Mrs. Astor’s Horse (episode #1530)

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.

Okay, I’m thinking of an animal.

It has a head like a cat, feet like a cat, a tail like a cat.

It’s a cat.

But it’s not a cat.

Oh.

It’s not a cat.

What is it?

A caterpillar?

I don’t know.

I don’t know what.

A kitten.

Oh!

Of course.

Oh, of course.

That’s from a book called A Rocket in My Pocket, The Rhymes and Chants of Young Americans.

It’s from 1948, and I found it on archive.org, which, as you know, is a great resource.

Tons of books that you can check out in digital format.

Yeah.

Thousands of them.

Yeah, it’s super cool.

I got another riddle or two for you, and they’re a lot harder.

I had real trouble with them.

Red and blue and delicate green, the king can’t catch it and neither can the queen.

Pull it in the room and you can catch it soon.

Answer this riddle by tomorrow at noon.

Wow.

Yeah.

Is that bees or the wind?

Your guesses are better than mine.

I couldn’t figure it out.

It’s a rainbow.

Oh, wow.

Catch it in a prism, right?

Catch it in a prism.

Or in Queen’s Jewels or something like that.

Okay, nice.

Okay, that makes a lot of sense.

One more?

Yeah.

I washed my hands in water that never rain nor run.

I dried them with a towel that was never wove or spun.

A dew on a spider’s web.

Dew and sun.

Dew and sun?

Is it dew on a spider’s web?

Dew and sun?

Dew.

Oh, okay.

Yeah, dew and sun.

I was thinking of the towel.

What was the towel?

The sun, drying it out.

The sun, okay, gotcha.

Got it half right.

Wow.

When I was a kid, I loved checking books of riddles out of the library.

I really did.

Oh, man.

I worked my way down the Dewey Decimal Shelf.

I don’t remember the number anymore, but I would just hit them all, one after the other.

This is how I encountered Shel Silverstein, which is still a favorite of mine,

Just working my way down the shelves until I hit something good.

Oh, cool.

Well, you can do that at archive.org.

And the book was called A Rocket in My Pocket.

The Rhymes and Chants of Young Americans.

1940s.

How great.

If you’ve got rhymes or something that you remember from when you were a kid,

From the playground or something you wrote in a yearbook,

Give us a call, 877-929-9673, or tell us about it on Twitter @wayword.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Gabrielle Motika. How are you doing?

Hi, Gabrielle. Where are you?

I am in Beloit, Wisconsin.

Beloit.

One of the funnest town names to say, Beloit.

That’s the sound of a faucet dripping in the other room.

Yeah, I always heard a quarter in a toilet.

Beloit.

Well, what’s going on, Gabrielle?

Well, I am the mother of a nine-year-old, a five-year-old, and an almost two-year-old.

And as such, I have the lovely job of needing to teach the English language to complete blank slates.

The other day, I was looking at my five-year-old, who is my word lawyer.

If there’s a way that he can talk his way out of something, he will.

So I have to think very carefully about everything I say to him.

Oh, boy.

And as a five-year-old is, his pants are not completely closed.

And my first thought was, zip up your fly.

And I realized they only know the insect or the action.

How do I explain and where does this come from?

The word fly to mean a closure of your pants.

Oh, boy.

Did he do it, though?

Because I have a word lawyer at home myself.

I love that.

No, I said, zip up your pants, buddy.

And he did.

But there are colloquialisms that we use every day and don’t even think about teaching our children.

And my oldest is on the spectrum.

So everything is very literal with him.

My middle one started speaking at four months old, and everything with language is a game for him.

Wow, four months.

Yeah.

And you sleep when?

When the two-year-old goes to bed with me.

Okay.

Let me ask you this, because this word confused me for a long time.

Do you ever go camping?

I used to when I was growing up.

And I did see that, you know, there’s tent flies.

That was my question.

Which, again, is a little bit of an unusual word.

Right.

Right.

But it’s the same idea there.

On a tent, you have a fly, which is the flap in front, right?

Mm—

And this is the thing that I think surprises a lot of people when they dig into this.

The word fly in this case doesn’t refer to the zipper itself.

Nor the opening.

Nor the opening.

It refers to that flap over the zipper.

That’s a fly, just like a fly on a tent.

Which is why you have button fly jeans.

Exactly.

Right.

Exactly.

Exactly.

Yeah.

So it has to do with that flap and the idea of fly being an old word for flap.

Okay.

I was wondering about that.

I put it out to my friends who have a rather diverse set of interests and skills, including reenacting.

And one of my friends said, well, maybe it has to do with cod pieces.

And I’m like, how do you get cod pieces from fly?

Thinking about fishing?

I don’t know.

Yeah, I don’t know.

Yeah, well, it does.

Have to do with the history of men’s fashion and the fact that back in the day, you did have a flap

That went over that part of the anatomy. Okay. So it’s the flying one piece of cloth

Over another. Right. Right. Kind of flapping like a wing does. Well, but also looking a lot like

Folded wings, whether on an actual housefly or on a bird, they have this interesting way of tucking

In and covering a space, right?

