Moded, Corroded, Your Booty Exploded

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You’re listening to A Way with Words.

I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

We often talk about the differences between what people say and what they mean and what other people understand.

So, I was pleased to find a funny little write-up on the blog of a woman calling herself Mommy Nolan.

Writing from Logan, Utah, and using her experience with her own children, she writes about the things that she says and what her granddaughter understands.

And they’re not necessarily the same things.

For example, if Mommy Nolan says “no,” her granddaughter hears “maybe.”

And if she says “maybe,” her granddaughter hears “ask again and again,” and “yes” is right around the corner.

Oh, yeah, that’s exactly what happened in our house.

The phrase was, “Can we see about it? Mommy, can we see about it?”

And she would say, “Yes, we can see about it.”

And somehow that was satisfying for everybody.

I don’t even know if we got what we were asking for, but the answer was satisfying.

That’s right.

Children don’t necessarily understand ambiguity, right?

Right.

They don’t understand gray areas.

And “maybe” is a lot of times skewed towards “yes” or skewed towards “no,” depending upon how often they’re able to get what they want from their parents.

Right.

I’m thinking we usually won, but now that I recall, I’m not so sure.

But there’s another thing that happens with communication.

In my house, as you know, I have a two-year-old, and he speaks fairly well, but he can’t always get his message across.

So what he does is a kind of misdirection.

If he doesn’t want to do something, he will then ask to do something that he knows we’ll say “yes” to, such as use the potty, because he knows that we’re trying to get him to use the potty all the time, right?

It’s a manipulation.

We know we’re being manipulated, but we can’t say “no” because we don’t want to untrain him from asking to use the potty.

So if he doesn’t want to go to bed, or if he doesn’t want to go out, he might ask to use the potty so that we’re forced to do the thing that he wants.

And then, a minute or two later, he’ll always ask to do something else that he really wants to do, instead of “go to bed” or “go out.”

Grant, that’s brilliant.

That’s what dog trainers do.

They tell you to interrupt the bad behavior and then give him a different command.

That’s what your kid is doing to you.

I am training him with a whistle, or is he training me?

I’m not sure.

No, he’s training you.

Clearly.

Well, we’d love to hear about cases of miscommunication or misdirection in your household.

What are the things that you say that people misunderstand?

And what are the things that people do in order to get around giving you what you’ve asked for?

Let us know.

The number’s 1-877-929-9673.

That’s 1-877-W-A-Y-W-O-R-D.

Or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Kelt in Austin, Texas.

How are you, Kelt?

How are you doing?

I’m doing very well.

How are you?

All right.

What can we do for you?

Well, I was getting ready to rent a movie online, and I wanted to make sure I got the right thing, so I checked out the trailer first.

And then I started to wonder why we call it a trailer when we view it before we view the actual movie.

So it’s the few minutes that they show us, like all the highlights, the things that are supposed to compel us to pay the full price, right?

Well, or in my case, rent it online.

Yeah, that’s a great question.

It’s this linguistic relic.

You’re right.

It doesn’t make sense if the trailer’s first, right?

Right.

And in some languages, it isn’t called a trailer.

It’s called something that indicates that it’s viewed before the movie.

And I guess we sometimes call it a preview.

Right.

Okay.

Yes.

What is your first language?

My first language is Danish.

I see.

And so what do they call it?

Well, we call it a four film.

A four film?

Yeah.

So the film before the film.

Right.

Okay.

So the answer is you guys are just more logical than us.

Well, I don’t know about that, but that’s certainly one possibility.

Well, there is an explanation for this, and it’s pretty simple.

This goes back to the old days of movies when there were double features.

Right.

And you would do the B movie, which was sort of the opening act, the warm-up act for the real attraction, and they would stick the preview of the coming attraction on the end of that first movie, that opening act.

So it was the trailer there, and it just became this sort of fossil that stuck.

So it was trailing the movie.

It was following behind.

Yeah.

It was trailing that first little movie in advance of the real feature.

Gotcha.

Well, that explanation makes perfect sense, and I guess you’d have to have lived through the 1920s to know that.

Well, I didn’t, if that’s what you’re asking.

No, no, no, I wouldn’t.

Well, I really appreciate your help on that little puzzle.

Thank you so much.

It’s a great question.

A lot of people wonder that.

You know, they start looking at that word and just thinking, “It’s like going into an antique store and seeing something that you’re sure had a function, but you just don’t know what it was.”

Yeah, I guess you’re right.

And it is what happens when you wait for that thing to load on the computer, for sure.

You sit and think about things.

Yeah, that’s a dangerous time, isn’t it?

Yeah, it is.

Hey, thanks a lot for calling.

Thank you for helping.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

In French, they call that the bande a nonce, B-A-N-D-A-N-N-O-N-C-E, two words, and it just means film announcement.

I kind of like trailer.

It’s abbreviated as BA.

Yeah, it works.

I like the fact that the jargon has become so entrenched that it’s lost its original meaning.

Yeah, it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

Plus, it’s just this kind of clunky word, trailer.

Trailer.

Don’t you think?

Yeah, the film boys will never let it go.

No, I don’t like that.

Well, if you’ve got a question about something that’s bugged you, something that makes no sense about English — wait, that’s all of English.

