Books With a Letter Missing

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

And I’m Martha Barnette.

If you love books and literature, you’ll probably get a kick out of a discussion that’s been making the rounds on Twitter.

The subject was books with a letter missing.

And the idea is this.

You take a famous book title, remove one letter so that you create a new book title on a totally different topic,

And lots and lots of people rose to the challenge grant.

And the results, as you know, were pretty darn funny.

For example, remove one letter from a famous book title and you get Marjorie Wilson’s book about a spiritual leader’s quest to be real.

That would be the Velveteen Rabbi.

I saw that one, too. You took one of mine.

And then there’s Louisa May Alcott’s book about a black kitten crossing the path of four sisters.

That would be Little Omen.

That’s pretty good.

Got one more for you, Grant.

Margaret Wise Brown’s book about the cow who wouldn’t go to sleep.

Oh, I don’t even want to try.

Good night, Moo.

Oh, that goes well with one of my favorites.

Yeah.

All the pretty hoses.

What’s that about shopping in the lingerie department?

We’ve got fireman’s hoses.

We’ve got garden hoses.

We’ve got hosies for your feet.

Anyway, these are great, and we’ll share some more later in the show.

In the meantime, you can call us with your language questions, 877-929-9673,

Or share them in email, words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Oh, hi, this is Jason from Bozeman, Montana.

Hi, Jason. Welcome to the program.

We’ve got a question concerning the word brandish,

And how it came up is my fiancée has got beautiful, full lips, and I accused her of brandishing them, to which she replied, quoting the Princess Bride,

I do not think it means what you think it means.

And we tried to look it up, and it’s clear that brandish certainly encompasses something held in one’s hand, you know, such as a club or a sword or a gun.

But it wasn’t clear whether it could encompass part of somebody’s body, like beautiful lips.

She was brandishing her lips at you, these full, beautiful lips, your gorgeous fiancé.

And you let yourself get distracted by the word?

She let herself get distracted.

And I should say, too, in fairness to her, she wasn’t actually doing anything affirmative to showcase them.

She just merely possesses beautiful, full lips.

So she was wielding them more than brandishing them.

Okay.

But you’re going strictly by the dictionary definition, right?

Well, yeah.

I mean, I would say more of a, you know, legitimate definition,

Not just some slang or sloppy use of words.

Well, I mean, that’s always the fine line

Because we have the straight-up dictionary definition,

Which is generally a concise approximation of how a word is used.

And then we have any number of possible figurative or literary uses

Which take the core meaning and add upon it for a temporary purpose

Or even a permanent one.

And so it sounds like some kind of license has been taken here.

It’s not altogether.

I mean, I think you’re fine with brandishing.

Maybe wheeled, like I say, was a better choice, but I think it’s fine.

So, Jason, your fiancée, what is her name?

Melissa.

Melissa.

And Melissa’s argument was that traditionally you brandish a sword

Or you brandish a club or something, correct?

Yeah, more like an object that you would have in your hand specifically,

But it might be possible to brandish something otherwise.

Perhaps maybe a gun in your waistband, you know,

You could lift your shirt up or something.

Her basic point was probably, you know, if it’s just part of your body

And it’s just sort of sitting there in its natural location,

It’s not really qualifying.

But it’s a joking, I mean, you’re elevating her lips to the status of weaponry,

You know, you’re talking about the female armament that she carries, right?

You’re talking about the weapons at her disposal that make you, you know,

That weaken your defenses.

No, but when I think of brandishing,

I think of waving something in the air, though.

To be completely literal,

Brandishing requires that something be held

And kind of waved about or thrust at someone, right?

Yeah, I think it goes back to an old word for sword in French.

But I know you can’t take the etymology literally all the time.

But to be figurative, he’s totally fine.

To use it kind of with some license,

Which is the way that we speak English,

We’re not exact all the time.

Nor could we be.

Jason, you have to send us a picture of you

And your lovely fiancé,

I must see these lips.

I want to find out

If she is as beautiful

As you say.

Is she truly brandishing them?

We can only know

With visual evidence.

Jason, I think Melissa

Chose well.

You sound like a great guy.

Well, thank you.

She is a great girl, too.

You know what?

The next time she complains

About the use of language,

Just kiss her.

Oh, all right.

That’s a solution

To everything.

Thanks, Jason.

Yes, thank you very much.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

I’m looking at one of the definitions in the Oxford English Dictionary for brandish.

It says, to flourish about, move vigorously, the limbs, the head, etc.,

Also used of a snake darting out its tongue of a lion flourishing its tail.

Okay. Is that archaic or current?

It’s somewhat archaic.

Okay. Jason had a great question.

If you’ve got a question like Jason’s, is there a dispute between you and your lover?

That’s right. You’re about to make out and some linguistic question stops you.

Call us. Pick up the phone, 877-929-9673, or drop everything and email us, words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Erin Jones from San Diego, California.

Hi, Erin.

Hey, Erin, how are you doing?

Hi, I’m good. How are you guys?

All right, great.

Doing well. What’s going on?

Well, I was calling because I had a question about a phrase that I used recently that I never really thought about before

Until someone pointed out that it was kind of an odd phrase that I used.

But basically, I am going to grad school in the fall.