So it kind of came from people observing nature around them.

It’s not 100% clear that that’s the origin.

And how they talked about it.

It’s not 100% clear, but clearly there’s something happening here between the word fly, the idea

Of flap, which is also wing-related.

Certainly there’s something happening here.

So that’s pretty much it.

And you mentioned button flap.

Originally it was buttons there, and the zippers only came later.

I only recently learned that zipper originally referred to boots like galoshes that had zippers on them.

I did not know that.

And zippers only were added to clothing later on.

Thank you very much, Gabrielle, for your call.

We really appreciate it.

And good luck teaching.

Well, thank you for answering my question.

Good luck filling those blank slates.

Thanks.

You have a lovely day.

You too.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

I do like the idea of the word lawyer, children.

I think I’ve told you this once.

My son still does this, but I’ll say stop jumping on the bed.

He’s like, I’m not jumping.

I’m boinging.

I’m like, oh, don’t do that.

You know what I meant.

I’m not throwing, I’m tossing.

877-929-9673.

We love talking about words that kids say that maybe aren’t quite right,

And then your whole family adopts that word.

And we had an example of that from Rebecca, who sent us a tweet that said,

A friend recently mentioned that her eldest could not say Pentecost,

But instead said polka dots.

Now all the kids say it, and they make a point to wear polka dots to church on Pentecost Sunday.

How nice is that? That’s adorable.

Right?

Yeah.

Polka dot Sunday.

Right? Preparing for polka dots.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello.

Hi, who’s this?

This is Eva Zanzel calling from Fairbanks, Alaska.

Welcome, Eva. What can we do for you?

When I was growing up, we would spend the night at our grandmother’s house sometimes,

And on a hot summer day, she might tell us to go into the back bedroom and raise the window down.

And we just thought that was the funniest thing, and it would giggle,

But I never understood why she said, raise the window down.

And I’d think about it as I got older, and I thought,

I wonder if it has anything to do with the type of window.

And that’s as far as I got.

Okay.

So when she said raise the window down, she meant open it to let some air in?

To open the window.

Okay.

And where was grandmother’s house?

It was in San Jose, California area, but she was from Texas.

Okay.

Okay, good.

And have you heard that anywhere else?

You’re in Alaska now.

I assume you’ve been to some other places.

Is this just one person, this one time?

I only heard my grandmother saying it, but I mentioned it to a friend from Georgia, and I asked, have she ever heard that expression? And she says, oh, yeah.

Yeah.

And my great-grandmother, my grandmother’s mother, was from South Carolina.

So I’m just wondering if it’s a southern expression or if it really had something to do with the windows.

Yeah, the kind of window.

Martha, you are from Louisville. You have family from North Carolina. As a representative of the South, do you feel like this is part of your vocabulary or something your family said?

No, it reminds me of when my dad would talk in the car about the need to run the glass up.

Run the glass up, yeah.

Run the glass up, which meant roll up the window.

But no, raise the window down, I never heard.

Yeah, Eva, I see it here and there.

I’ve heard it over the years.

It is not that common.

It is mostly thought to be Southern, especially by Southerners.

But I do find examples of raise the window down or raise it down, meaning to open a window, scattered throughout the country in print over the years.

It has never been really that common.

There is one entry in the Dictionary of American Regional English.

And there’s an interesting citation there, which has the opposite meaning.

Raise the window down appears to mean to close the window, to shut it, to prevent the rain from coming in.

And so I’m wondering what you’re wondering.

If there was a particular kind of crank window, I was imagining the, what are those louvered windows called? I forget.

There’s a fancy name for those.

Jalousy windows?

Jalousy windows.

Sometimes they have the crank on the side where there’s a crank action and the window is closing.

And the same crank action will either open it up or close it.

But again, it’s not very much has been done in the dialect studies to find out information about this.

Even I don’t know very much about it either.

That’s the extent of it.

Yeah, I was wondering if it had to do with, you know, double hung windows where you could open them from the top or the bottom.

Oh, nice.

I like that.

So there’d be some kind of contradiction about what raise and down meant.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So if you wanted to put the window down, what would she say?

I don’t know.

Lower the window off?

I guess the opposite.

Interesting.

I think she might just say close the window.

Close the window.

Well, I think it’s time to gather some data on this. I know there are people out there who use or have heard raise the window down to mean lower the window to let the air in, whether in a car or a home.

Do call us or email us and let us know who you are and where you are and when you heard it and who said it and what else you think about it. 877-929-9673 or email words@waywordradio.org.

Eva, we’re going to find out more about this.

All right.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Take care.

Thanks for calling.

We had a phone call from Sean Carter who said that at his office, they’re kicking around a question about what you call the overhang area on a building where people can drive up and let people off and there’s a roof overhead, like at an emergency room or something like that.

And they were thinking maybe it’s called an overhang, but that didn’t sound right, or a portico.

And I didn’t know what to tell them.

