Mr. Can’t Died (episode #1377)

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

A friend of mine was telling me about a rough patch in her life recently. She was having a hard time at work. She was overextended there and trying to balance that with her family life. And I said, it sounds like you’ve been riding the struggle bus.

Struggle bus. She’d never heard the expression, but it made perfect sense to her. And I just love this expression, riding the struggle bus. You know, it’s a great way to solicit sympathy about what’s going on with you, but also sort of make light about it at the same time. It’s a series of things not going well. Yeah, you’re riding the struggle bus. Or if you’re having a really bad day, you’re driving the struggle bus. You’re in charge of the struggle. And if you’re having a really, really bad week, you’re driving a double-decker struggle bus.

Yeah. I’ve heard the clue bus before. You better get a ticket for the clue bus. Get hit by a clue by four, too. Oh, I hadn’t heard that. But struggle bus, it was a new-to-me term. I hadn’t read it until I came across it on a list of new slang.

Well, that list of new slang comes to us from Connie Ebley. She is a professor of English at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. And for years now, she and her students have been compiling lists of slang from their campus. Some of the list doesn’t change much year to year. The preoccupations of college kids kind of stay the same. But every year, there’s a number of new terms on there where we’re like, oh. And one that’s kind of come to the fore in the last couple of years is the term ratchet. It’s got a couple of different meanings. Generally, it’s derogatory. So I’m not dating her. That’s a ratchet chick. It means that she’s just not up to your standards. But you could also use ratchet to mean off the hook or great. That part is so ratchet, I can’t even believe it. Or ratchet kind of means hot mess. That is a ratchet situation, not even getting a part of that lab. That’s just messed up. That’s going to put me on the struggle bus.

Yeah, put me on the struggle bus. So it’s a cool list. And thanks to Connie Ebley for sending that. We really appreciate it and her students. It’s a ton of great stuff. We’ll try to share a few more later in the show.

Great. And if you’d like to talk about any aspect of language, slang, grammar, call us 877-929-9673. Or you can send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, how’s it going?

Super, who’s this?

Hey.

This is Marco from San Diego, California.

Hello, Marco.

Hi, Marco.

Welcome to the show. You sound enthusiastic.

Well, the reason I wanted to talk to you guys is that, well, I have sort of a phenomenon that I was hoping that you guys could help clear up. If there is a phrase for this phenomenon already, great, but we’ve kind of made up a phrase for it, my wife and I.

So to set up the situation, think for just a moment that you have a cup on the table that in your head you know to be water. And you pick up the cup and you drink and it is, in fact, Sprite or orange juice or something completely different. Have you ever experienced something like that?

Yes, we’re reacting as you speak.

I see, yes. And when this happens, I feel like there is a real physical reaction that happens in your body. I almost feel that the expectation of what you are going to taste is partly put on top of what you actually taste. And there’s this shock and this offense, and it takes you aback.

And we were trying to come up with a phrase for that phenomenon, and we kind of made up this phrase that we deemed cephalus offendo. What we wanted was the phrase to reflect what happens, and we think it’s like an affront to your senses. You feel this wave of your brain reacting to the momentary lapse and its trust in the consistency of the world. We thought it would be very multilayered and obscure, so we looked for some words that would be multilayered and obscure.

So we dug into the ancient Greek for head, and we found cephalus out of, I guess, cephalopods. My wife and I are in the zoology field, so she pulled from that. And we decided cephalus offendo, because it’s like an offense of your head, would be the best term to describe this, in our experience at least.

So I was wondering if there was already a phrase to describe such a phenomenon.

That sounds like one of the lesser Hogwarts spells.

Yeah, it does kind of sound like a Harry Potter spell. Cephalos offendo.

What the first years work with, right? Before they do transformations.

Cephalos offendo.

Oh, I do like that. Because you can say it like an exclamation, just kind of blurt it out when something happens. You’re like, oh, cephalos offendo. I thought that was water. What is this? It’s vodka.

Part of our normal vocabulary.

It reminds me, you know, you make me think of the vegetarian fakes. That’s when this happens to me the most. When, like, you’re out with vegetarians, and to go along, you order, like, the fake steak or the fake burger, and you bite into it, and you’re like, this is nothing like a burger. It’s burger-shaped. It looks like a burger, but it does not taste like a burger. The vegetarian fakes give cephalus offendo all the time.

Yeah, no, that’s a great use of the word, I think.

But cephalus offendo, it sounds like syphilis, though. I can’t get behind this.

Oh, well, I didn’t want to go there. I didn’t even think of that. When you first said it, I thought you said sensula sfendo, which I thought was kind of a fake Latin enough that you might get away with it. It’s offending your senses.

And I would take it that it doesn’t necessarily have to be a beverage or a food. I mean, it could be like a suitcase that you think is heavy, and then you pick it up, and it doesn’t have anything in it.

Yeah, that’s another cephala sfendo.

Oh, blind dates.

Blind dates?

Blind dates? And your friend says, oh, she’s wonderful. And you realize all she can talk about is my little pony. And you’re like, oh, no.

Oh, no. Yucko offendo. I can’t do this.