And before I’m going, I decided that I wanted to go on a trip for about a month to Central America.

So at the same time, my lease was up for my apartment, and I had a backpacking trip that I was doing.

So I kind of was packing up my apartment and also packing for these two trips at the same time.

And my house was just covered in boxes.

So originally I was going to plan on maybe having a dinner party that night.

And I realized that half my stuff was packed away in boxes already.

And I didn’t know which ingredients were in the cupboard anymore.

So basically I called my friend up and I was like, hey, you know, I know we’re supposed to have dinner tonight.

Can we maybe do it at your house instead?

So my word was, I said, can we have the dinner party at your house?

Because my house is in shambles right now.

I didn’t even think anything of it.

But then he started laughing and said, shambles, ha ha.

And I was thinking, yeah, you know, that is kind of a funny phrase.

I don’t really know where that came from, but I was calling to find out where that came from.

So your house wasn’t bloody, right?

There was no meat thrown around everywhere, no carcasses?

I hope not.

She wouldn’t know.

There were boxes everywhere.

Because up until like the 1920s and 30s and even into the 40s, there were two competing meetings for Shambles.

And they were, the old meeting was bloody, literally bloody, covered in blood, like a crime scene.

You really don’t want to come to my house tonight.

And in turn, the word shambles for that came from the stool or the booth or the stall that you might have found, say, in a marketplace where the butcher worked.

He would have the carcass hanging on a hook.

You’d point to the flank that you wanted and he’d cut it off.

You know, that’s roughly what it comes from.

It ultimately goes back to Latin word meaning stool or bench.

So it’s interesting.

So from Latin stool bench to a small stall that might contain a stool or a bench used by a butcher to a place of butchery to a bloody mess to a place that was just a mess without the blood.

Oh, that’s awesome.

Yeah.

It’s worse than you knew.

Yeah.

Seriously, don’t come over tonight, really.

Well, yeah, don’t leave a corpse there before you go, all right?

So in shambles, does that come to mean something different, or is that still kind of the connotation that comes with it?

It just means a mess, just a disorder.

Yeah, yeah.

I was like, did I not use that correctly?

No, you’re fine. You’re totally fine.

No, you’re absolutely using it correctly, and there are some English words that do that, where they’re really vivid and gross like that.

I mean, the word dreary goes back to dreary in Old English, which was, I mean, if you stuck a sword in somebody and pulled it out, the gore on your sword was dreary.

And a lot of the words like that tend to lose their much more vivid meaning over time.

They dilute.

Yeah, it’s called semantic bleaching, where the vividness of it kind of pales after a while.

Semantic bleaching.

Yeah, that’s the official term for it.

Thank you so much.

Our pleasure.

Thanks for calling.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

So what word made you cock your ear when you had a conversation with somebody?

Call us, 877-929-9673, or send it an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hey, this is Brian from Eureka, California. How’s it going?

Hi, Brian. Welcome to the program. Everything’s groovy here. How about there?

It’s nice. Good weather. Everything’s doing well out here.

What can we help you with, Brian?

I’ve been trying to figure out this word.

I’ve been reading a couple, I guess, Civil War history books recently,

And this word is Popinjay, P-O-P-I-N-J-A-Y.

And it seems like a lot of these books, you know, they have a lot of the guys’ journal entries for, you know, anecdotal evidence.

And it seems like a lot of these, like, line staff military guys would use the term Popinjay as, like, a derogatory term regarding, like, a commanding officer,

Or someone that they felt would be mean to them,

Or if I was to draw a parallel, I’d say like a Napoleon complex kind of thing.

He’s an arrogant little poppin’ jay.

I’d never heard it before, and it baffles me.

Well, we can help you with that.

I mean, it makes perfect sense if you know the origin of this term.

A poppin’ jay is a parrot.

Oh, okay.

Yeah, and so the idea is that, you know,

Sort of in the same way that a parrot has that kind of gaudy plumage

And is probably vain and conceited about it,

Then a Popinjay is that kind of person, that kind of vain, conceited person,

Exactly what you’re describing, somebody with a Napoleon complex.

Yeah, so in a military environment, that might be an officer who takes excessive pride

In the customs and the costumes and the finery and the ceremony of his position.

Yeah.

Yeah, that definitely ties in where they made other statements where they gave a good explanation.

They would also call them like a bandbox boy was a term for an officer who they felt like spent excessive time in the field, like grooming and making sure their uniform looked nice.

Oh, really?

Like a band member.

You know, like a band member of the time would transport their uniform in a bandbox to make sure it stayed clean.

Oh, my gosh.

Oh, that’s nice.

Bandbox boy.

Grant’s making a note.

I am indeed.

He’s adding it to his collection.

But yeah, Papagayo is a great word, and it goes way, way, way back.

It comes to us from Persian via Arabic, via French, I think, or Spanish.

Papagayo in Spanish is parrot.

Papagallo in Italian, if you’ve had Papagallo shoes, they have a name that means parrot.

So Papagayo comes from parrot.

And Papagayo green is a shade of green.

It’s sort of that bright, same green as the plumage on a parrot.

Interesting.

Well, thank you for solving the mystery for me.

Without Google or anything like that.