So I called my friend Janine, who’s an architect at Steinberg Heart here in San Diego.

And she said the term that we’re looking for is porte cochere, which is from French and literally means coach gateway or coach door.

How nice is that?

Port cochere.

Oh, architects, they have all the language, don’t they?

Yes, gorgeous language in architecture.

Port cochere sounds fancier than just porch.

877-929-9673.

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

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

And joining us on the line from New York City is our quiz guide, John Chaneski.

Hi, John.

Hi, Martha.

Hi, Grant.

What’s up, bud?

Well, you know, I mentioned before that I have a degree in drama, so I love plays.

And I think today’s quiz is going to be about plays.

It’s a good thing that our greatest playwrights have always been good spellers.

Otherwise, we might have ended up with the simply awful Tennessee William work, The Slags Menagerie.

Can you imagine?

All right, I’ll describe a play from this alternate terrible spelling universe.

It will be a mashup of the original play and the misspelling.

There’ll be one word misspelled in each title.

You tell me the misspelled play.

All right?

For example, in this Shakespeare work, Titania, Oberon, Puck, and all the fairies are packing heat.

Now, that would be a Midsummer Night’s armed.

Oh, gosh.

Okay.

Got it?

All right.

There’s plenty of clues in here, too.

I’m sure you’ll get it.

Let’s see how you do.

Oscar Wilde offers a lighthearted romp in which an idle young gentleman convinces his California friends that he’s from New England.

I want to see that one.

Yeah, that sounds pretty good.

Is that the importance of being Eastern?

Yes, the importance of being Eastern.

Yes, very nice.

Thornton Wilder’s metatheatrical play about sleepy Grover’s Corners, its residents, and how they do whatever it is they feel like doing.

Our want.

Our want.

I was thinking what else could that become?

Arthur Lawrence and Stephen Sondheim offer a sort of musical mashup of Romeo and Juliet and Julius Caesar in which all of the Jets take a shiv to Tony on March 15th.

West Side Story.

I know.

It becomes West Ides Story.

West Ides Story.

Yes.

Alright.

In this black comedy play later made into a Frank Capra film starring Cary Grant, two eccentric ladies work in a traveling circus and they poison lonely men and hide them in their basement.

Arsenic and old lace.

But carnies and old lace.

Carnies and old lace, yes.

Again, that’s a play I would go see.

That I would go see.

William Shakespeare, so good he could even create a rollicking comedy from a nature documentary about the breeding of small mole-like mammals.

The mating of the shrew?

The mating of the shrew, yes.

NSFW, by the way.

Well, not safe for the kids.

Don’t bring the kids to this one.

More Shakespeare.

This time he turns a famous set of words from a Game of Thrones around, and the Starks find that it’s not as cold as it’s supposed to be.

So winter is coming turns into…

Winter’s late.

The winter’s late, yes.

The winter’s late.

All right.

You guys did very, very well.

All of these, I retain the rights to these if anybody wants to put these up as a play.

I’d like to see some of these.

Sure.

Sure.

Me too.

All right.

And I’ll see you guys next week.

Thanks, John.

Thanks, John.

Bye.

We’ve been talking about language, and we’d love to hear from you.

So call us, 877-929-9673, or send us an email.

That address is words@waywordradio.org.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi.

My name is Lydia.

I’m calling from Madison, Alabama.

Hi, Lydia. Welcome to the show.

Hello, Lydia.

What can we do for you?

Well, I have this question about two words.

They sounded really similar, but they’re spelled a little differently.

Oh.

It’s immigrate with an E and one M, and immigrate with an I and two M.

I could see how these could be confusing.

Did you look them up, or you just thought of us and thought you’d go straight to the experts?

Yeah, I thought of you guys.

Oh, we’re so glad you did.

Yeah, me too.

And the difference between these two words, Lydia, has to do with your point of view.

They’re two different words.

And basically, you emigrate when you leave a place.

That’s with the E at the beginning.

Emigrate has to do with leaving.

And immigrate has to do with entering a place.

So you’re traveling in each case, but in one case you’re going out of a place, and with the other word you’re coming in to a place.

And the way to remember that is the I at the beginning of immigrant has to do with somebody going in, and the E in emigrate has to do with exiting or leaving.

Yeah.

And there’s something kind of permanent about this.

It’s not just I’m immigrating from the house today to go to work, right? You immigrate from a country when you are going to make a permanent move, or you immigrate to a country when you’re going to make a permanent move.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think so, too.

And another difference between the two is that immigrate going in has two Ms, and emigrate just has one when you’re going out.

So when you get to the place, you get a new M.

Okay.

Does that make sense?

Yeah.

Okay, good.

If you need further clarification, pop us an email and we’ll send you a little note on it, all right?

Okay.

Do you listen to our show a lot?

Yeah.

Great.

Well, you’ve helped a lot of other people understand these words too, Lydia, so we’re really glad you called.

Thank you.

Thank you.

All right.

Bye, Lydia.

Take care.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

You know, sometimes kids ask the best questions.

Right.