Well, give us a call. 1-877 — it’s not a logical language, right?

No, are you kidding?

English.

No, there’s plenty to be explained here.

1-877-929-9673.

Or send an email to words@waywordradio.org, or hammer it out on your keyboard in our discussion forums at waywordradio.org/discussion.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hey, aloha, Martha.

Aloha.

Mahalo.

Who’s this?

My name is Eric, and I’m calling from Bellingham, Washington.

Oh, I thought you were going to be from Hawaii.

Yeah, they don’t speak Hawaiian.

I go there a lot.

Okay.

My questions regarding a little nugget of a slang word had an accompanying gesture and kind of a little rhyme that went with it.

I grew up in the ’80s, and the word is called “moded,” and I believe the word was designed to be used like the slang word “face.”

Like, if someone was, like, monkeying around and they got caught by the teacher, you would say, “You, you got moded.”

And there was a gesture that was — you kind of scratched your chin or rubbed your chin with it, and the rhyme — you want to hear the rhyme?

Yeah, of course.

Yeah, sure.

All right.

The rhyme was, “Moded, corroded, your booty exploded.”

How old were you?

Nice.

I am turning 40 this year.

Well, how old were you when you said, “Moded, corroded, your booty exploded?”

11 to 13. 11 to 13?

Yeah.

That’s about the right age for that.

And so your question is, “What up with moded?”

Yeah, exactly.

I mean, I know what it means, why we used it, but how did the gesture and the word “moded” become that?

Where exactly were you?

I grew up in southern California, in South Bay, each community.

Okay, okay.

And that’s consistent with this.

“Moded” is a distinctly Californian expression.

I don’t know if you Googled this, but if you did, you might have come across the entry I did on my Double Tongue Dictionary website.

And we should dispel this.

Most of the time, it’s spelled M-O-D-E-D, although occasionally people will spell it as M-O-A-T-E-D.

One of the theories, and this is the most reliable one, is that it’s a form of the word “demoted.”

And by a process known as a “ferocis,” the first syllable dropped off.

And so it became “moded,” M-O-T-E-D.

And if you go to, and I’m not hyping my website just because I want people to go there, but you know, I’ve got an entry for this and some citations that show it being used.

But even more interesting, some people have contributed their memories of this word as far back as the early 1970s, people who grew up in California.

And so there are a couple of people who say, “I remember this from the mid-1970s or the early 1970s.”

There’s at least one person who has almost exactly the same rhyme as you have.

You’re moded, corroded, and your booty got exploded.

They talk about where they’re from, so “bear area” in San Francisco.

And then they also talk about the meaning of the word and what we’re, you talked about “faced,” like you go, “Oh, faced.”

And when I was growing up, we would say, “Burned. You got burned.”

And a lot of people still use that.

And that’s kind of in that same way, right?

To show that somebody got beaten or that they got embarrassed or that things didn’t turn out like they planned, right?

Yeah.

And that’s pretty much, you know, I guess that’s the way we used it.

But why did we scratch our chin?

Really good question.

That kind of stuff, gestures are very difficult to track because they’re usually not put in print.

People usually don’t write about gestures in that way.

You know, for example, one of the problems we have with the history of the middle finger being used as something offensive is that people tended not to write about it.

We tend not to describe these gestures in print because they’re not transmitted with words.

They’re transmitted with the body.

And so there’s no written archive of this stuff.

I don’t know.

Yeah, that’s a weird one, isn’t it?

That’s a weird one.

And frankly, I don’t think any of my contributors, any of the people who commented on the moded entry on my website, I don’t think any of them talked about it.

Really?

Well, I mean, we’d even use the alternate, “Oh, scratched the chin,” which was basically the same.

You would do the gesture without the expression?

Yeah.

There’s very many different variants for it.

It depends on how moded the person was and how many people were watching you mode that person.

I see.

So this is interesting.

I love this expression because, for once, we can actually say a little bit about its history because it’s within living memory that this term has become popular.

And I’m always trying to find more information on this.

Eric, if you come across anything new, by all means, send it our way and I’ll make sure that the world knows, all right?

Well, awesome.

Thanks a lot.

I really enjoyed you guys’ show.

Thanks, Colin.

All right.

Thanks, Colin.

Bye-bye, Eric.

Talk to us about the slang of your high school years.

We want to hear about it.

The number is 1-877-929-9673 or send an email to words@waywordradio.org or you can put it on our discussion forum at waywordradio.org/discussion.

A while back, we took a call from Jenny.

She works at the meat counter at Murray’s Cheese and Grand Central Station here in New York City, where I am broadcasting.

Her dilemma, Martha, if you remember, was what do you call a person working at the specialty meat counter?

Oh, yeah, I remember that.

We got a lot of responses.

We did.

We all agreed that meat monger sounds a little too salacious and not very delicious and butcher sounds unrefined, right?

Or a comparative.

Yeah, yeah, butcher, I don’t think so.

So we asked for your help and we got help from you, lots of it, in email and discussion forums and on the phone.

Mary in San Diego suggested cold cut slurry.

Cold cut slurry kind of works, though it sounds more like a tool or a place.

Scott in Dallas suggested salieri, maybe, but it also happens to be the Venetian composer who was Mozart’s rival, played by F. Murray Abraham in the movie.

