn’t sweat And then she she glowed.

Then she fainted.

It’s just too much for her womanliness.

But I wonder, given that she was British, what hot temperatures were to her, because I I laugh when I hear British announcers on on sporting tournaments talk about the heat wave and it’s like eighty degrees.

Like, what are you talking about?

That’s normal.

I know, I know, but the last time I was there it was in the nineties.

Yeah, I’ll give you that.

That’s a heat wave.

But eighty no thanks.

That’s not a heat wave.

It keeps me in a continual state of inelegance.

I just love that.

Well, what are the phrases and expressions that popped out at you in your reading or show watching?

Share ’em with us.

We’ll share them with everyone else.

Words@waywordradio.org or call or text toll-free eight seven seven nine two nine nine six seven three.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi.

Hi Kate from Omaha, Nebraska.

Hi Kate in Omaha.

Welcome to the show.

What’s up?

I’m calling to ask about the meaning and origin of honorary degrees.

I work at a Jesuit Catholic school in Omaha called Creighton University and each year we give honorary degrees to some individuals, maybe one or two, and their doctorate degrees, and I thought, I wonder what that is.

And it’s not medicine or philosophy, and it’s I think it’s in humane letters, but I’m not sure what that means or where that comes from.

Not inhumane is one word, but you mean in space humane.

Okay.

Yes.

So yeah.

So to summarize here, you’re asking about the honorary doctorate degree name.

Yeah.

Doctorate of Humane Letters.

Doctorate of Humane Letters.

Okay.

Gotcha.

Oh Martha, is there a clue here that it’s a Jesuit university?

Well, there’s a clue that it’s a university for sure.

Okay.

Because the tradition of awarding honorary degrees, you were asking about that, it goes back all the way back to 15th century European universities.

I think Oxford awarded the first one.

And later in this country we began doing that too, certain universities.

Today universities typically award the degree you’re talking about to people whose contributions have enriched society and culture and the key to the title doctor of humane letters goes back to latin and maybe that’s what you were getting at grant with the Jesuit out of the yeah, because the Jesuits ha usually have a strong Latin program.

Yes.

The key here is that the word humane doesn’t mean what we usually think of it as meaning.

It doesn’t necessarily mean kind or compassionate, that’s the modern adjective, but this is a much older scholarly use of the word humane.

It actually comes from the Latin humanus and the Renaissance phrase studia humanitatis, which literally means the studies of humanity.

And for Renaissance scholars, the studia humanitatis were the subjects that made you a fully cultivated human being.

You know, grammar and rhetoric and history and poetry and moral philosophy, all those ideas that give us the word humanities.

So humane letters in this older academic sense meant literature and learning and cultural and intellectual life and it’s the same letters.

You’ve probably heard the phrase a man of letters, he’s a man of letters.

It doesn’t mean that he’s, you know, sitting there eating alphabet soup or anything.

It means he’s a real scholar.

And so when you give somebody the Doctor of Humane Letters title, it’s literarum humanarum doctor, which is abbreviated, I don’t know how they do it at Creighton, but but it’s either abbreviated L H D or D H L.

Do you happen to know?

Yeah, I think it might be D H L.

Okay.

Yeah, that makes sense.

And that just simply translates as a doctor of the humanities and and doctor in this case being related to words like docent.

It has to do with teaching.

Well that’s great.

Kate, thank you so much.

We really appreciate it.

Okay.

Say hello to the zoo there for me.

We will.

Thanks for calling, Kate.

Call or text toll-free in the United States and Canada, 877-929-9673, or find a dozen ways to reach us in all of our past episodes on our website at Wayword Radio Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello.

It’s Lisa Gould from Tabernacle, New Jersey.

Hey Lisa, glad to have you.

What’s up?

Well, I’ve been listening to your show and I’ve always wondered when where I grew up, which is northern New Jersey in a little town called New Melford, the night before Halloween we called cabbage night and it was pretty much what we in South Jersey here call mischief night.

So it was you know, the night before Halloween was just as important ’cause you go out and you toilet paper and egg houses and do all three golf sort of sorts of havoc.

And I don’t know the origin of cabbage night.

But I don’t live in North Jersey anymore.

When I moved to South Jersey, they called the night before Halloween mischief night.

And so I just, you know, at that time I did look it up and it really seemed like it was northern New Jersey and I think one county in Connecticut, but I never knew what the origin was.

And then I have to tell you I told my son that he’s out in Colorado now and they don’t even have mischief night.

So apparently we’re only mischievous in New England.

I mean in in northern in the northeast is what I’m trying to say.

Yeah, that’s right.

Yeah.

A lot of these terms are very specific to the north northeast, although I know being from Missouri and living now in California, I can tell you that mischief around Halloween is still a thing.

In California they like to do it with fireworks, pretty much fi fireworks for every holiday.

Well that’s not good out there, is it?

No, it’s just no, it’s terrible.

But so just to be clear here, we’re talking about October 30th, the night before Halloween.

And I asked because s for historically sometimes cabbage night or mischief night has been either day, either Halloween itself or the day before.

Oh.

Well, we were always the night before.

And although New Jerseyans like to think that cabbage night and mischief night are mostly there as they’re really, like you say, have historically been m more widespread threat.

New England, even parts of the upper Midwest around the Great Lakes.

You’ll definitely hear about Cabbage Night in parts of New York City.

So it’s it’s it’s water, and you know what?

It goes back to the 1860s.

It’s just the term itself, all of the habit of the mischief is much older than that.

That’s got back into the mists of time.

But the cabbage night.

Why it’s called cabbage night?

Because people would throw cabbages at doors.

And not just any cabbages.

They would throw rotten cabbages or a variety known as a skunk cabbage, which can smell as bad as like rotten meat and other Interesting.

So y you know, young men, they’ll do any kind of mischief they can get away with, or even if they can’t, they’ll still do it.

So they they throw it at the door kind of so you hear boom, boom, boom.

And of course you go to the door and you open up and there’s a pile of stinking cabbage.

Interesting.

Real pleasant.

So we’ve talked, Martha, we’ve talked about this before, but there are besides Mischief Night and Cabbage Night, there are other terms for this.

Oh yeah.

There’s beggar’s night in New Hampshire and and people playing ding dong ditch.

I guess that’s one of the things that’s done during yeah.

Devil’s night, goosey night, corn night, picket night.

All of these are various terms for this.

Yeah, corn night involving throwing little kernels of corn, you know, just pelting the windows.

Yeah.

And then when you step out onto the porch it makes like a awkward crunch like you’re stepping on insects.

Well good to know.

Yeah.

Not the only bad one.

No, not at all.

New Jersey doesn’t deserve its reputation of of of being kind of naughty.

Take care of your trouble.

Stay out of trouble.

We appreciate it.

All right.

Bye-bye.

All right.

Bye-bye.

We’re toll-free in the US and Canada, 877-929-9673 or email us.

The address is words@waywordradio.org.

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

Although we’re not a part of NPR, we thank NPR stations throughout the United States that carry the show.

And special thanks to our nonprofits volunteer board: Michael Breslauer, Josh Eckels, Clare Grotting, Merrill Perlman, Bruce Rogow, Rick Seidenwurm, and Betty Willis.

Thanks for listening.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

Until next time, goodbye.

So long.