And we’d love to hear from more of you, so give us a call, 877-929-9673, or send us your questions in email.

That address is words@waywordradio.org.

Remember our discussion about the option to change your first name? That prompted an email from Michelle Kazmer in Tallahassee, Florida.

She writes, when I started kindergarten, the teacher asked each of us if we went by a name other than the one appearing on her roster, like Jamie instead of James or middle name Patrick instead of a first name.

And she wrote the preferred names we told her on our crayon boxes, reinforcing for us how to spell our names and reminding her of what we like to be called.

I told the teacher with 100% confidence that I had always been called Shelly by my family and everyone else since birth.

I spelled it out for her carefully and very emphatically, S-H-E-L-L-E-Y.

All the students in the class and the teacher called me Shelly.

I wrote Shelly on all my worksheets and so forth.

Imagine my mother’s 100% surprise and shock on parent night when she couldn’t find my desk nor any of my written work because they didn’t use surnames on their written work.

The conversation reported to me between my mother and the teacher sounds priceless.

Prior to the first day of kindergarten, I’d never been called Shelly.

I didn’t know anyone called Shelly.

There was no reason at all except in my own five-year-old head for this change, including this slightly idiosyncratic spelling.

I remained Shelly for all of kindergarten and then went back to Michelle starting in first grade.

I still can’t explain solidly why I did it, and I hadn’t thought about it for some time until I heard your show.

Oh, kids are the best.

I love that story so much.

It just reminds me of my five-year-old mind and how I was so sure of something.

Just absolutely.

You know, no question.

I just absolutely believe that when I grew up, I was going to be a boy.

And also that I could dig a hole in the backyard and go all the way to the other side of the world.

And I tried.

And we got about two or three feet down.

But, you know, when you’re five, you just kind of.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The world’s things are possible.

Right.

And imagination is unlimited.

Right.

And my name is Shelly. I just love that story.

Oh, Michelle, that is Shelly. That’s a wonderful story. Thank you for sharing that with us.

You know, we’re still looking for your tales of changing your first name. These are good.

We love them. Serious stuff, too. As an adult, why did you decide that you had a different name?

What worked for you? How did it finally click and you knew that’s who you were meant to be?

877-929-9673. Your email, words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Grant. My name is John Furter. I’m calling from Bismarck, North Dakota.

Hi, John. Welcome to the show.

Hello, John. What can we do for you?

So I have a word search question.

I am enrolled in an online program for veterans who have gotten out of the military or have returned from a deployment.

And that program works with processing emotions, things like that.

Well, one of the things it talked about was that we’re always feeling emotions or feeling feelings, and we’re working on trying to identify those.

And the emotion I can’t seem to identify is what I’m calling middle emotion.

And so I basically put all of our emotions on a timeline from 1 to 10, 1 being clinical depression, something like that, 10 being complete euphoria.

But I can’t figure out what number five would be. If you are dead center in the middle, what would be the word for number five? And I actually have, there’s a peer mentor program on that program.

And I chatted with somebody on there and we tried to come up with some words.

And one of the words he came up with was insouciant, which I really liked, but I had to look it up because I wasn’t familiar with it. And the definition was free from worry or anxiety.

And I was like, yeah, that still doesn’t seem quite right. And so after I did that for kind of searched around for that for a little while, I figured I’d give you guys a call and kind of figure out and see if you guys had any ideas.

Yeah, I agree that insouciant isn’t really the right word. To me, it’s a little more about carefree, even when you should have care. Insouciant isn’t really that neutral middle word.

The other word that he came up with was also apathy.

But I was like, typically apathy is associated more with the depression side of it.

I was like, so that’s a little bit more down towards that one side.

So it’s a tough word to come up with.

And you don’t want to use a word like normal because everyone’s normal is different, right?

Correct.

What’s wrong with neutral?

Neutral is actually not a bad word.

Not a word I typically would associate with an emotion.

But that could work. The other one I was thinking of was the word zen.

Z-E-N?

Yeah. Because the way I look at it is it’s kind of one of those things where as soon as you identify the emotion or that you’re feeling it, you’re not feeling it anymore.

Yeah. Another one you might try is affectless, although it’s a little jargony. Your affect is your demeanor, your emotions, what’s happening with your composure.

And so affectus means you are neither one thing nor another. You’re without affect.

I think of affect as what’s projected.

You know, like you talk about somebody with a flat affect.

Right.

So it’s all about what is seen rather than what is felt.

Yeah.

That’s my sense of it, but I don’t know.

I do like neutral.

That was one of the first words I wrote down.

We’re really talking about the middle or the median, right? Because your really negative isn’t the same as my really negative, and your really positive isn’t the same as my really positive.

Like, even our middle, our neutral isn’t going to be the same.

We each have a different emotional range.

Right.

It’s your five.

And I don’t think that everybody’s would be the same, but I think the word for it would be the same.

I mean, somebody’s sad is not the same as somebody else’s sad.

Somebody’s, you know, happy is not the same as somebody else’s happy.

But, I mean, each person has a happy, each person has a sad.