Maybe there’s a specific psychological term for it. It’s not exactly cognitive dissonance. There’s a literary term that kind of applies. Peripatia. This is when there’s like a sudden reversal in the story. Like the thing turns around for the hero. But maybe you could just extend that term a little bit and use peripatia. P-E-R-I-P-E-T-E-I-A. And it’s kind of like a sucker punch, right? You didn’t know it was coming.

Yeah.

It’s almost like a paraprostokian.

A little bit, yeah.

The only other term that I can think of, the drawback is that it’s not a highfalutin term, but I would describe that as antisappointment.

Oh.

Oh. You like that?

Oh, my gosh. That’s really good. Antisappointment. Look at you. I knew there was a reason I called you guys.

She’s looking very smug right now.

Well, we might have to replace Sevilus Defendo with Antisappointment from time to time.

I like it. I like the Latin-esque thing that you guys came up with. I really would like, I think the fake Latin is a way to go on this.

Okay, well, you know, we can use Antisappointment as the common name.

And then the binomial form.

Yes, right. Mixing the Greek and the Latin there.

We’re feeling very fancy.

This is a great question, and we’re going to throw this out to everybody and see what else we get. You never know with our crowd.

All right? I can’t wait to hear all about it. Thanks, Marco.

Thanks, you guys. Have a great one.

Bye-bye.

So here it is. Here’s the pitch. When you have something that doesn’t turn out like you expected, the drink that you thought was water turns out to be vodka. Yeah, or you think it’s in a big glass mug and it’s plastic, and you put it up and you slam your face with the… The suitcase you thought was heavy is light. The blind date that you thought would be awesome is terrible. What are you going to call that?

Coin a word for us, will you?

Martha calls it antisappointment.

Maybe you’ve got something else.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

You probably know this slang word.

It’s when somebody says, I see you.

I see you?

Yeah, it’s when you are doing something and people want to acknowledge that they see what you’re up to.

It comes from performance.

Like you might have it in an improv class, or you might have it when you’re learning how to act.

So, and some people claim that it comes from African-American performance rhetoric.

So it’s, I acknowledge you, I see you, I know what you’re doing.

It’s kind of like, I hear you, and now I’m going to respond to you.

I see you.

I hear you.

Yeah, see, there we go.

It’s just like, I hear you, only I see you.

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

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, how are you?

I’m doing well. Who is this?

This is Sadie from Charlottesville, Virginia.

Hi, Sadie. Welcome to the show. What can we help you with?

Hi, Sadie. What’s going on?

Hello. I’m so excited to be talking to y’all.

Okay, so my boyfriend is a professional golfer. He’s on a mini tour.

So he was telling me that he and some of the other players were going to arrange a Calcutta, which I was like, what is this?

And so he tried to explain it, and then I looked it up.

And it turns out that it’s kind of a bunch of players prior to the start of the tournament can bet on who is going to be the best and get the, I guess, least amount of points for golf or the lowest, and then whoever wins the bet wins the pool of money.

Right.

But so my question is, I’m asking him, like, why is it called a Calcutta, of all things?

Where did that come from?

And he had no idea.

And so this is why I’m enlisting you for help.

Oh, I love this.

The Calcutta wager in golf.

They’ve used this in other sports, occasionally pop up in dog racing or horse racing.

But it’s a 200 plus year old kind of wagering that the British brought back from the subcontinent, from India.

And it was apparently practiced at a well-known club in Calcutta, a golf club.

But it was in a variety of other kinds of sports entertainments as well.

So the British brought it back and spread it to the Anglophone world.

It’s literally because it’s from a place in Calcutta.

Okay, so it’s not like, I was like, it has to have something related to that.

That makes a lot of sense.

Yeah, what surprises people, though, is the long pedigree, that it is more than 200 years old, and yet we’re still using the term because we just hang on to it.

It really aptly describes this, and you did a perfect job of describing it.

You’ve got a bunch of players betting on the outcome of a race that they’re a part of, and the one who bets correctly gets the largest share of the pot.

And sometimes you use this as a fundraiser, so the winner gets some of the pot, and then the rest of the pot goes to whatever the charity is.

So there’s a lot of different ways to do it.

But yeah, it usually involves the participants betting on the outcome.

And one of the things that the Calcutta supposedly does is takes out some of the cheating, or evens out the cheating so that everyone can cheat since you’re betting on what you’re involved in, right?

Usually that’s not allowed in sports.

You’re not allowed to bet on a game that you’re a part of.

This is so interesting.

Thank you so much.

Yeah, sure.

You’re welcome.

But it’s pretty cool that you’re married to a famous dude, right?

It’s a boyfriend, right?

Boyfriend.

Okay, boyfriend.

Well, nice.

Right.

Now, I’m going to make sure that he hears that, too.

Well, thank you both so much.

I really appreciate it.

Yeah, sure.

Thanks for calling.

Call us again sometime, all right?

All righty.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Tell us about the language of your workplace, whether it’s on the golf course or in the office or someplace else.

877-929-9673.

Here is a bit of college slang that I’m absolutely adopting, Grant.

Procrastinate.

Procrastinate?

Oh.

Yeah.

It’s when you clean your apartment or house instead of doing your work.

No, no.

It’s when you consume food that’s often unhealthy while you’re postponing an important task.

Oh, so it’s neat as in eat, not neat as in make neat.

It’s, yes.

Procrastinate plus the word eat.

Procrastinate.

Oh, I see.

You know, especially those of us who work at home, freelance writers, we’re always procrastinating.