Dale in Indianapolis suggested carne sieres, as in a meat carne sieres.

The carne is from the Latin word for flesh, of course.

Brian in Dallas had a similar idea.

He said carne carver, so the Spanish word for meat, carne carver.

And, of course, there are many, many more.

Harrison suggested deli monger.

Carl suggested meat maven.

Elena suggested meter d after meter d.

Pamela offered meat meister.

Elise wanted meat maestro.

And David in Cape Cod reminded us of the old term tripe dresser.

Tripe dresser?

Yeah.

Would you like a top hat on your intestines, sir?

Something like that.

Tripe dresser.

It doesn’t really work, but fun.

If you’ve got more suggestions on what to call the person who works at a specialty meat counter, give us a call. 1-877-929-9673 or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

The thrill of victory and the agony of being stumped by a word quiz.

All that and more next on A Way with Words.

You’re listening to A Way with Words.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

And we’re joined once again by our puzzle dude, Greg Pliska.

Hiya, Greg.

Hi, Martha.

Hi, Greg.

What have you brought us this week?

Well, I thought I would introduce you to a puzzle type that you might find in the Enigma, which is the monthly publication of the National Puzzlers League.

And it’s a kind of puzzle we call the false opposite.

And this is how it works.

I’ll give you hints to two words which are unrelated, but which might, given their prefixes, suffixes, or other parts, be construed as opposites.

Okay.

How about an example?

I’d clue the first word as forward motion and the second word as American legislative body.

Okay.

Something Congress.

Yep.

So Congress is the second word.

The false opposite of Congress.

Is progress.

Progress.

Progress.

Yeah, there you go.

That’s an old joke.

Congress and progress are opposites.

But if that makes sense, I’ll give you a bunch of these.

Yep.

Let’s have them.

Okay.

Number one.

To pillage or loot and a short-billed shorebird.

A short-billed shorebird.

Yeah.

Is a duck.

A goose.

A gull.

A gull.

It’s a less common word than those.

You probably get this.

Clover.

Oh, Mr. Barrett.

Whoa, whoa.

Oh, well, if it’s not a duck or a gull, it must be a plover.

It’s a plover.

Yeah, absolutely.

Plover and plunder.

And plunder.

The false opposite of plover would be plunder because of over and under in there.

Nice.

Oh, very good.

Teamwork there.

All right.

Here’s a little more pop culture one.

The male performer of the Quantum of Solace theme song and the School of Rock actor.

So Jack Black is the second one.

But the first one, I don’t remember who did the theme song for that.

Was it Coldplay or something?

No.

Radiohead.

It was the false opposite of Jack Black.

Chris White.

Jack White.

No, Jack White.

Jack White.

Oh, yeah, sure.

Jack White.

Better clued as the guy from the White Stripes, but you can’t say White Stripes in the clue.

Would it be better as Jill White, though?

That would be the false opposite opposite.

All right.

Here’s a pair for you.

Workplace and In Reserve.

How about Office and On Ice?

There you go.

Nice.

Well done.

Yep.

Off and On are the opposites in Office and On Ice.

You’re rolling now.

The New York Mets shortstop Jose and the biggest little city in the world.

Oh.

That’s what I was thinking.

I was thinking sports knowledge.

I know there’s a team called the Mets that you play at Shea Stadium.

It’s baseball, right?

Now they’re homeless.

I don’t know.

So here’s another clue for the first word.

It’s a point north of San Francisco that is a national park.

Reyes.

Yes.

And the biggest little city in the world.

The biggest little silly city in the world.

That’s the nickname of this Nevada town.

Oh, Reno?

Reno.

But what’s the — I don’t know what the answer is.

Oh, no and yes.

Yes, there you go.

Reyes, R-E-Y-E-S, and Reno, R-E-N-O.

I was looking at eyes and thinking, what’s the opposite of eyes?

Ears?

Yeah, Point Reyes is a park in the north of the Bay, right?

Yeah, yeah.

It’s on the coast north of San Francisco.

Lovely place, actually.

Fired as a gun and vocal reprimand.

Shot and scold.

Yes, very good.

Hot and cold.

Hot and cold are the buried opposites in that one.

And I’ve got one more for you here.

The period between childhood and maturity and a drug slangly referred to as crystal.

Is it the full name of meth or just meth?

No.

Well, you want me to tell you?

It’s just meth.

The period between childhood and maturity.

Yeah.

Meth, M-E-T-H.

Oh, youth.

Youth.

Oh, me and you.

Oh, very nice.

Greg, this was a lot of fun.

Thanks.

Thank you.

It’s always good to be with you guys.

And if you’d like to talk about grammar, slang, punctuation, or words and how we use them, the number to call is 1-877-929-9673.

That’s 1-877-WAYWORD or send us an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Well hello, how are you?

Super duper, who’s this?

My name is Sheldon Hubbard and I’m calling from Dallas, Texas.

Well hello, Sheldon, and welcome to the show.

Oh, thanks a bunch.

I had a question about the phrase “turn to” as in “to get to work.”

We used it an awful lot when I was in the Navy.

I was always where that had come from.

I was accompanied by some fingers being pointed at and in the turning motion as if they were a screwdriver of some sort.

Like you’re holding an invisible doorknob or something?