Right.

So.

I would also argue against the word Zen, which was one you suggested.

Zen has got the religious, spiritual connotations that I’m not sure apply here.

If we want something a little more clinical and direct, Zen isn’t going to work.

Right.

Yeah.

I mean, like I said, I’ve just been kind of searching through words and looking here and there to see what I could find.

And it’s been a tough one to come up with.

I’ll tell you what we’ll do, John.

We’ll throw this out to our listeners and see what they come up with.

All right. Perfect.

We appreciate your call, John.

Thank you for the thoughtful question.

Bye-bye.

If you’ve got a word for John, what is the name for the middle emotion? Exactly halfway between very negative and very positive.

Let us know, 877-929-9673.

Or email words@waywordradio.org.

Or tell us on Twitter @wayword.

If you see somebody who’s trying to make themselves look attractive by messing with their hair, putting on makeup, and sort of straightening up, you might say they’re preening.

You know, they’re trying to look especially good.

Or primping.

Yeah, primping or preening.

Preening, of course, refers to the action of birds, you know, and arranging their feathers.

What I didn’t realize until recently is that there’s another wonderful word, allopreening.

Can you guys remember?

Allo, is that A-double-L?

Yes.

A-double-L-O preening.

I don’t know what that would be.

That’s what birds do to each other.

You preen somebody else.

And I kind of like that as a metaphor for, you know, you brush the lint off of your sweetie’s lapel or something like that.

Yeah, you make sure the collars turn the right way and the tie is straight, that sort of thing.

Yeah, allopreening.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Julie Shea from Greenwood, Indiana.

Hi, Julie.

Welcome to the show.

Hello, Julie.

What’s up?

For years and years, my mother, she’d see somebody really dressed up, and she’d say,

Look at that.

She’s dressed better than Miss Astor’s pet horse.

And I wondered if that was just a Midwestern thing or if that was something she made up

Or if you’d ever heard of it.

What are we talking about here?

Are we talking about tuxedos and top hats or fancy gowns and diamonds, tiaras?

Are we talking about even further beyond that?

No, just really simple.

I mean, someone that’s just really, you know, dressed really, really nice.

Okay.

That would be her way of, I think, always saying, you know, oh, my gosh, you know, she just looks fabulous.

Okay.

Okay.

So it’s not about fancy clothes.

It’s about good presentation?

Yeah, I think so.

That’s the way I kind of took it as I grew up, you know.

I remember when I was a little girl, I remember she said that, and I was like, what?

I said, who is this Miss Astor, and why is she putting clothes on her horse?

Yeah, why, Martha?

Why is Mrs. Astor putting clothes on their horse?

What is wrong with Mrs. Astor?

Right.

Oh, well, their horse was very modest.

Well, we all like to dress up our pets a little.

Pets in human clothes.

That’s funny.

Yeah.

Right?

It’s cute.

Yes.

Well, the Astors historically were a very, very, very wealthy family in this country.

They were definitely in the 1%.

And so if you’re talking about Miss Astor’s pet horse, then that horse is going to be living in the lap of luxury.

And it’s not just a horse.

I mean, there are lots of different variations of this expression.

Miss Astor’s pet cow, Miss Astor’s pet pony, Miss Astor’s plush horse, Miss Astor’s billy goat.

All reflecting the idea that Mrs. Astor, whoever she was in this big and very wealthy family in this country, had a ton of money.

She was loaded.

And so the term Astor’s pet horse means an overly dressed up or made up person.

And a lot of times you hear it more in the north than any place else in this country.

We’re talking one of the wealthiest families in the history of this country.

As in Waldorf Astori.

Well, yeah, Waldorf Astori.

But, well, there were a lot of Mrs. Astors.

But the one that we’re talking about was Caroline Skirmerhorn Astor.

There’s a subway station with the name of Skirmerhorn in Brooklyn.

But they were incredibly wealthy, and she led what were called the 400.

This was the list of the top people in New York City that you wanted to be a part of.

This meant that you had arrived.

You were invited to all the parties.

You married into the right families, da-da-da-da.

You know, you got invited to the right clubs.

And she was it for a very long time until she died in 1908.

She would have these fabulous parties with all this decoration, including literally dressing up her horse.

She actually did that.

Wow.

Yeah.

That is so neat.

Yeah.

That is so neat.

And it just carried from state all over the country then.

Yeah, yeah.

People saying that and picking it up.

Yeah.

I wouldn’t call them the Kardashians of the day, but certainly they were the kind of thing that if you were of lesser means,

You might read about the asters with some jealousy or some admiration.

They were on the front headline.

Yeah.

Right.

People also use the term astropurious, which meant very haughty.

Oh, my.

Yeah.

So there you go, Julie.

Well, thank you so much for having me on and answering my questions.

Thank you.

Thanks for calling.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

So if there’s a word or phrase that’s been kicking around your family and you’re curious about it,

Give us a call, 877-929-9673, or send us an email.

That address is words@waywordradio.org.