Sure.

Procrastinate.

Why face that blank screen when you can get up and have a…

You alphabetize your books by author and genre when you should actually be doing work.

You make your book jobs neat, right?

You laugh because you know.

I know it all too well.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

Simple stories, big discoveries.

We’re talking about language as A Way with Words continues.

You’re listening to A Way with Words.

I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

And here we have on the line, John Chaneski, our quiz guy.

Reel him in.

New York City.

On the East Coast, here’s John Chaneski with a quiz.

Hello, John.

Oh, boy.

What did they put in your juice today, guys?

So I’m doing great.

My mom and dad just moved back from, they moved from Fort Leeds back to Hoboken, the town I grew up in.

Okay.

That’s really cool.

The reason I mentioned them, because today’s quiz is called a mom and pop operation.

Okay.

That’s a little segue there.

Okay.

The answer to each of the following questions is a two-word phrase in which each word begins with either M-A or P-A.

Okay.

Sure.

Okay.

Okay.

For example, if a bachelor gets altered, he becomes what?

Married.

Man.

Well, two-word phrase.

Oh.

Married man.

Married man.

Married man.

Yeah, two words.

Okay.

Married man.

Very good.

Two-word phrase, M-A-R-P.

There was a mama right there.

Okay.

It’s altered.

Here we go.

He had the only line in Mel Brooks’ silent movie, silent movie, which is funny because he was famous for not talking.

Marcel Marceau.

Marcel Marceau is correct.

Nice.

Way to go.

Now, I mentioned I grew up in Hoboken, where almost no one has a garage.

So I’m frankly quite adept at this vehicular skill.

I’m not.

Parallel parking.

Parallel parking.

Parallel parking.

Parable.

I love it.

Now, once a year, thousands and thousands of people go insane for college basketball.

March Madness.

March Madness.

There’s your mama right there.

T-M.

NCAA.

How about this?

She is a fictional lady who fell in love with a homeless archer.

Oh, Maid Marianne.

Maid Marianne, yes.

Homeless archer.

She was a character in the Bible who illustrated that it’s possible for anyone from any background to be blessed.

Mary Magdalene.

Mary Magdalene. Very good.

Now, this port in American Samoa sounds like what happens to my salary each week when I settle up with my creditors.

Pay, pay?

PayPal.

Almost. What happens to my pay?

It’s, Pago, Pago.

Pago, Pago, yes.

Good.

Now, when you need an object or a part, and you want to avoid all the imperfections inherent in a human-crafted item, get one created like this.

Machine made.

Yes, machine made.

Oh, good. That’s good.

Well done.

Now, when you’re done baking with this disposable nonstick surface, maybe you can write a letter inviting me to your cookie party, maybe.

Something pan?

No, it’s disposable.

No, it’s disposable.

Paper pan?

Paper pan?

That’s an idea.

Now all the bakers in the crowd are yelling at that.

P-A-P-O.

Parchment.

Paper.

Paper?

Yes, parchment paper.

Good teamwork.

There we go.

Parchment paper is used for baking.

And then, like I said, you can write me a letter if you wish.

Here’s the last one.

Well, the quiz is over.

Questions have been asked and answers were delivered.

Except for asked and delivered are what verb form?

Past participle.

Past participle is right.

That’s your last papa, mama, and papa.

I think you could fasten that one into a pretty good road game, right?

Yeah, you could.

Thanks, John.

Really good stuff, as always.

We’ll talk to you again next week, all right?

Thank you, guys.

A lot of fun.

See you next week.

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

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Craig Schaefer.

Hi, Craig.

How are you doing?

Where are you calling from?

I’m really good.

How are you doing?

Super duper.

What’s going on, Craig?

Where are you?

I am in Baja, Mexico.

Oh, hey.

Outside of Rosarito Beach.

Oh, nice.

Nice.

What are you doing down there?

Surfing?

Shell collecting?

Well, no.

I am looking at the dolphins.

Mmm.

Enjoying the day.

Okay.

And calling us.

Glad to be a part of it.

How can we help?

Well, when I was a little boy, my grandmother would, if I said, I can’t do something, she would say, can’t die in a cornfield.

Can’t die in a cornfield.

And I know what she meant.

She meant you can do anything.

But I wondered where that might have come from.

Cant died in a cornfield.

All right.

Tell us a little bit about her.

Where was she from?

What was she like?

Arapahoe, Nebraska.

Okay.

Town of 1080.

Okay.

And is that where you grew up, Craig?

Yes, up through grade school.

Okay.

And so, Craig, what did you picture when she said that, Cant died in a cornfield?

I mean, we have the metaphorical meaning, but what were you picturing?

Well, the unwritten words were, well, you either don’t want to, but you can do anything.

Mm—

And I guess it just meant that you don’t say that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, be positive.

Exactly.

Sort of like can’t as a human being or a character, right?

Exactly.

Yeah.

I kind of pictured it as a person, yes.

Or old Mr. Can’t.

I’ve seen it that way, old Mr. Can’t.

Old Man Can’t.

Yeah, old man Can’t died in a cornfield.

Or the notion of be positive, and if you don’t try something, you won’t be able to do anything at all.

What I love about this, most of all, though, is that if you’ve ever been in a cornfield, you can grow really kind of frightened of whether or not you’ll make your way out.