Your two fingers pointed to the person that needs to get to work and then they were turning like you were turning an invisible doorknob, absolutely.

And tell us about the context in which you’d hear this in the Navy.

Normally a chief would be walking by or your superior and see you doing the wrong thing or doing nothing and when you need to be swabbing a deck or something.

Just idle, idle hands being seen.

And maybe an English background I always thought.

So would the officers say “turn to” or just make the gesture?

It would be either or.

You know, sometimes they just look at you and kind of give you the gesture and you know you’ve got to get to work.

I find a lot of uses of this in military books and papers and stories about people’s time in the service and in a few glossaries here and there.

But it’s so basic a phrase that nobody bothers to even explain it.

Does that make sense?

That people feel like it’s so ordinary that it’s not even really worth their attention trying to explain.

Right, you just learn it and you get to work right away.

Yeah, you don’t ask an awful lot of questions.

In the Navy, right.

As far as I know the original sense was “turn to T.O.” Like “set to” or “go to” like meaning “let’s do it” or “turn to your work.”

The idea in all those phrases is sort of focusing your attention.

And I think that the finger motion is probably a visual pun.

Don’t you think?

Turn to?

Oh yeah, yeah, two fingers pointing at you.

Yeah, I mean the only other possible explanation I’ve seen about this is that maybe people were making that gesture because it’s so noisy on ships.

Oh yeah, wow, hey, that’s a great idea.

That makes a lot of sense actually, doesn’t it?

Absolutely.

Yeah, it’s sort of just a little gesture to get you back to work.

Yeah, you guys are awesome.

Oh, we try.

Thank you.

Well, I tell you what, you know we have a lot of listeners here in San Diego in the Navy, of course.

Oh, that’s right.

We always love drawing on their expertise, so we’d love to hear from you no matter where you are if you’ve been in the Navy and have something to say about this.

Sheldon, thank you so much for your call.

Oh, thank you guys very much.

I love your show.

Thank you.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Well, if you have a question about language, turn to us.

The number is 1-877-929-9673 or you can email us.

The address is words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Vicki.

I’m calling from Appleton, Wisconsin.

Well, hello, Appleton.

I have a question about a word that I used commonly in grade school and then it fell out of my vocabulary, but I used it again at work and thought, my word, I haven’t used this word forever.

And the word we used was kype, like C-I-P-E or K-Y-P-E.

We used it when we took something that wasn’t really ours, but we needed and it seemed to not be important to the adults who controlled the resources.

And we never used that word around adults because you didn’t necessarily want to bring up what you did.

But what we were doing was lifting things that were in the general neighborhood, not in someone else’s houses.

And it was clearly understood not to mean steel.

And if someone located what you’d carried off, which tended to be materials for building forts, you would of course give it right back.

And I brought it up to a couple of friends who didn’t live near me when we grew up.

And a couple of them knew the word very well and others were completely flummoxed by the idea.

And I’m wondering where it came from, how I ever would have learned such a word.

Were your friends also from the same part of the country?

No, I grew up outside Minneapolis.

Another grew up in Winona, Minnesota, which is, I don’t know, maybe 100, 200 miles.

And another one was North Dakota.

So it’s not permanently stealing, it’s just kind of appropriating or something?

I mean, it’s appropriating.

And when it came up in my mind just recently, I had gone into an office that was being refurbished from my office and was looking for envelopes.

As I went through drawers looking for them, I found a couple of telephone receivers, which we needed in our section.

And it is true that if we had put through some sort of a work order, we would get those receivers eventually.

And instead, I just sort of picked those babies up and walked away and thought, “I typed some telephone receivers.”

Right.

So it wasn’t stealing because it’s still within the company, you’re just kind of taking them out of somebody else’s control and putting them in your own, right?

What would you say if I told you that this word is probably related to another word that’s 750 years old?

I would like to know what that word is and where in the world I ever picked up such a word because…

Well, let’s answer that in two parts.

First, the word that it’s probably related to is “kip.”

And it originally meant something like “to seize” or “catch” or “hold on to.”

You can find it in the old work, the English Dialect Dictionary under K.I.P.

And there, it’s defined as “to take the property of another by fraud or violence,” which is a much more severe kind of definition than you’ve given us.

But, you know, words tend to kind of blandify and ameliorate over time.

They tend to become more gentle.

The way you learned it is the same way that you learned all of your language.

You absorbed it from somebody else.

And there is a language of children that kind of passes from child to child.

And, of course, you learn plenty of stuff from your parents.

But children do learn from each other.

You could have easily learned this.

This was within the mob.

Yeah, you could have easily learned this from someone thousands of miles away.

Children’s language really does travel very fast because children know children the same way that adults know adults.

So, they may seem like they don’t know that many people, but all they need to know is one other person to learn a word.

And you only have to hear a word once in order to pick it up.

So, it doesn’t take much for a word to travel.

So, Vicki, you kyped the word “kype.”

If it seemed appropriate, I would have.

Well, I’ve got to tell you, Vicki, this was a really interesting story about your childhood.

I love hearing this stuff.

I talk to my wife about these things all the time, and she grew up just to stay away from me, and her language was different.

We had some things in common, but there were some things that were different.

“Kype” wasn’t a part of my childhood.