Here’s another little rhyme from A Rocket in My Pocket,

The rhymes and chants of young Americans.

It goes, when the donkey saw the zebra, he began to twitch his tail.

Well, I never said the donkey.

There’s a mule that’s been to jail.

Nice.

The zebra is a mule that’s been to jail.

Wonderful.

I wonder what it did.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org or share your childhood rhymes on Twitter with us @wayword.

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 want to talk about an old word that deserves to be revived.

But in order to do that, I need to talk about storks.

And specifically white storks in antiquity.

They had a really good reputation in a lot of cultures.

The Hebrew word for stork is hasida, which means the kindly one.

And it comes from the word hesed, which means loving kindness.

So it’s a bird that does acts of kindness.

And among the Greeks and Romans, storks were known for being especially affectionate with each other and nurturing with their young.

And it was said that the young, in turn, would come back to the nest and support their parents when the parents got old.

And the Greeks and Romans believed that the young storks would pluck their own feathers to keep them warm and go hunt for them and bring them back food the way that their parents had done.

Had done for them.

Isn’t that beautiful?

And maybe they thought that because storks tend to go back

To the same nest again and again, and they nurture their young for a particularly long time.

Anyway, the Greek word for stork is pelargos.

Oh.

Ding, ding, ding.

Are you thinking?

I think so.

Okay.

For a long time in ancient Greece, there was a law called the pelargonia,

From the word for stork, that required the adult children to care for their parents.

And the Romans had a similar requirement, the lexiconia, which meant stork law.

And there was also a word that eventually found its way into English, all the way from ancient Greek via French.

And that word that showed up in the 17th century is antipelagy.

A-N-T-I-P-E-L-A-R-G-Y.

Antipelagy, which means

Don’t abandon your parents?

Pretty much.

In a 1656 book of words, it says that anti-pelagy is the reciprocal love of children to their parents,

Or more generally, any requital or mutual kindness.

Isn’t that gorgeous?

That’s very wonderful.

Anti-pelagy.

Anti-pelagy.

Well, the reason I had an aha moment is that I recently took out some plants that weren’t thriving in front of my house.

Oh, I’m having an aha moment too.

I dug up the plants, and I wanted something that would thrive in Southern California and not require a lot of upkeep and maybe put some scent in the air.

So I came across pelargoniums, which are also known as scented geraniums.

I installed the cinnamon one and the apple one, I think the chocolate one, and there’s like a whole bunch of these.

And they’re vaguely like, the lemon one is very limiting.

The cinnamon one’s close, but the apple one’s very far.

But they’re thriving.

They’re doing very well.

So I have four different kinds of pelargonium in front of my house now.

That’s the Latin genus name, and there’s all the different subspecies and species.

Right.

Pelergonium, which comes from the bill-shaped seed pod.

Oh, how about that?

It’s also called storksbill.

You know, never take on the woman who wrote the book about flower words.

She’s going to know it.

Yeah, you’ve got storksbill all over your yard.

I do.

And they’re beautiful, and they’re thriving.

They’re doing very well.

Yeah.

And it comes from the Greek word for stork.

But antipelargy is such a gorgeous word, you know?

Children looking after their parents.

And anti, in that sense, means sort of reciprocal or giving back.

Oh, I see.

Gotcha.

Sort of like antiphonal music is going back and forth.

So there’s a mutuality there.

The world is complex.

Language is interesting.

We’re doing a show about it.

We want you to be a part of it.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

Hi there.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi.

My name is Cindy Fine.

I’m calling from Spokane, Washington.

And I have a question about some colloquialisms that I heard from my father when he was growing up as a child in the mid-1930s to late 1930s.

His family lived in Powell County, Montana.

That’s east of Missoula, west of Helena.

And his father worked as a miner.

So the terms that my dad would use, one was tapper light.

As someone was leaving to kind of say farewell, good luck, be well, he would send them off with that phrase, tapper light.

And I think that that comes from a mining term like using dynamite to work with, and you would want to be careful and tap it lightly.

And then the other one is high grade.

And so he would use that like we’re passing the salad bowl around and he would take all of the best tomatoes out of the bowl and he would say, I’m going to high grade it.

And maybe that comes from like taking the best ore out for yourself.

I don’t know.

But I love these little phrases.

And I wonder if you can kind of clarify my understanding of them and maybe know of any others.

Well, it sounds like you’re on the right track, frankly.

It sounds like you really nailed them.

Your granddad was a miner.

You picked up some language, and that sounds about right to me.

The tapper light one really I find to be very affectionate and is still used somewhat today.

It’s kind of localized now in Butte, Montana.

But one time it was fairly widespread in the West.

You can find it in old newspapers throughout all of the mining region in California, Nevada, and other places.

And it is what you said.

It’s about trying to be gentle when you’re mining to avoid premature detonation of your explosives.

But it’s also about being relatively gentle to avoid cave-ins and rock slides and all these other things that can cause death.

Mining seems like a brute force job, and it kind of is, but it also involves a lot of care and a lot of safety and a lot of precaution.