Our pleasure, Brian.

We aim to please.

Thanks for calling.

All right, thank you. Have a nice day.

What word did you come across in your reading that had you stumped?

Maybe we can help.

Call us 877-929-9673 or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

And if you just can’t wait, find us on Facebook or Twitter.

A word quiz and more of your questions next on A Way with Words.

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 now by our quiz guy, Greg Pliska. Hello, Greg.

Hello, Grant. Hello, Martha.

Hi, Greg.

This week’s puzzle is called The Mother of Goose, It is Moved.

This game uses Babelfish, or Babelfish, however you pronounce it, the internet translation service.

Okay.

So I started with a nursery rhyme, and using Babelfish, I translated it into another language,

Then back into English, then back into a third language, and so on.

The interesting thing, of course, is not which languages I used,

But how quickly the translation devolves into gibberish.

So I’m going to give you the final gibberish,

And you have to identify the original nursery rhyme I started with.

Okay.

Okay.

All right, here’s your first one.

The lamp holder or the jack?

It jumps over the agile jack.

Jack and chill.

No, jack be nimble.

Jack be nimble, jack be quick.

Oh, I see nursery rhymes.

If I had gotten to the end of it where it says,

The Jack, you fast.

Oh, okay.

All right. That is Jack be nimble, Jack

Be quick, Jack jump over the candlestick.

All right. Sitting on the

Fence wall squat.

There is a big chunky waterfall.

All of the Mayo King,

The king who is unable to collect

A cumulative effect. It’s Humpty

Dumpty. It is. Humpty

Dumpty. The king was kind of the giveaway in the

Wall. You see, I’m sitting on the fence

Wall squat.

There is a big

Chunky waterfall.

There is.

Okay, here’s another one for you.

This is actually very poetic, the way this comes out.

The wharf dickory in the hard nut clock the mouse was operated.

The clock rose in one lower part, and the mouse stabbed.

Dickory, the hard nut, the wharf.

Hickory dickory dock.

That is beautiful.

Hickory dickory dock, yes.

That is beautiful.

I like the way it came out.

Dickory, the hard nut, the wharf.

So how many languages did you put these through, two, three?

That was just English to, that one I think went to Spanish to English to Chinese to English.

Oh, wow.

Okay.

And one of the keys is if you go to like a romance language and back and then go into something Asian or more further removed, you get a lot of chaos happening.

It’s really good.

All right.

Here’s another one for you.

One small bow chirp cannot call lost her sheeps, and you find those somewhere.

If they are shot, return in the house.

Shake the tail with that rear department.

What?

Shake that tail with the rear department, Little Bo Peep.

Exactly.

Little Bo Peep has lost her sheep.

They’ll come home wagging their tails behind them.

Shake that tail with that rear department.

I’m just glad you find this as humorous as I do.

I read these things and I want to cry.

They’re so funny.

I do.

Baby got rear department.

I’m liking it.

Yeah, exactly.

Here’s another one for you.

Calling voice of the sheep and calling voice of the sheep.

In the nuisance, is there a certain fur?

It is.

And as for person is the complete gentleman, three sacks.

One for my original, for my woman one, and it is small one are tracks, trucks for the young person.

This you have lived.

Is that Baba Blacksheep?

Baba Blacksheep.

Calling voice of the sheep and calling voice of the sheep.

Calling voice of the sheep.

Do you read?

Do you read?

Calling voice of the sheep.

Come in.

Come in.

In the nuisance, is there a certain fur?

I mean, it’s brilliant.

I think all the human translators out there are really enjoying this.

This is really justifying the work they do, right?

It justifies their work 100% and more.

Absolutely.

All right.

I’ve got one more for you.

Because those went to St. Ives,

Seven sacks, which have the spouse who made everyone who was made in the individual who has seven spouses,

All sacks, seven cats, which it has, all cats, the dependents, seven of dependents,

And some rank, which it had, the cat, the sack, and the spouse it meets to the St. Ives.

Who goes that here?

This is like a divorce document.

It is.

Exactly.

It is. It is like that.

The man going to St. Ives.

Going to St. Ives, exactly.

It’s a tricky enough riddle without translating it through six different languages.

I’ll say.

Yeah, me too.

Well, that’s great, Greg.

Thank you so much for the quizzes.

That was kind of amazing.

If you have a question about wordplay, language, grammar, slang, regional dialects, or more,

Call us at 877-929-9673.

Or you can send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello.

This is Tony from San Diego, California.

Hi, Tony. Welcome to the program.

Hello, hello.

Hey there. What can we do for you today?

Well, I have a question regarding a word that seems to have fallen out of favor, at least in the press.

And every time I read the substitute, I get a little electric jolt, I think.

Oh, my.

If it was still valuable and valid, the word is pled, P-L-E-D.

And what’s in vogue today in discussing judicial issues in the press seems to be pleaded.

And, you know, I thought maybe all those years of watching Perry Mason had walked my mind.

So I figured I’d ask you guys.

Yeah, Della Street and Paul.

Man, you’re bringing back some memories there.

What did they say on Perry Mason?

I don’t remember.

Did they say pled?

They used to say pled.

Did they really?

Interesting.

Yeah.

What was that, 50s, 60s?