Oh, yes, yes, I’ve had that experience.

I can’t get out of here.

You will die in the cornfield because you’ve got to just keep trying until you find the edge, right?

Exactly. You have to keep moving.

Yeah, you don’t want to draw your last breath there.

And I’ve also seen can’t died in the poorhouse, too.

I mean, wherever can’t dies, it’s a place that you don’t want to be.

Exactly.

Can’t died in the war is another one.

-huh.

-huh.

-huh.

Yeah.

And I haven’t seen that phrase that far back, can’t died in a cornfield.

Have you, Grant?

1950s, maybe.

Yeah.

It’s probably older than that, but there’s not a lot out there about it, Craig.

Not really.

Well, and I was born in the 50s, so.

Okay.

And I don’t know why it should occur at that time.

It seems to be a rustic expression to me associated with the rural lifestyle.

Mm—

Well, in that they were, you know, it’s a farm culture in that area.

There’s another one that I liked in particular, Cant is Dead, His Brothers, called Try.

Oh, that’s good.

Yeah.

Cant is Dead, His Brothers, called Try.

And that really kind of underscores what the three of us are saying, right, about it being about, look, just abandon your negative can’t-do attitude and go for it.

Try, try, try.

Mm—

Exactly.

You know what, guys?

I’m looking at a magazine from 1910.

It’s a magazine for kids, and it has a whole poem about Mr. Cant and Mr. Can.

Oh, please.

And, well, it goes on and on, but I’ll just read you part of it.

Mr. Cant is a pitiful sight, for he’s whipped before he’s begun to fight.

And he says that it puzzles him quite a lot why some can do it and some cannot.

And it goes on and on like that.

And I could see if you’re a little kid, you know, and you’re reading about Mr. Cant and Mr. Cant, you’re going to want to be like Mr. Cant.

Because as a father of a young child, I have that problem in my house where it’s hard to convince him that the trying is worth it.

You’ve got to build up the resistance to failure and being wrong, right?

Exactly.

And she certainly was a good role model for that.

Always keep moving and always, if you try, you can.

Well, cool.

Say hello to the dolphins for us.

I’ll do it.

Thank you so much.

Our pleasure.

Thanks a lot, Craig.

Thanks.

Bye.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

Tell us what you learned from your mother and father.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Becky, and I’m calling from Amherst, Mass.

Well, welcome to the show.

Glad to talk to you.

Oh, thank you.

I’m glad to be on.

How can we help you?

Well, I have a question that has to do with the origin of a descriptive term, and that is the term blue blood.

Now, I know pretty much, or I thought I did, you know, what it referred to, but I wasn’t sure where it came from, because when I think about it, it’s kind of an odd term.

What are you thinking about it?

You know, I figured it meant somebody who was wealthy or aristocratic or, you know, somebody who was, you know, from old money or something like that.

But I said to myself, you know, blood isn’t blue, I mean, unless you’re a horseshoe crab or something.

So, you know, why would somebody who is, you know, from the nobility or royalty come to be called a blue blood?

Right.

And yet that term is in pretty common use.

And it’s also in my dictionary.

And, you know, you can find it online as well.

And I’ve heard, you know, a couple of different explanations.

But I wasn’t sure, you know, which one would be the right one or if anybody knew.

So I said to myself, well, I have to call A Way with Words and find out.

And here we are.

Yes.

Well, there’s a pretty clear-cut origin story for this.

We got it from the Spanish in what we call a calc.

This is when you take a word or expression in another language and translate it directly word for word into the second language.

So in Spanish, it’s sangre azul, which is blue blood.

And it goes back to the 1700s in Spanish and all the varieties of Spanish that we know of.

And it has to do with the class of people who would not necessarily ever get their skin darkened by the sun.

They would be inside and protected.

They’re not working in the fields, not working with the animals.

They’re probably living in fine mansions and houses.

And so they have this ivory, beautiful, maybe even marble skin with the blue veins showing through.

You know, almost translucent, almost glowing skin, the luminescent skin.

And so you can actually see their blue veins showing through their arms and legs and whatever.

Okay.

Yeah.

Well, that makes sense.

Is that one of the explanations that you came across?

Well, I mean, this whole thing started when my sister and I had been having a discussion about silverware or selling our silver.

And she found an article that was published in the L.A. Times.

And it gives another origin story for the term blue blood.

And I did not think that that was accurate.

And so I’m just, you know, we were a little concerned that maybe this reporter should have had or should not have accepted, you know, the origin story so uncritically because, you know, they’d be passing on incorrect information.

What was the story?

Anyway, you know, when I’m reading this article again, you know, the reporter doesn’t give the origin story.

He’s just quoting from a book the history of medical use of silver.

But I thought maybe he should have put a little bracket there.

This origin story is not generally accepted or something.

But anyway.

So he was claiming that the origin of blue blood was because silver was used to treat certain illnesses, and it can change the color and pallor of the skin.

Is that his?

Yes.

That’s probably not true.

There’s numerous reasons for this, but the short version for this is actually a complicated explanation for a rare phenomenon.

And when you look at the history of Sangre Azul in Spanish, we find fairly consistently that it shows up in even middle class, the language of middle class people.

And the truth is that silver treatment actually caused the skin to look gray.

Yeah, or silvery.