Well, I think you had to be in the growing up situation where you could kype things.

Oh, believe me, we kyped, but not by that word.

My father would often come, “Where’s my 9/16 wrench?”

You may have carried more guilt.

All right, well, Vicki, thank you so much for giving us a ring.

Thank you.

That’s very interesting.

And where did the word “kyp” come from?

Oh, it’s from British dialects.

Oh, all right.

Thank you.

Yeah, so it’s got a good, strong history.

It predates, probably, the founding of the United States.

Hey, Vicki, thank you so much for calling.

Thank you.

All right, bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

We love those questions about words from your childhood.

Call us and talk about it.

The number is 1-877-929-9673.

That’s 1-877-WAYWORD, or you can send us an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Lee.

I’m calling from Elk Grove Village, Illinois, but I have a question for you.

Great.

I didn’t think there was a distinction between the words envy and jealousy, or being envious and jealous.

And I hear a lot of people these days saying, “I’m really jealous, and I think they wish that they have what somebody else has.”

Is that distinction still viable?

Where were you encountering this?

I’ve heard it on National Public Radio, among other places.

Well, surely they have perfect grammar and diction on NPR.

No, this is a semantic issue, not a grammatical one.

Well, you know, some of the conservative authorities will say that there’s a distinction, but I think that distinction is something that they’re looking hard for and isn’t supported by the evidence at hand, if that makes sense.

Is it kind of a distinction that you’re jealous of things that you own or think you own, and you’re envious of what you don’t have but would like?

It’s something like that, but the thing is, jealousy is the troublemaker here.

Jealousy is the word that has the more variability to its meaning.

So see if this makes sense to you.

For example, you could be envious of someone, meaning you want what they have for yourself.

So it could be good looks or money or a sexy bod, whatever it is, but you have no claim on it, right?

That’s envy.

It’s also kind of a form of rivalry.

You not only want what they have, but you want to take it away from them, and you want to be better than them because of it.

So that’s envy.

That’s kind of all wrapped up in a package there.

It’s about possession of a quality or possession of a thing.

So it’s sort of, “I’ll have what she’s having.”

Yeah, I like that, and I don’t want her to have it.

I want to be better than her.

I want to have the good things and deprive her of those.

Do you think it has to do with the deprivation, though?

I mean, I can see being jealous enough to drive across the country in diapers but being envious that the other astronaut got selected to go up on the space shuttle, but not necessarily wanting to take that away from the person, just wanting to go up in the space shuttle myself.

Well, if you look, I can say, again, it’s one of those things that you can talk about what you believe envy and jealousy mean, but when you look at actually how people use them when they’re not thinking about their meanings, the patterns fall pretty clearly.

I mean, by far and away.

So let’s talk about jealous for a second.

If you’re jealous, you can also have envy.

Envy can be kind of part of jealousy.

So that’s kind of where we’re getting confusion here.

And also, when you have jealousy, you tend to have anger and suspicion and weariness, and you’re possessive of what you already have, and you don’t want someone else to take it.

When you talk about the astronaut who drove across country because she was a jealous lover, that’s what you’re talking about.

She did not want somebody to take her man from her, right?

So you can be jealous of someone’s good fortune or their belongings or their smoking hot spouse.

That’s also jealousy.

And you can see where envy and jealousy kind of overlap there.

You know, English is well known for being a language filled with synonyms and near synonyms.

And I think that’s what’s happening here.

There’s an overlap.

And it’s definitely a case where the context of what you say or what you write is going to explain to the people you’re communicating with what you mean.

So these words don’t stand alone.

They’re heavily dependent upon the company they keep in our language.

And that’s where the meaning is going to come through.

Envy made the list of seven deadly sins, didn’t it?

I think it did.

Did jealousy not?

I don’t think so.

Envy is enough of a troublemaker.

We don’t need jealousy on top of it, right?

Have we provided you with some clarity here?

Yes, it’s a big help.

I appreciate it.

All right.

Thank you, Lee.

Thanks for calling.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Well, your questions about wordplay, grammar, slang, the little subtleties of language, we welcome them 1-877-929-9673.

That’s 1-877-W-A-Y-W-O-R-D.

And you can email us to words@waywordradio.org.

Grant, you know the word “formication,” right?

Something to do with ants.

Right, exactly.

It’s spelled with an M, not an N, and it means the sensation of having ants crawling all over your skin.

It’s an actual medical term.

Anyway, I was thinking about that word the other day, and it reminded me of a riddle for you.

Oh, let’s have it.

Okay.

Why don’t ant eaters ever get sick?

I don’t know why.

Because they’re full of little antibodies.

I told you it was stupid.

Well, give us a call with your silly, stupid riddles, 1-877-929-9673, and send your questions about all things language related to words@waywordradio.org.

Support for A Way with Words comes from National Geographic Books, publisher of “I’m Not Hanging Noodles From Your Ears,” a collection of intriguing idioms from around the world by Jag Bala.

Learn more at shopng.com/noodles.

You’re listening to A Way with Words.

I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

A nice part of working in language is that I get to help in small ways on the work of colleagues.

For example, I contributed a few terms to the brand new edition of Paul Dixon’s Baseball Dictionary.

It’s just been published.

A tiny few terms, and I was one of hundreds of people who helped him, but still, it feels good to be a part of something great.