At least as I recall it, anyway.

Yeah, yeah.

In my wonder years.

Yeah, there you go.

Yeah, yeah.

You know what’s really weird is that I’ve heard many people say,

Oh, what’s the deal with pleaded all of a sudden becoming in vogue?

But the truth is that pleaded is the traditional form, right?

And it’s used exclusively in Great Britain.

And we’ve actually been moving away from it a little bit with pled.

But pleaded will make a lot of the sticklers happy if you use that one.

I see.

Yeah, so pleaded is the older, more common form still.

In the legal profession, Martha, am I remembering correctly that they do prefer pleaded to plead?

He pleaded guilty, but outside of the legal profession, you’ll find it more common to say he pled for his life.

I would say he pleaded for his life.

Oh, really?

What would you say, Tony?

I would say pled, actually.

You would say pled?

I think, you know, maybe it’s the economy of a one-syllable versus two.

I don’t know.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, again, the traditional form is pleaded.

And, Grant, I do think that a lot of attorneys prescribe pleaded,

Although if you look online at discussions, a lot of them say, oh, no, it’s pled.

So I think there’s some controversy within the legal profession as well.

Interesting.

Well, both are in the dictionary and both are listed as valid.

Right.

And it just struck me as curious, that’s all.

Right.

Yeah, it does strike the ear strangely, doesn’t it?

Because you think of read and read and feed and fed and bleed and bled.

And then you have plead and pleated.

Pleated, yeah, not reeded.

Yeah.

It’s almost a skunked word where you’re going to give somebody that jolt of electricity that you’re talking about either way.

Don’t you think, Grant?

Yeah, we’ll send an electrician right over.

Well, thank you.

We really enjoy your show.

Thank you.

Well, I hope you’re wearing rubber shoes when you listen to us.

From now on, yes, I will.

Okay, Tony, good talking with you.

Thanks for sorting this out.

Thanks, buddy.

Good talking to you.

Did we?

Bye-bye.

All right, bye-bye.

If you’ve got a question for the lexicographical electricians, give us a call, 877-929-9673,

Or tell us about your jolt in email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Dorothy Baker from Dallas, Texas.

Welcome, Dorothy.

Hi, Dorothy.

Welcome to the program.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

What would you like to talk with us about?

Well, when I was growing up, my grandfather lived with us.

I grew up in New Orleans, and he was also from New Orleans.

And he used to use an expression right on the T-na-na.

And I have asked many people if they had ever heard anyone else use that expression.

My parents used it a little bit, but my grandfather used it a lot.

And I understood it to mean exactly right.

It was exactly perfect.

It was right on the T-na-na.

But I have no idea about the derivation.

No one that I know has ever heard it before, I mean, since.

And, Dorothy, have you heard it in any other context besides your grandfather?

No, I haven’t.

Nobody else.

Only meaning it was exactly correct.

That was right on the T-Nana.

Was he a musician?

No.

No?

Did he like to listen to jazz or old ragtime or anything like that?

I don’t think so.

Even some of the Zydeco or anything like that?

No, although, as I say, he did grow up in New Orleans.

So I had a little bit of an idea that it might have some French derivation or maybe Cajun.

I don’t know.

It’s possible.

The reason I asked about music, and it’s fantastic that there’s a New Orleans connection here,

Because there have been a number of songs over the last hundred years

Sung by musicians who are either from New Orleans or heavily associated with it,

Who have songs with T-na-na as part of the chorus or the title of the song.

Oh!

Yeah, and it goes back as far as 1910.

There was a song called the T-na-na Indian Rag,

And in 1912, there was a song called Tee Na Na from New Orleans.

And in 1940, there was a song that Jelly Roll Morton did called Mama’s Got a Baby Named Tee Na Na.

Well, I’d never heard of those.

That’s great.

It’s possible that it’s just a name.

I say that, though, but there was an interview a few years ago on NPR.

The host was Gwen Tompkins, and she interviewed Dr. John.

Do you know him and his music?

I know.

The name sounds familiar to me, but I don’t know it well.

Well, he’s a pianist. He’s from New Orleans, I believe, right, Martha?

I think so, yeah.

And she asked him specifically about the kind of language that he uses.

A lot of it is this hyper-stylized Cajun French.

And she specifically said, what exactly is T-na-na?

And he replied and said, well, T-na-na is when you talk about a funky butt.

That is the butt, B-U-T-T.

That thing you shake it and don’t break it.

That’s kind of what the T-na-na is.

And so it’s possible that your grandfather was saying right on the tuchus,

Or right on the patootie.

Oh, well, that’s very interesting.

That surprises me, too.

Oh, really?

Was he not that kind of fellow?

Not particularly.

He was rather a serious type, to me anyway, to a child.

I was very respectful of him, and we weren’t buddies.

Mm—

That’s the only time that I’ve ever seen that reference, though, connecting it with…

Yeah, it’s possible that Dr. John has made that meaning himself, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, I can’t help thinking about the expression to a T, you know, exactly.

To a T.

Oh, yes.

-huh.

I don’t know if there’s any connection whatsoever.

Does it sound similar and it means the same thing?

It means right on the nose or exactly right.

Yeah, right on the T-na-na.

I love it.