Yeah, silvery.

It’s not really blue at all.

This is one of the things that Martha and I do when we look at these word origins.

We try to judge critically all these different sources, and we find again and again, there are a lot of these past etymologies that need to be reexamined.

And you can’t just take anyone’s word for this stuff.

Some of this stuff has been wrong for 100 or 150 years.

And it’s only since a lot of databases and text and newspapers have come online that we’ve been able to say, look, we can prove this wrong as a matter of fact without any reservation.

So, Becky, good for you for being skeptical there.

Thanks, Becky.

Okay. Love your show. Thanks a lot.

Thank you for calling.

Take care.

Okay.

Bye-bye.

There’s an expression in Spanish that I like a lot that’s related to this.

Yeah.

Sangre de horchata.

I’ve never heard that.

Horchata blood.

Do you know what horchata is?

Sure.

I love that drink.

It’s a rice milk with cinnamon that you drink cold.

That’s delicious.

Yeah.

But sangre de horchata means if you have horchata blood, you are super calm and nothing can affect you.

Oh, it’s like you have some foie.

Yeah, exactly.

Very mellow.

Sangre de horchata.

Oh, I like that a lot.

I have never heard that.

877-929-9673.

Here’s a bit of college slang I like that’s been around for a while.

Dime piece or a dime?

Yeah, sure.

He’s a dime.

You are a 10.

Right?

10 out of 10.

10 out of 10.

Beautiful.

Got the brains, got the beauty, got the athleticism, everything you wanted in a woman.

She’s a dime piece.

Oh, she, okay.

Oh.

You were talking to the second person there.

I was getting all embarrassed.

Well.

She’s a real dime piece.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have a way with the words.

Hi, Grant.

How are you?

Great.

Who is this?

This is Lance from Ames, Iowa.

Ames, Iowa.

Welcome to the show, Lance.

Hi, Lance.

Well, I am an ESL teacher here at Iowa State University.

All right.

On Monday, one of my students came in and said, teacher, today I can no-give homework because this weekend I was very drunken.

So after the class laughed, we turned it into a teachable moment.

Good.

But I got stuck on drunk versus drunken.

I lived in Korea for about seven years, and my students there also said drunken.

I understand that that’s an adjective,

But I don’t understand how to teach students

The difference between drunk and drunken.

Very interesting.

Drunk versus drunken.

Drunk versus drunken.

Yeah.

Well, my sense is that those two words mean slightly different things.

When they’re adjectives.

Yes, when they’re functioning as adjectives.

Because drunken is only in adjectives,

But drunk can be part of a verb form, a noun, or an adjective.

Yeah, and the word drunk generally means intoxicated, and it’s usually the predicate adjective.

He was drunk. Your student was drunk, right?

Yeah.

Drunken often means more characterized by lots of drinking or a habitual state.

So you might talk about a drunken party or a drunken orgy or something like that.

Right.

There’s kind of a way to get to the bottom of what the native speaker thinks about these two adjectives,

And we’ll just leave the noun and verb out of it for now,

And what you can do, and you’ve heard us talk about this on the show before, is look at the corpora.

These are large bodies of text where they take all this text in and they assign parts of speech to every word.

And then you can analyze according to parts of speech to see what company the words keep.

And so I’ve done this now for drunken drunken.

And so here’s kind of what I found out.

We celebrate in drunken revelry rather than drunk revelry.

We wouldn’t say drunk revelry.

We do it in a drunken haze, not a drunk haze.

We have drunken brawls, drunken debauchery, drunken sailors, drunken stupor, drunken rage, and drunk louts.

We wouldn’t have drunken louts.

And this is what people most commonly do.

There’s a couple other things.

We get legally drunk, not legally drunken.

We drive drunk.

We don’t drive drunken.

And we are visibly drunk more than we’re visibly drunken.

And so it’s just interesting that you find in people’s written behavior where they’ve,

And some of this is edited text, so perhaps it’s gone through a copy editor that kind of conformed to a more standard way of writing.

But you can see here, by and large, there’s some very cleared patterns here that drunk and drunken keep different company.

So drunken refers less often to people then.

It’s about a situation or a condition or a behavior.

Yeah, that’s what I was trying to say.

And drunk is more often about a person.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It’s really interesting.

That would be easy to explain to them because a lot of things in English happen.

You know, it changes based on behavior versus person.

We have a lot of people like you, Lance, who teach English to people who don’t speak it as a first language.

And what I would recommend is that you Google BYU Corpus.

That’s BYU as in Brigham Young University Corpus.

And you’re going to come to a free page where there are giant texts, giant databases,

That you can do the kind of analysis that I just did to get to the bottom of these questions for yourself.

Yeah, we use the COCA.

Yes, that’s it. There we go.

The focus of contemporary American English?

Yes, that will work as well.

We use that and teach it in our advanced levels, but this is kind of an intermediate level.

But it can help answer that question.

It’s probably something you don’t want to have your intermediate students do for themselves,

But you could do that for them and just show them the results,

Kind of like figure out what the difference is there.

Dictionaries don’t tend to provide this information.

There’s no dictionary that I know that would tell you the difference between drunk and drunk,

And they’d probably just call them synonyms.

Well, thank you very much.

Thanks for calling, Lance. Really appreciate it.

Yeah, thank you. Have a great day.