I have a copy of the Dixon Baseball Dictionary right here.

It’s stupendous.

This is probably, Martha, the best specialty dictionary I’ve seen in years.

The coverage is complete, the scholarship is excellent, and the subject matter is deeply American.

You read it and you can’t be anywhere else but the United States.

There are terms like “to bang a game,” which means to stop it because of the weather, and “Bugs Bunny Change Up,” which is a fastball that appears to stop right in front of the plate.

It’s named after a pitch thrown by Bugs in one of those old Warner Brothers cartoons.

It’s so slow that a batter can get in all three strikes on a single pitch.

There are old terms too, like “skull,” a free ticket of admission, and newish terms like “skullion,” a very ugly player, which is probably another form of “mullion,” which means the same thing.

I’m not a sports fan.

I know very little about baseball, but I know a lot about dictionaries, and the Dixon Baseball Dictionary has “slud” into “home plate” for a big win.

Well, it sounds great, Grant, but “slud”?

“Slud.”

“Slud?”

Really not a baseball person.

“Slud?”

No, I’m afraid I’m not, but…

It’s a fake past tense of “to slide,” and it’s often attributed to Dizzy Dean, who talked about somebody who had “slud” into “home plate.”

Oh, really?

I had no idea.

And I remember that Bugs Bunny cartoon, too.

I always wondered how he did that.

It’s a cartoon.

Yeah, it took me a while to figure that one out.

You were 30.

Yeah, back then.

Oh, my.

Well, it sounds great, and the name of the publication again is…

It’s the Dixon Baseball Dictionary, third edition.

Okay, gotta get it.

Well, anyway, if you want to talk about baseball slang or any other kind of slang or just words in general, give us a call.

The number is 1-877-9299673.

That’s 1-877-WAYWORD, or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Clinton from Brooklyn, New York.

Oh, hi, Clinton.

Welcome to the show.

Thanks.

I actually had a question about the term “long johns.”

A friend of mine were playing chess, and long story short, he made a wrong move, and I told him I was getting my long johns in a tizzy, and he wasn’t familiar with the word.

And I noticed that not many people around these parts say “long johns.”

They say “thermals” or “long underwear.”

I’m originally from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and everyone back home always says “long johns.”

So I was wondering how that term came about.

Don’t get your long johns in a tizzy.

Yeah, we said “long johns” in Missouri when I was growing up.

It’s a great, what shall we say, a great genre of expressions involving— Words for underwear?

Well, I was going to say ways to tell people to calm down that have to do with their underwear.

I mean, I’ve seen “don’t get your long johns in a bunch,” “don’t get your long johns bundled up in your britches,” “don’t get your knickers in a twist,” “don’t get your knickers in a knot,” and the favorite one that I grew up with was “don’t get your bowels in an uproar.”

So you guys are sitting around a chessboard talking about underwear being twisted.

Yeah, yeah, it was really cold that day, too.

Yeah, that’s pretty twisted, Clinton.

So where does the word “long johns” come from?

That is a great question, and I’m afraid it’s one of those origin unknown words.

I have seen one suggestion that it might have to do with John L. Sullivan.

Do you know the champion boxer from the 1880s, early 1890s?

You see photos of him from time to time, and he’s standing there kind of posing with his arms out and his fists clenched, and he’s wearing what look like long johns.

They have that texture to them, that kind of small waffle texture that long johns seem to have?

Well, I didn’t get that close enough to look, but it’s definitely the shape, you know, just the kind of tight-fitting, it looks like long underwear, and he’s there bare-chested.

We could put a picture of him on our website for an example.

I do know that there was a newspaper in the 1940s that referred to long johns and said that that’s where the name came from, and usually those kinds of stories are pretty iffy, but I don’t know.

We don’t have a better answer for it, unless you know one, Cornette.

He was wearing these?

Well, I don’t think that John Sullivan was boxing in long underwear, but he was wearing, I don’t know what you would call those things.

They’re really tight-fitting.

They almost look silky, trousers.

But there’s a bit of a historical gap there, right?

Yes.

The long johns term comes from the 1940s, and Sullivan was a boxer in what period?

The 1880s?

1880s, early 1890s.

Right.

So that is entirely too large of a gap for that term to lay dormant and then suddenly pop up in the 1940s, at least as far as I can imagine, unless there was a movie made about Sullivan and maybe it’s from the movie Sullivan instead of the original, I don’t know.

It’s always hard to say on this kind of stuff.

But that is an answer.

I don’t know is a good answer because you could find many kind of harebrained theories about this that might lead you astray, and we’re actually giving you the straight dope, which is nobody knows.

If they tell you they know, they’re full of it, and you can have them call us and we’ll tell them so.

So Clinton, who won the game?

That’d be me.

All right.

Well, Clinton, thank you so much for giving us a ring.

Thank you very much.

All right.

Best of luck to you.

Bye bye.

Take care.

Well, if you’ve got a question that you don’t want an answer to, give us a call.

1-877-929-9673.

And you can also send it to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Maeve, and I’m calling from San Diego.

Maeve?

Yes, Maeve.

Welcome, Maeve.

How are you?

Thank you.

I’m doing very well.

What’s up?

So I’m calling today about a word that actually occurred to me because of a word that I’d heard talked about on your show.