Do you use it yourself, Dorothy?

Yes, I do every now and then.

Mm—

I do.

And do you get funny looks?

Yes.

People say, what do you mean?

Sometimes it’s nice to have a bit of language that other people don’t quite understand.

Yes, it’s fun.

I like that, too.

If you ever get a chance to talk to some of your relatives who might have known your grandfather better,

See if any of this stuff that we’ve brought up about music and old-time jazz from New Orleans rings a bell with them,

And maybe they know a little bit about what he liked to listen to or liked to do in his off time.

Yeah, I certainly will.

Thanks so much.

Our pleasure, Dori.

Thanks for giving us a call.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

If you have a question about language, we’ll try to give you an answer that’s right on the T-na-na.

I am officially adopting that into my vocabulary grant, right on the T-na-na.

You bet your patootie.

Yeah, yeah.

Call us, 877-929-9673, or email us.

The address is words@waywordradio.org.

By the way, Tommy Donbavan, D-O-N-B-A-V-A-N-D,

May be the guy who started this trend on Twitter.

It’s books with a letter missing.

He’s got a list of thousands of these on his website.

We’ll link to that.

And one of my favorites was this Guide to Jewish Sensuality.

Do you know this book?

The Oy of Sex?

If you’ve got some that you love, send them along.

877-929-9673.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Matt.

Hi, Matt. Where are you calling from?

Tallahassee, Florida.

Tallahassee.

Welcome to the program, Matt. How can we help you?

Glad to have you.

So I grew up in the South, and all my grandparents did too,

And my dad’s dad in particular has a number of phrases,

Some of which even bear repeating.

One that came up in conversation recently was God willing and the creek don’t rise.

And to me, you know, when somebody says, will you be there on Wednesday?

And you have every intention of being there, but acknowledging that there are things out of your control, one might say God willing and the creek don’t rise.

Well, I mentioned that to the woman who grows our vegetables, and she had a completely different idea, I guess, of where the phrase originally came from than I did.

Well, let’s hear your competing theories.

Yeah, what’d she have to say?

Okay. Well, mine is really simple. I just think it means the creek as in a body of moving water. So if the road floods out, I can’t get there, but otherwise I will.

But she was thinking that it was a reference to the Creek tribe in the time that Europeans were,

Whether you want to call it settling or stealing, this part of the country,

A reference to whether the Creek tribe doesn’t rise up and prevent us from traveling or doing whatever it is.

And that had never crossed my mind. So now I’m really curious.

I’ve heard that theory before, the latter theory about the Native American tribe,

Sometimes called the Creek.

I don’t think there’s any credence to it.

I don’t think it’s accurate at all.

I didn’t either.

And as a matter of fact, if you look in the historical record,

I’ll be darned if I can find anybody actually using it that way

Where it’s very clear that they’re referring to Native Americans at all.

Okay.

The earliest thing we find is from 1851,

And it’s coming from the mouth of a fictional character,

A woman who is fairly well uneducated,

And she speaks in a kind of dialect way that was common for the period.

And I have to mention that she’s portrayed as uneducated because the thing that throws some people is the don’t.

Because don’t should be preceded by a plural subject.

And so that’s why creek don’t might make more sense because the creek could be more than one Creek Indian, right?

But in fact, what we’re finding here is it’s just a fairly typical use of the wrong tense by a fairly uneducated speaker.

The same way that we will often say ain’t in a jocular way or in a joking way.

Sure.

So this quote from 1851, this woman says,

Feller citizens, I’m not accustomed to public speaking before such highfalutin audiences,

Yet here I stand before you, a speckled hermit wrapped in the risen sun counterpane

On my popularity and intended providence permitting,

And the creek do not rise to go it blind.

So she’s standing on a stump, or standing in front of a crowd,

Just kind of stating her case and trying to get people over to her side.

And so, you know, she’s speaking in this hyper-formal way, this hyper-corrected way that an uneducated speaker might,

Because they think that that’s how educated speakers actually speak.

Yeah, and it doesn’t sound like she’s referring to a rebellion of the locals, does it?

No, not so much.

And then the other thing, Matt, that we have to talk about here, and you hit upon it in the way you described this,

It is all about travel because we are talking about a period when paved roads were nil.

You maybe got lucky and you had a plank road.

But for the most part, we’re talking about mud and gravel or just plain old dirt or nothing, just a field to roll through, right?

And where you could travel depended completely upon the season of the year because the creek comes up.

If you’ve got any sense at all, you are not going to, regardless of what you’ve seen in Western movies,

You are not going to put your wagon in that creek if that creek is up because you stand to lose your horse.

Horses, your wagon, and everybody on it. You’re just not going to put your property and your people

At risk. You’re just not going to do it. And so the creek rising or not rising,

It’s kind of like checking the weather. You go down to the creek in the morning and see what it’s

Doing, and that can set the whole rest of your day in motion. So Matt, it sounds like your instincts

Were absolutely right on that this other story about the Creek Indians

Came up afterward as a way to explain it.

Well, thank you both so much for figuring that out. That had really been

Kind of in the back of my head for a while now.

Well, I’m glad you shared it.

Take care.

All right. Keep up the good work.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Well, what’s your question about language?