Okay, bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673. Email words@waywordradio.org.

Grant, have you ever seen a unicorn on campus?

I know this is a trick question.

It is a trick.

The answer is, I don’t know. What is it?

This little bit of college slang refers to someone you see everywhere, but you haven’t actually met them.

And you invent this elaborate life story for them.

You see this guy everywhere, you know, the guy with the dreadlocks.

And you just, you make up this mental story.

The unicorn, right?

The mythical creature.

Yeah.

Do they actually go to school here?

Right.

The apparition of some kind.

What’s their backstory?

Might as well make one up.

Is that the Secret Service agent assigned to me?

Right?

They’re spying on me.

Deep cover.

877-929-9673.

Call us and share your examples of slang.

More of your stories about language coming up.

Stay tuned.

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

I’ve just started reading a book by Harriet Doerr, and I’m wondering how I managed to miss her work all this time.

It’s called Stones for Ibarra.

Have you ever read that, Grant?

Nope, but I’ll add it to the list.

I think you would like it.

It’s her first novel, and it’s known for this sparse, evocative prose.

And I just want to read you a little bit from the beginning, okay?

Here they are, two North Americans, a man and a woman, just over and just under 40,

Come to spend their lives in Mexico and already lost as they travel cross-country over the central plateau.

The driver of the station wagon is Richard Everton, a blue-eyed, black-haired, stubborn man who will die 30 years sooner than he now imagines.

On the seat beside him is his wife, Sarah, who imagines neither his death nor her own, imminent or remote as they may be.

Instead, she sees in one of its previous incarnations, the adobe house where they intend to sleep tonight.

Now, I dare you to stop reading there.

That sounds great. It’s a good mix of what’s happening internally in the characters to scene setting to describing the characters.

I know who they are, what they’re doing, and something is about to happen.

Something’s going to happen.

Yeah.

It’s a remarkable first novel.

But you know what’s really remarkable about this novel?

Is she published it at the age of 73.

Yay for her.

Yay for her.

And more yay, she won the National Book Award for that book.

Nice.

This is great.

So how does that happen?

I mean, this is a woman who started college, and then she dropped out to have a couple of kids,

Moved with her husband to Mexico, and lived with him there for many years.

And came back after his death.

And then she started college again at 65.

She went to Stanford to study history.

And eight years later, she’s winning a National Book Award.

How does that happen?

I’ve got a theory.

Yeah?

I think when we get older, we strip away what’s not important.

We stop the little things that don’t matter and start concentrating on the life work.

Be it raising kids or writing a book or finally building that business.

We just stopped doing the little useless things that were distracting us from doing the big thing.

And I think she did it.

Yeah.

Well, it’s interesting that you mentioned that because she has said before, I mean, she died about 10 years ago,

But she said that she was often happy to spend an entire hour writing one sentence.

She compared herself to a stonemason, you know, just chipping and chipping and sanding until she got it exactly right.

Literally, you know, paring away everything, sort of like what you’re saying in a metaphorical sense.

Well, good for her.

I think that those late life starts have just as much potential.

We have a myth that genius comes from the young, but I don’t think that’s true.

There’s something about the accumulation of life experience as well, which can color and provide nuance to writing that you just can’t get in the eyes and ears and pen of a 20-year-old.

I think you’re right.

I find that so fascinating that she spent most of her life just sort of marinating, you know, and reading and having lively intellectual discussions and then boom.

Well, here’s to the late life successes.

If you’ve got a story about one, an author or artist or somebody famous or somebody not so famous who did something great late in life, let us know.

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

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Russell from Burlington, Vermont.

Hi, Russell. Welcome to the show. What can we do for you?

What’s up, buddy?

Well, I have a question about one of my very favorite words, one of my very, very favorite things in the entire world,

Which is what we in Vermont call creamies.

And they call soft-serve ice cream in Vermont creamy.

And there’s nothing better on a hot summer day than a real maple creamy from Vermont.

But I’ve noticed that when you travel to New York State or New Hampshire or Massachusetts or Quebec, they never call it that.

I’ve even been to a creamy stand that had translation.

It was near the border, and it said creamy, and then in parentheses, soft serve ice cream, near the New York border.

So I’m wondering, how would that happen?

How a word can follow the state line so closely and where it comes from?

And Russell, how are you spelling creamy?

Well, I usually see it spelled C-R-E-E hyphen or dash M-E-E,

But I’ve sometimes seen it C-R-E-A-M dash E-E.

How’s it served?

On a cone or in a bowl or both?

Either way.

Okay, so this is basically like soft-serve ice cream, right?

It is.

It’s pretty much soft-serve.

Traditionally, they’ll use a commercial mix,

But they’ll put it in real Vermont maple syrup if it’s maple flavored.

Oh, okay.

You still have all the other flavors that, you know, you get it.

I have heard that some Vermonters believe that the maple creamy is the epitome of the creamy,

And it’s the one, if it’s on the menu, that you should automatically get.

It’s the creme de la creemies.

Absolutely.

Okay.

So it’s no different from if I went to Dairy Queen in Kentucky?

Except that you’re getting it in Vermont.

Except that I’m getting it in Vermont, and possibly with maple syrup, but not necessarily.

I’m liking that. I haven’t had that before. That sounds outstanding.

But your larger question is the one that I want to answer, Russell.