So on your show, you had previously talked about the word “janky,” and from that, I thought of a word that I’d heard of in Ireland, which has a very similar meaning, which is “banjaxed.”

Banjaxed?

Banjaxed, yeah.

And how I would spell it is B-A-N-J-A-X-E-D.

Banjaxed.

Right.

Okay.

Yeah, that’s how most of the dictionaries have it.

They do.

So we were talking about “janky” meaning?

Meaning something that doesn’t work as it was designed to.

Well, it’s a little different than that.

“Janky” usually just means inferior, bad, or weird, so it kind of could encompass something that’s broken or malfunctioning.

“Banjaxed” tends to mean busted or intentionally broken or ruined, right?

Like you can banjax your knee or you can banjax a window or banjax a party by ruining a party?

Well, in terms of how I heard it used in Ireland, like an old car that was very near to breaking down would be called a banjax car.

Or if you heard a body part, that body part would be banjaxed.

But it’s not necessarily something that was done by intent.

I see.

There we go, yeah.

As far as banjax being the origin of “janky,” there’s a big, big gap of decades there.

Oh, okay.

“Janky” doesn’t really start to show up until the early ’90s in the United States.

And there’s the problem of banjax not really being an Americanism.

People might know it here.

I’ve never heard it.

Yeah, I bet maybe fewer than one in a hundred people in the United States would know that term.

And they would probably be ex-pat Brits like you.

Okay.

Are there different forms of it as well?

“I’m going to banjax your knee if you aren’t nice to me,” or…

I suppose I have heard it used in that sense, but it’s normally used in the past tense when some damage has already happened.

Something’s messed up.

-huh, -huh.

I see.

You were raised in Ireland?

Yes, correct.

Which part?

In Dublin, and I’ve been here in San Diego for about 10 years now.

Okay, so long enough that you know us Americans in our evil ways, but short enough that you still kept your accent.

Sure, sure.

But you don’t keep saying banjaxed, right, because people just look at you funny?

Not too often, no.

I mean, I try to curb the amount of Irish phrases that I use.

I don’t think that makes you interesting.

I do, too.

But we’re language people, so maybe that’s…

I want the full force of your foreignism to come out when I’m talking to you.

Okay.

All right, well, I hope we’ve helped some, Maeve.

Okay, thank you very much.

All right.

See you for Duper.

Bye-bye.

Thanks for calling.

Bye.

Banjaxed.

I love that.

B-A-N-J-A-X.

That is indeed the way that it’s spelled.

It’s almost always more often than not used in the kind of adjective form as banjaxed, so something can be banjaxed.

-huh.

I like it.

Ruined or broken or screwed.

I mean, if we can use that on…

If Barack Obama can say it on five national television networks, we can say it on public radio.

Banjaxed is not a bad synonym for screwed or screwed up.

I like it.

If you’ve got a question about a foreignism or something that you learned when you were a child that nobody seems to say anymore, give us a call.

The number is 1-877-929-9673.

That’s 1-877-WAYWORD.

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

Not too long ago, we were talking on the show about the Apple Corps Baltimore game.

Mm—

Remember that?

Yes, and Evermore, Forevermore, or something like that.

Right, right, right.

And all the little variations.

You eat an apple down to the core, and then you yell out, “Apple Corps!”

And then the first person who says, “Baltimore!”

Gets to designate which direction you throw the Apple Corps, ideally, at one of your friends or family members.

Boy, did this ever generate a ton of email and phone calls.

Yeah, you know, I think that you and I are the only people in America who never saw the Disney cartoon.

My gosh, yes.

This is amazing.

A lot of people wrote us to tell us that they learned it first from a Donald Duck and Chip and Dale cartoon, and we had so many people send us the link that we decided that we would put a link on our website so you can see it too.

And I have to say, I have to add a little caveat, which is that there’s some sort of, you know, ethnic stereotyping going on in that cartoon.

That has happened with a lot of the cartoons, because in this particular cartoon, Donald Duck holds something explosive and explodes, and he falls all the way through the earth to China, and so the Apple Corps Baltimore game is actually played with somebody way down the hole in China, and you can imagine how that went.

But anyway.

Yeah, we’re in a different era, in a different time.

Right, different sensitivities and that kind of thing.

But so many people wrote to tell us about this cartoon that you and I missed that I thought we would put it on the website anyway.

Right, and it’s good to have it.

It’s not the oldest use of it, but it’s definitely a place where I would call that the popularizer.

Yeah, yeah, we actually got a message on our discussion forum from somebody who wrote, “I’m 63 years old. I grew up in Southern California, and as a child in elementary school, this was a common game. Many of us had apples in our lunch sack or lunch box, and when we finished eating, we played Apple Corps.”

And she says her mother also told her that her mother played this game as a child.

She was born in Illinois in 1910.

So it does seem to go back quite a ways, but I think it was Chip and Dale who, as you said, popularized it in the minds of a lot of people.

Well, we always welcome your calls and comments about things that we talk about on the air.

It’s never too late.

Give us a call, 1-877-929-9673, or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, my name is Michael Harris, and I’m calling from Irving, Texas.

Hi, Michael, how are you?

Hi, Michael, what’s up?

Hi, I’m doing just fine, thank you.