What’s been niggling you?

What is the burr under your saddle?

Give us a call about your language problems,

And we’ll try to solve them, 877-929-9673,

Or send us an email to words@waywordradio.org.

More of your calls as A Way with Words continues.

Support for A Way with Words comes from National University,

Where flexible online classes let you earn your degree or credential on your schedule.

More at nu.edu.

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

And I’m Grant Barrett.

When we talk about language on this program, we spend a great deal of time talking about the Lexus.

That’s the great store of words that we have at our disposal.

And my car out in the parking lot.

It’s L-E-X-I-S, Lexus.

And it’s related to lexicon and lexicography and those words.

What we talk about a lot less, actually, is grammar, right?

And so I wanted to share with you a project called the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project.

What they’ve done is map the different ways that we speak in the United States.

There are some modes of speech, some grammar that we have that aren’t universal,

And they belong to particular kinds of people or particular region of the country.

And some of these we’ve talked about on the program before.

Oh, yeah, we hear about them all the time, right?

Like double modals, like might could, right?

Or needs fixed in or needs washed, stuff like that.

Or so don’t I, right?

We’ve talked about all of these.

And so these folks at this Yale Grammatical Diversity Project have done a survey of the academic research that’s out there.

They’ve talked to people, just regular Joes and Janes, and they put little pins in a Google map so you can see that there tends to be clusters for this kind of stuff.

I love it.

I really love it because it’s actually doing a certain kind of job that I don’t think it’s done enough, which is to show you in a graphic form what you ordinarily talk about in words.

Does that make sense?

Sure.

So much of talking about grammar is hard to do on the radio because you can’t compare sentences very easily.

Or it’s easy to forget the slight variations between the two lines so you can really understand how the grammar varies.

It’s interesting.

So I love this.

So you get a visual then on this site where people say might could or needs washed, which is concentrated in what?

Indiana, Western Ohio.

Yeah, actually the Ohio River Valley.

And for example, So Don’t I is clustered in the Northeast.

How cool.

Yeah, it’s pretty great, right?

Yeah, so it’s a picture of us grammatically.

And it looks like a growing project, so it’s the kind of place you might check in once in a while.

And that project, again, is the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project.

You can Google that. It’ll be the first hit, and we’ll link to it on the website as well.

If you’ve got questions about grammar or anything else related to language or reading or writing or speaking well,

Give us a call, 877-929-9673, or send us an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Why, thank you. This is Leah, and I’m from Simsbury, Connecticut.

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

I would like to talk about my hairstylist’s use of the word product.

About two months ago, I went to get my haircut, and I have thick, wavy, kind of wild hair.

And I was complaining to my hairstylist about it, and she told me to use more product.

And I thought that was a strange thing to say.

I didn’t know whether she meant hair gel or hairspray or…

Insecticide, yeah.

Insecticide, yeah.

So I really didn’t know what to say.

And I just thought, you know, it was just a one-time thing.

But then last week, I went to get my hair done again.

And she asked me what product I preferred.

And again, I didn’t know what to answer.

And then I saw on her counter a product.

Yeah, a product.

It was called It’s a Ten Miracle Product.

And that’s all it said on the bottle.

Leave in product.

So I didn’t know what that was.

And I was just wondering, I’ve been out of the country for five years.

Is this a new way to use the word product?

Or is my hairstylist, you know, being too general and that’s why it’s driving me crazy?

Or what do you think of this?

It drives me crazy too, Leah.

I just, I mean, to me it’s like being at a restaurant and saying to the server,

Could I have a little more nutrition on my plate?

You know, I mean, product, it’s just so generic.

But it’s not new.

I’m pretty sure that I remember this from at least the early 90s and perhaps the late 80s.

I remember my sisters using this language.

This was before I was really language aware.

But the product for hairstyling gels and different kinds of leave-in things and sprays and stuff is common throughout the industry.

Any hairdresser you meet will probably know or use that term.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

I hear it all the time.

And I think I started hearing it a whole lot on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.

They were always talking about putting product in your hair.

I don’t know if it has to do with the fact that it used to be that you did home things for your hair,

Like, you know, olive oil or I don’t know.

I see.

So if you had to buy something, then that is you were buying a product.

And somehow it went from being a count noun where you could have a product or multiple products

To being a mass noun, like some product or put a little product in there.

Right.

I mean, Leah, did anybody ever tell you to wash your hair in beer or rinse it in beer?

No.

No.

Okay.

Well, that’s a different kind of product.

It’s funny that you mentioned…

Did I try that?

It’ll save money on product, maybe.

It’s funny that you mentioned the name of the particular product that you saw on the counter,

Because I think that might be a contributing factor to this.

If you go to one of the bigger drugstores or places where they sell hair products

And look at the names of this stuff, there’s so much of it.

It’ll be row after row, shelf after shelf of this stuff.

And even if you go to the fancier salons or even like the middle brow salons,

They’ll still have a ton of this stuff.

And there are so many weird names, and it’s so unusual, and it’s so varied,

But yet it’s all so relatively interchangeable, except for the cost.

I wonder if just referring to the whole big lot of it as product

Isn’t just a lot easier than trying to remember the specific name

Of the particular brand that you have on hand.