So, yeah, tap or light.

It’s like saying drive safely when someone leaves the house.

-huh.

Take care.

Take care.

Take it easy.

The high grade is still used today.

So imagine back in the day when things were a little less sophisticated and it was basically guys in holes with pickaxes, you know, digging.

And sometimes if they came across a good vein or a particularly good nugget and they could pocket it, they would pocket it.

They’d take the best stuff right off the top.

And the harder to get ore would be what would go out in the wheelbarrows and the rail cars and what have you.

So these days you might high grade the M&Ms out of the trail mix when you’re hiking with somebody.

Exactly like that.

And that too dates to the early 1900s.

Cherry pick, basically, is what most of us would say today.

Or to pick over, right?

Also used in logging and fishing, by the way, to talk about stealing.

A common trick even now is you sell land for timber, but a devious person will go through and pick out the best trees before selling the land and take them.

And that’s high grading those trees.

Also called in logging, gutting a show.

To gut a show, yeah.

Didn’t know that.

So anyway, yeah, so both these terms are mining.

I just love that they’re still out there.

It feels like sometimes that the colorful language of the world is being washed out and replaced by stuff that doesn’t have the charm for me, like video game language, which is fine.

It just doesn’t feel as close to the earth to me.

Yeah.

Cindy, do you still use these?

Not often, but it just kind of has a little soft spot in my heart when I do hear them.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I feel the same way, even though I don’t have the tradition of miners in my family.

I feel the same way.

Those linguistic heirlooms.

So, Cindy, thanks for your call.

We really appreciate it.

Thank you.

Thanks for calling.

Bye-bye.

Our show is heard throughout the mining region, even now in Northern California and Nevada and Wyoming and Yellowstone and that area.

I’d love to hear more mining language, frankly.

I think it’s out there.

Bring it.

877-929-9673.

Or email words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Alex calling from Amarillo, Texas.

Welcome, Alex. How can we help you?

Yes, I have a question for you.

It kind of started out as a little bit of a pet peeve.

I noticed people would say forward instead of forward.

And as I paid attention to it more and more, I noticed that it was happening on the national stage, too, like with elected officials, politicians, reporters, so on and so forth, to the point where I realize that I hear it more than I actually hear forward.

So when exactly did this shift kind of happen?

I don’t know. It just seems really accepted nowadays.

So we’re talking about the word forward, F-O-R-W-A-R-D, right?

Yes, sir.

And how do you say it? Do you say forward or forward?

I say forward.

Forward. And are you finding any other patterns in the people who say this? Are they of a certain education level or a certain part of the country or anything like that?

No, not really. Like I said, I’ve kind of noticed it on the national scale because I work in the news media and I’m hearing reports from all over the country all the time. And I just hear it more often than not.

Yeah, it’s a thing for that first R and forward to be dropped. And there are records that linguists have compiled to show it’s been happening for at least 100 years. There’s a process called dissimilation, which I realize is a wonky word, but it’s one of the ways in which we drop sounds from words. And in this particular case, what’s happening is when a sound occurs more than once in a word, sometimes we drop one of those instances of that sound, especially when the sound occurs between a consonant made with the lips and one made with the tip of the tongue. And that’s literally what’s happening here with forward.

And you find this in other words.

It’s not only forward that you hear.

You hear governor with that first R dropped.

Governor.

Particular.

Particular.

Surprise is a very common one.

It often comes out as surprise.

That first R is gone.

Paraphernalia.

Paraphernalia.

Albuquerque.

That first R just poof, poof goes away.

Oh, there’s an R.

There’s an R.

Yeah, there’s an R there.

And there’s a really nice paper by Nancy Hall called R-Dissimilation, D-I-S-S-I-M-I-L-A-T-I-L-N.

And it’s very wonky, very academic, but there’s a list in it of words that go through this dissimilation.

And she tries to explain in a reasonable way the patterns that she sees.

And I think she’s done an excellent job of showing that isn’t just one-offs, but there’s a real physical thing happening in the mouth.

There’s something about these words and the order in which the sounds occur that is forcing us down a simpler path when we speak.

And this happens a lot in English.

Actually, every language goes through this.

So the other thing that I want to note here is I am not surprised that you’ve heard this on the national stage from a lot of national news media.

Because I have seen evidence that some people believe that forward is the only correct pronunciation of that word and they teach it to their staff.

And I’ve heard of this, and I think it’s a mistake, but I think they’re modeling it on a British pronunciation, first of all.

They’re modeling on old East Coast white male pronunciations in the late 1890s.

And they’re also thinking of the word toward, which some people believe should only be pronounced as toward.

So they’re teaching people to say it that way, which for right or wrong, I think it’s incorrect, but lots of people are doing it.

I’ve got a soup spoon.

I can’t stop the tide, you know?

I have a friend from New York who says there’s no R in forward, and if there is, it’s optional.

Like neither R is in forward?

What is forward?

Forward.

Forward.

She also says always.

Always.

You know, that W.

Sounds like she’s got some speech things.