My question is about the word which is spelled L-L-A-M-A, llama, an animal which is common in Peru, and I think native to South America.

I’ve always pronounced this word llama, because in my Spanish classes in school, I always learned that the double L in Spanish is pronounced like a Y.

Yeah, like in the words tortilla, tomatillo, pollo, which means chicken, or caballero, which means gentleman.

But ever since I saw a particular animated movie in 2000, the movie was The Emperor’s New Groove, an animated movie, all throughout that movie, that word was pronounced llama, and I think in the movie, an emperor is turned into a llama.

I don’t remember exactly why or how, but anyway, all throughout that movie, that word was pronounced llama.

So I mean, here living in Texas, I can accept the fact that you can find an armadillo in Amarillo, but llama is just too much for me, because I’ve always learned it was llama.

So how did this happen?

This is complicated.

Okay.

All right, here’s a couple things.

The first one is that in Spanish, that double L is a single character, and that double L, you’ll even find it alphabetized differently in Spanish dictionaries, if you remember, that double L has a bunch of different pronunciations depending upon the dialect of Spanish that you’re speaking.

All right, so in some places it is a Y sound.

Right, in Spain and Mexico, for sure.

Some places it’s more like a J, so they say llama.

In some places, it almost sounds like a D, a llama, llama.

It’s like you can actually feel your tongue kind of shift from the Y to the J to the D.

It’s just a little bit different on the mouth.

And so the pronunciation that you learn in school, if you don’t learn it natively in your household or on the streets, is going to be an approximation, kind of like the best case pronunciation of that word.

So there’s not one fixed pronunciation of llama, and that’s okay.

The other thing is the word is the same case as armadillo.

It’s been fully anglicized.

It is fully and completely adopted into English and is no longer a foreign word.

You will find no source anywhere that does something like italicize it or put it in quotes to show that it’s not native to English.

And so the pronunciation is the L sound as far as most Americans are concerned.

I don’t know anybody that says it with the Y sound except if they’re a Spanish speaker, and that’s what their particular dialect has to say.

So I can get being a little annoyed if you learned it differently.

Definitely, when we’re taught stuff in school and we hear something different, it takes a while to reconcile that, right?

Yeah, it does.

Yeah, it can be a little bit of a stumbling block, right, Martha, to get over that thing that you learned, and it seems so true, and you’re like, “Wait a second.”

Oh my gosh, especially in terms of pronunciation.

We hold so closely to that.

Yeah, because identity is closely bound to pronunciation.

It shows that we’re a member of a group.

But unfortunately, Michael, the pronunciation of llama is probably best as just a straight up L sound.

Now, if you go to parts of South America and Central America, you’re going to be absolutely fine with your pronunciation.

Okay, well, thanks for talking me through it.

I mean, I feel a little bit better about it now.

We talked you off the roof, right?

Yeah, yeah, pretty much, yeah.

Hey, Mike, I have a question for you.

Yes.

What are we going to do about vicuna?

Oh, that’s a big one.

Oh, you’ve given him something all new to worry about, Martha.

That’s right.

Forget the llamas.

Shame on you.

What about the bicunas, you know?

Yeah, I know.

Well, it’s something new to think about, I guess.

Yeah, something to pass the hours.

Well, Michael, thank you for calling.

It’s a thoughtful question, and we’re glad to answer it, all right?

Okay, thank you very much.

Okay, adios.

We should probably go back and say that just because the movie did it that way, that’s not what makes this right, because big, big productions get things wrong, and professionals get things wrong all the time.

Witness, Martha, and Grant.

Right, exactly.

I was going to say that, yeah.

No, but I remember a drama that was done on the BBC, which is a highly professional organization.

It was a radio show, so it’s all about The Voice, right?

And it was about my hometown of St. Louis, where I was born.

And through the entire drama, they pronounced it St. Louis.

Oh, really?

I had to email them and say, “You know what? That pronunciation is only a joke. We only say that in the song, and only when we’re kidding, nobody in seriousness ever calls the town St. Louis.”

Did they write that?

Yeah, they did.

They actually read my letter on the air.

They were reading these dramatic letters from this woman.

It wasn’t a comedy.

It was drama.

They were reading these dramatic letters, and she would say, “I can’t wait to see you in St. Louis.”

And I’m like, “No!”

She would never say that.

It was St. Louis.

Or in the St. Louis accent, she might actually say St. Louis, because that’s how they say it.

Anyway, so I just wanted to say to Michael, you should always call those higher authorities in the question.

Yes, and you should call us at 1-877-9299673, or send your emails to words@waywordradio.org, or pop by our discussion forum.

That’s at waywordradio.org/discussion.

Things have come to a pretty pass.

That’s our show for this week.

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Call us at 1-877-9299673.

Or email your questions to words@waywordradio.org, or join the conversation right now on our discussion forum.

You’ll find it at waywordradio.org/discussion.

Stefanie Levine is our senior producer.

Our technical director and editor is Tim Felten.

Tim also engineered our theme music.

Kurt Konen produced it.

We’ve had production help this week from Michael Bagdasian and Josette Herdell.

From the Argo Network in New York City, I’m Grant Barrett.

From Studio West in San Diego, I’m Martha Barnette.

So long.

Bye-bye.

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