The linguistic point of view is that sometimes when something becomes complicated,

We simplify it in language.

We just find a way to make it a little easier to handle.

Maybe that’s what happened here.

I’m not saying that I agree with it.

I also find it to be a little diminishing.

I worked in the music industry for a while, a couple of decades ago,

And people would often talk about product dropping.

And they meant that a musical group was going to release an album.

And I just thought it just diminished the whole creative process.

And every little bit of soul that might have been in that work

Was destroyed by describing it as product.

I kind of feel the same way here.

If you put a lot of your personal appearance,

A lot of your psyche is invested into your personal appearance,

Calling the styling gel that you use product might be a way to just kind of diminish that.

I don’t know.

So, Leah, did we help you or at least offer you a shoulder to cry on?

Yeah, I thought it was interesting that they do it in the music industry as well.

Yeah.

So, I don’t know.

Maybe we’ll have some hairstylists weigh in.

Yes, please.

If you’ve got information on why product is used in that way in the hairstyling business,

Give us a call, 877-929-9673,

Or tell us about it in email to words@waywordradio.org.

Leah, thank you for calling today.

All right, thanks for your response.

Sure, bye-bye.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Weird Words, we love them.

Call us, 877-929-9673,

Or send them an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Grant, a lot of people have weighed in on our discussion

About why department stores use the word baby on the wall

As opposed to men’s, women’s, boys, girls, teens.

Katie wrote us from Menominee, Wisconsin to say,

Men’s, women’s, juniors, et cetera, usually all refer to clothing only,

Whereas baby will usually include clothing, diapers, car seats, cribs,

And other baby accessories.

It’s more inclusive.

And then Julie in Indiana had a more philosophical take.

She wrote, people mostly have one baby at a time.

Baby is a special position in the family to the extent that baby is used even as a name,

Like in the song, Just Molly and Me and Baby Makes Three.

So people want to buy things for that special person.

Using baby increases the special allure and increases the desire to buy for this special and unique person.

She adds, I’m not in retail. I’m just a wordy.

Yeah, they don’t call the department infantile offspring, do they?

Baby. The essence of baby.

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

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Oh, hi, yes. This is Roz Coates calling from Dallas, Texas.

Hi, Roz. Welcome to the program.

Thank you. I’m so glad to be on.

What can we help you with?

Okay, my question involves the phrase, shake a stick at.

And it started when I was at work a while ago, and a co-worker of mine, we were by the break room area,

And there was a ton of coffee cups piled up in the sink.

And my co-worker said, well, that’s more coffee cups than you could shake a stick at.

And we started talking about what a weird expression that is.

I mean, why would a large quantity of something render you unable to shake a stick at it?

I mean, I’ve grown up saying that, and I actually have relatives in Oklahoma who would say,

It’s more than you could wag a stick at.

Aha! Interesting.

Where does that come from?

Here’s the strongest theory that I know,

And I think Martha probably agrees with this,

That it has to do with counting.

Just imagine this scenario, if you will.

It’s evening, the herdsman is bringing in his cattle

Or bringing in his sheep.

He’s got the dogs behind them to chase them in.

He’s got them coming down a chute one by one,

One after the other, so he can count them.

And he’s got his walking stick or his prod or his birch switch or whatever in his hand.

And as they’re coming through the fence, he’s tapping them or pointing at them one by one to count them to make sure that none have been left behind, none have been rustled, what have you.

And so it literally has to do with that act that you’ll find yourself doing this now that you’ve heard us talk about it.

You will find yourself wagging your hand or your finger or your head at lots of things as you count them.

So you are literally wagging or shaking or poking your stick at something as you count it.

So it’s about inventory.

Yeah, more or less.

Okay, okay.

And if it’s too many to count, there’s too many to shake or wag a stick at.

Yeah, your arm would get tired.

But it’s a lot easier to count.

If you develop that natural rhythm, it is a lot easier to count.

Try it sometime.

Just pick something of a large quantity and try to count without moving your head or your hand.

And it’s really difficult.

The body makes it easier if the body is involved in the counting.

Yeah, so there’s something to do when you’re standing in the line at the DMV.

There’s a lot of coffee cups piled in the sink.

Yeah, exactly.

I’ll stand there with my hands behind my back.

Yeah.

Exactly.

They’ll be waiting for you to wash them, right?

Though I don’t know why it’s not wag a finger at or poke a finger at, you know,

Or shake a finger at, right?

Because it would make more sense.

You’re more likely to have a finger in count than you are a stick to count.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, that is very interesting.

That makes sense, though.

Yeah.

I always thought that was the most bizarre expression ever,

And I kind of blamed my relatives in Oklahoma and thought, well, that’s just sort of a weird Oklahoma thing.

It’s a little sense to Oklahoma.

I mean, my whole mother’s family is there.

But, yeah, but that actually, that sounds very sensible.

Aren’t we so disconnected from our past sometimes?

It’s always nice to draw that conclusion when it kind of makes a little more sense when you think about the way that we all used to be a little more agrarian, right?

Yeah, yeah.

So does that mean—

Well, thank you very much.

That was a great deal of help.

Raj, thank you so much for giving us a call today.

Oh, thank you.

I love your show.