Now, there are people, by the way, who pronounce forward to rhyme with forward, F-O-R-D.

And as a matter of fact, there are people who say the word forehead and the word forward, they rhyme.

They sound like homophones.

Forward.

Yeah, it’s very interesting.

So anyway, one thing I want to note before we go, Alex, is I counted nine different pronunciations that are possible in the United States of the word forward.

Really?

Meaning where you are, what your background is, whether or not you have R-fulness or roticity.

That is, you come from a dialect culture where the R is not pronounced in certain circumstances and other things.

So it’s got a track record for being kind of an ambiguous word.

The oldest words have these two conflicting characteristics.

One is the oldest words tend to be very stable.

But the thing is, if they had multiple forms back in the day, they may still have multiple stable forms now.

And I believe forward is one of those.

That’s super interesting.

Yeah, language is interesting.

We should do a show about that.

Let’s.

Anyway, I hope you come away a little reassured, Alex.

No, yeah, I do appreciate it, Grant and Martha.

All right, call us again sometime with your observations, all right?

All right, Candy.

We look forward to it.

Take care.

I want to share the name of that paper one more time.

Yeah.

I think it’s going to be too wonky for most of the audience, but the lists are good.

The list of words that undergo this dissimilation.

It’s called R-Dissimilation, D-I-S-S-I-M-I-L-A-T-I-O-N,

And it’s by Nancy Hall, and it’s freely available in PDF form.

Check it out.

And give us a call about your language question, 877-929-9673,

Or send your emails to words@waywordradio.org.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Tess Cootie-Anders, and I’m calling from San Antonio, Texas.

Welcome, Tess.

Hi, Tess.

What can we do for you?

What’s up?

I grew up with my dad and my grandfather playing this game with us, kind of a, I don’t know,

Kind of a boogeyman game where they would chase us around and say,

Old Sanny Mocus is coming to get you.

And I guess like most kids, I assumed all granddads and dads played the Sanny Mocus game

And sort of forgot about it as I grew older.

And after our father passed away, my sister and I were, you know, reminiscing and talking about it.

And it occurred to us that probably no one else knew what a sani mocus was.

And when we asked, no one did.

And all these years later, we’ve really wanted to know, was it something unique to our family or was it something regional from where my parents grew up?

And just what was the etymology of a sani mocus?

What is it?

All right.

Spell that for us.

Spell that for us, will you?

So, you know, here’s my best guess.

Santee mocus as in S-A-N-T-Y.

And we’ve imagined mocus to be either M-O-C-U-S or M-O-K-U-S.

At least that’s how it seemed to be enunciated as, you know, we were being chased.

Sure.

There’s a clue in what you said a few minutes ago, a minute ago, about the boogeyman.

And I think this is the answer.

Martha, don’t you think? I think this is one of the many names for the devil. There are in English

Probably more than a thousand names for the devil because it’s less important now, but it used to be

Important that you never named the devil. Did you always come up with an indirect reference when you

Needed to mention the devil? Mentioning him brings him, makes him present and involves him in your

Life.

And there are similar sounding terms that aren’t quite the same, but I could see how a

Corruption would get you to Santimocus.

One of them is Tantibogus.

Another one is Tantribobus

Or Tantrumbobus, something like that.

And these are listed in some of the older dictionaries and

Some of the reference works that kind of specialize in gathering up language from old tales and old

Stories.

I don’t know for sure that that’s the origin of old Santimocus, but boy, it sure sounds

Like another name for the devil.

I think that that makes sense.

I mean, both.

So my grandfather was a pastor, his father was a pastor.

So the idea of, you know, the devil being an important character in our lives would definitely be, definitely resonates.

Yeah.

Any other description of this character?

Well, only by their actions, maybe.

So, you know, whenever either of them played this game with us,

They sort of always raised their hands above their heads and raised their shoulders in sort of a menacing fashion

And sort of lurched about.

And it was just a, you know, I think the implication was that it was a creature.

And you would run squealing through the house, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, this says a lot about our family, possibly.

I don’t know.

But it was a lot of fun.

And that resonates.

I feel like that that could be it.

Well, you know, if anybody else grew up with old Santa Mocas, we’re going to hear about it.

I hope so.

I hope you do.

And I really, really appreciate the insight.

Thank you so much for your call.

Absolutely.

You all have a great day.

Okay.

Thanks, Tess.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Well, if you ever heard of old Santa Mocas, we’d love to hear about it from you.

So give us a call, 877-929-9673, or tell us about the other boogeyman in your life.

Send those emails to words@waywordradio.org.

Thanks to senior producer Stefanie Levine, director Colin Tedeschi, editor Tim Felten, and production assistant Tamar Wittenberg.

You can send us a message, subscribe to the podcast, get the newsletter, or catch up on hundreds of past episodes at waywordradio.org.

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Who are changing the way the world talks about language.

We’re coming to you from the Recording Arts Center

At Studio West in San Diego, California.

Thanks for listening.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

Until next time, goodbye.

Bye.

Thank you.