Why did it stick to Vermont?

And I think we have an answer for that, or some kind of answer.

No kidding.

It is kind of astonishing that you can find geopolitical borders in the world

That don’t align with, say, a river or a mountain or any other kind of physical obstruction

And find that the language on this arbitrary line is different on one side of the line from the other.

And there’s a reason for this.

We stick to our communities and we are conscious at all times of who we are, where we’re from,

And where our center of gravity is. We gravitate toward the center of our area rather than the edge

Of our area. And we become more like the people that we’re already like. And I know that sounds

Kind of circular, but that is exactly what it is. It is a self-reinforcing loop of behavior.

You can find this at the Canadian-American border. Absolutely. You can go just find the border and

You’ll be astonished that on one side of the border, even in the states that aren’t particularly

French, or provinces that aren’t particularly French-speaking, you will find on the Canadian

Side, it feels Canadian. And on the American side, it feels American. There’s a lot of reasons for

This that have to do with commerce. For example, is it Tim Hortons? Tim Hortons isn’t really going

To appear south of the border, right? Yep. And American chains won’t appear north of the border

And so on and so forth. Well, are you saying that calling them creamies is sort of like a matter of

Linguistic civic pride, sort of in the same way that youpers will say, holy wah, and they

Sort of do it maybe in a self-conscious kind of way?

It could be, but it also could be unselfconscious.

It’s the thing where you’re like, oh, inside, in order to feel like a Vermonter, I say the

Word creamy.

That’s it.

And you might not even think about it.

You just adopt the behavior of other people whom you want to be seen as allied with, right?

That’s the way we behave.

We want to be a part of the larger group.

And this kind of term fits perfectly into that.

We adopt the language of the people that we want to be like.

And I don’t want to be seen as if I’m from New Hampshire.

I want to be seen as if I’m from Vermont.

So I will use all the different expressions that Vermonters use.

How did we do, Russell?

That was great. Thank you.

Bye-bye. Take care.

But that regional language, just to kind of summarize,

The language that belongs to a place is incredibly common.

There’s tons of it, particularly with food words.

There’s the Speedy, for example, S-P-I-E-D-I-E,

In northern New York that’s a kind of sausage.

It really is regional, and that word just doesn’t exist in the rest of the United States

For that particular kind of sausage.

Yeah, that’s the way a lot of people discover differences in dialect, right?

Right, we start with the food words, and we move on from there.

Call us with your language questions, 877-929-9673,

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

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Grant.

Yeah, this is Grant. Who’s this?

This is Josh Moore. I’m calling from Big Sky, Montana.

Hi, Josh. Welcome to the show.

Hello, Josh.

Hi, Martha. Thanks for having me.

Sure thing. What’s on your mind?

Well, I called with a word that I’ve heard since I was a young guy.

I grew up in Hendersonville, North Carolina, in the Appalachian Mountains,

And my grandmother is a historian.

She’s over in Kingsport, Tennessee,

And she used to tell me about a word called malungion,

And I believe it’s spelled M-A-L or M-E-L-U-N-G-E-O-N is how I would guess.

And she said that it was like, I don’t know if it was a racial type of people or just people with like physical characteristics.

She described it as olive skin and like high cheekbones.

And she would always describe it with these physical characteristics.

She said that it was debated whether or not Melungeons were real or not.

I don’t know how heavy the debate has been over the years,

But she referred to Melungeons as high cheekbones, shovel-shaped teeth,

And they had a little knot on the back of their head,

And I don’t know if there’s any validity to that term.

And what kind of teeth?

She said, I remember her describing it as shovel-shaped teeth,

And how I always interpreted that was kind of thick at the top,

And curved in and skinny at the bottom.

And I don’t know if there’s validity to that at all, but I’m curious.

Yeah, it’s been a term that’s been used to refer to certain families in southeastern Appalachia.

With some of those physical characteristics that you’re talking about, the swarthy skin and dark eyes.

And we should also note that for more than 100 years, this was a term that was not used by those people themselves to describe themselves.

It was a term that was placed on that community by other people, and a lot of people who were referred to as Mlungens took deep offense to this term.

It wasn’t until the 1960s that there was some reclaiming of that word going on.

There’s a great website run by the Mlungen Heritage Association, which talks all about this.

But, yeah, there was a lot of mystery.

I remember hearing about the malungeants when I was growing up in Kentucky, and it was this mysterious group of people whose origin was difficult to explain.

And a lot of them claimed to be of Portuguese descent or Turkish descent or descended from pirates off the Atlantic coast or even the lost colonists of Roanoke Island.

You’ve heard those stories, Grant.

Yeah, absolutely.

And, of course, other people saying they have African-American origins and Native American Indian origins and that sort of thing.

And still disputes to this day about who they are and exactly who is a Mlungin, who isn’t, and where they come from.

Yeah, it’s interesting.

There was some DNA testing done a couple of years ago that traced their origins back to sub-Saharan African men and women of northern and central European origins.

Perhaps indentured servants even before slavery in this country.

Interesting.

But there’s a lot of mystery behind it.

The word itself, any ideas on that?

Yeah, it’s a strange word, melungen, but I suspect that the most likely origin of that word is that it’s from the French melange, meaning a mixture.

There have been other theories or other hypotheses proposed that maybe it comes from an old word meaning companion on a ship, I think, from Portuguese, something like that.