Thank you.

Thanks for calling.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Okay, bye-bye.

That’s right.

When in doubt, just talk etymology.

If there’s a job to be done, just get distracted by the origin of the word.

That’s my technique.

You know, you can count and watch at the same time.

I guess that’s true.

I didn’t think about that.

The workplace, the home life, we often come across phrases at work and at home

Where just for a moment we stop and go, huh, I wonder about that.

Well, this is the place to hang on to those haws and let them out.

877-929-9673 or bring your haas to words@waywordradio.org.

Grant, we were talking earlier about the game Books with a Letter Missing that people were playing on Twitter.

Well, I’ve enjoyed the game so much that I’ve been playing it offline with a friend of mine.

And my friend Jackie came up with a book about how 99-cent stores changed the face of shopping in America.

That would be the little price.

Very good.

Then she came up with another one by Robert Penn Warren.

She described the book as, I think a professional has moved into apartment 3B.

It’s all the residents’ men.

Got to love it.

Please send us your books with a letter missing to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Lena from Oceanside, California.

Hi, Lena.

Hi, Lena. How are you doing?

Good. Well, I have a question about a certain word.

I’m a physician, and I’ve been out of training for a while,

But I was meeting with a friend of mine who just graduated from medical school.

A certain word came up that is very common among doctors,

Especially when they’re in school and in training.

And it’s an unusual use of the word,

And so I was wondering how it came to be that way.

And the word is to pimp, P-I-M-P.

And it doesn’t have anything to do with pandering

Or even the use of, you know, kind of cool.

It means to quiz someone minutely,

Like usually by a superior physician.

So if you’re pimped, it means someone usually, your superior has asked you a lot of questions

That usually get progressively harder until you finally can’t answer them.

And it’s usually in front of your peers.

So it seems like the goal is to basically humiliate you and embarrass you in front of your peers.

And it’s sort of something that every doctor has gone through.

So you ask any doctor in the United States, they’ll know exactly what that word means in that context.

And so how would you use it in a sentence?

I would say like the attending physician pimped the intern about liver failure until she cried,

Embarrassing herself in front of her fellow students.

Wow. So it’s a word you kind of dread or dread having used about yourself, right?

Yes. It doesn’t always mean to go to that extreme, but it often does.

But it definitely has a negative connotation.

At least there’s the quizzing component there from someone senior questioning someone junior about what they know.

Exactly.

That’s interesting stuff.

Well, let’s get the first thing out of the way, right, Martha?

This has nothing to do with pimp my ride or pimps and prostitutes.

It’s a different pimp altogether.

What I think to be the definitive article on this was published in 1989 in the Journal of American Medicine.

Frederick Brancati wrote an article about pimp and pipping in which he mentions that the pimp probably is directly related to German.

This pastime, this custom of quizzing the students or the learning physicians comes to us from Germany.

And it comes from that culture, that culture of medicine there.

And the word that he uses, which I have not been able to verify, is pumpfrasch, which basically means pimp questions.

And he suggests that pimp is related to the English pump.

So you might pump someone for information.

It’s kind of the language used in detective novels, right?

The detectives pumped the narc for information.

And so it’s pretty simple when you think about it in those terms.

It might just be a simple matter of a vowel.

As it left German and went into English, we heard the German poomp or whatever it was as pimp.

And then we call it pimp instead of pump.

That makes sense.

Does that make sense?

Yeah, it does.

We’ll link to this article on our website.

I think there’s a full version of it out there somewhere.

But he takes it back to as far as 1889.

And again, I’m not 100% sure if his sources and his etymologies and everything are correct.

There’s a lot of information here to verify.

You know how doctors are when they write for journals.

But if I ever get a chance, I’ll try to verify this stuff.

We’ll link to it at least as a good starting point.

I would not be surprised to find that this is it.

Okay, so it’s not an acronym like prying inquisitive medical persons.

It is not.

Some people will claim that the medical term PIMP is an acronym.

It is not an acronym at all and never has been.

So just be very clear about that.

Even though you guys are fond of acronyms, right?

Yeah, that makes sense.

Thanks, Lena.

I really appreciate it.

Thanks.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

877-929-9673 or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

One more book with a letter missing for you, Martha.

All right.

It’s a story about a young Southern woman finding peace within the fury of a storm.

One with the wind.

One with the wind.

And the British version of that is Jane I.

What are your favorite book titles with a letter missing?

Take the book title, take a letter away, and make something brand new.

Waywordradio.org or call us 877-929-9673.

Things have come to a pretty pass.

That’s our show for this week.

Don’t forget you can leave us a message even when we’re not on the air.

Call us 877-929-9673 or email us.

The address is words@waywordradio.org.

And you can stay in touch with us all week on Facebook and Twitter.

You can listen to all our past shows by going online to waywordradio.org.

Or get the podcast on iTunes.

Stefanie Levine is our senior producer.

Our technical director and editor is Tim Felten.

Tim also chooses our music.

We’ve had production help this week from Josette Hardell,

Jennifer Powell, and James Ramsey.

A Way with Words is independently produced and distributed by Wayword Inc.,

A nonprofit organization.

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

Thanks for listening. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. Dasvidaniya.

Ciao.

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.

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