Highly unlikely.

Yeah, yeah, I think so.

Particularly because of the late arrival of the term versus the arrival of the people themselves.

Yeah, yeah.

I think the most likely explanation is melange, meaning a mixture.

Well, that’s incredibly interesting.

I appreciate you shedding some light onto that for me.

It’s been a word that’s always been in my mind because of my grandmother.

Thank you very much, Grand Martha.

It was a real pleasure to be on.

I listen to you all the time, and this is just real exciting for me.

Oh, great.

Great to talk with you.

Bye-bye, Josh.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

And, you know, we have a Facebook page with a lot of activity and a Facebook group with even more activity.

And we’re on Twitter, SoundCloud, iTunes, Stitcher, and all over the podcast services.

Another bit of college slang.

Talk to you later.

Lylas.

Lylas.

Love you like a sister.

That’s right.

You knew that one.

Yeah, that’s old.

Oh, is it old?

Yeah.

How old is it?

Decades.

It’s not… maybe even millennia.

No.

Really?

No.

We didn’t say that in college.

It’s probably like 30 or 40 years.

Is it?

Yeah.

Wow.

It goes hand and hand with all those string of acronyms that girls used to write in their letters to each other.

Yeah.

Oh, how did I miss that?

I guess I love them differently.

877-929-9673.

Hi there.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Scott Rickard calling from Billings, Montana.

Hi, Scott. Welcome.

What’s up, buddy?

My question is, I don’t know if Grant’s ever experienced this, but what is it with people adding an E sound to the end of a person’s first name?

Like, particularly, you hear it when someone’s talking about or to a child, or it’s a family member, or when you differentiate between two family members or relatives that share the first name, they’ll say, no, not Don, but Donnie.

Right.

Where does that come from?

And to me, it just gets a little more interesting when people do that to an adult.

Because what does this mean?

Does this mean the speaker considers this person a friend or useful or, you know, is it harmless?

Or in some cases, is this even a compliment?

Oh, that’s a good question.

This is a really good question.

There’s a lot to talk about this.

So your name is?

Scott.

And do people call you?

Yes.

Do you like it?

You know, it’s all right.

You know, I’ve just learned there’s far worse things to be called.

You don’t want to be called Scotty.

Don’t ever call me Marty.

Marty, no.

But we call you Martita off the air, right?

Well, Martita, yeah, that works.

But that’s the Spanish suffix.

Yeah, but Scott, if we called you Scotty, you wouldn’t be happy is what you’re saying.

No, it’s not the best thing.

And I have had it, Scott.

People, my grandmother, when I was a boy, called me, my middle name is Andrew.

She called me Grant Andy.

And it’s kind of a way of doing it.

Oh, that’s cute.

But granty doesn’t really work.

Sounds too much like granny and believe me I heard that but granny is another one of those grandmother to grandma to granny right so we’ve got this set of suffixes in english and there were a lot of them some of them more common than others and they they’re called many things but hypokaristic suffixes is the best word hypokaristic hypokarisms you might call them for nouns and i’m also called diminutive suffixes where when you affix these to the end of the word you change the meaning.

I mean, this is what we do with any kind of suffix or any kind of prefix or any kind of infix.

They modify what they’re connected to.

And we have in English two or three, depending which source you check, let’s just call them three, three hyperchoristic suffixes, which when attached to a noun or a proper noun, change it to mean smaller, cuter, less, sweeter, simpler.

And that’s what you get when you have a big don and little don or big don and donny.

Donny means small don or little don or it means the lesser of the two dons, you know.

So we’ve got one root which comes from Old English and another one which appeared in Scots and might be connected to Dutch and then another one which probably comes from French.

And all three of these suffixes, one way or the other mean small, cute, simple, tiny, adorable, maybe even.

And cute has an interesting kind of connection there because it could, in the old days, it meant small as often as it meant like sweet and attractive.

So that’s what’s happening here.

And this is just normal, everyday English.

This is the morphology of English.

We take a root, we add prefixes and suffixes, and voila, we’ve got another word to work with.

Okay.

So, Scott, what do you do when that happens?

I just let it pass.

When I was younger, it bothered me more.

But, you know, you just let it fly.

You know, what you could do, and there’s kind of a joking reverse trend to this, and it’s not that common, but you can take and add masculine-sounding suffixes.

Like it could be, no, no, don’t call me Scotty.

Call me Scotland or whatever, right?

Something else.

Scottmeister.

Yeah, Scottmeister sounds a little stronger and bolder than Scotty.

I mean, if you’re going to nickname me, give me something aggressive.

Yeah.

Scottmeister.

I’m sure I’m going to hear all of these in the next few weeks.

Yeah, why not, right?

But I hope we helped Scott.

You did. Thank you very much.

Yeah, sure. Take care now.

Thanks. Bye-bye.

All right. Take care.

What are the sweet names that you use in your house?

What do people call you that you don’t want to be called?

What would you rather be called?

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Email words@waywordradio.org.

Things have come to a pretty pass.

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

Thanks for listening. I’m Martha Burnett.

And I’m Grant Barrett. Adios.

Ciao.

Tomato, tomato, let’s call the whole thing off.

But oh, if we call the whole thing off, then we must part.

And oh, if we ever part, then that might be…