Mudlarking (episode #1561)

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.

In the late 18th century, the English term mudlark was a rather grim one. It referred to people who scavenged for usable debris in the cold, stinking, tidal mud of a river because they didn’t have any other means of income.

Today, mudlarking is more of a hobby, and it’s the subject of a book I’m really enjoying by Laura Makelum. It’s called Mudlark, in search of London’s past along the River Thames.

It turns out that much of the River Thames is tidal, which means that twice a day it pulls back to reveal its secrets. And Makelum has found all kinds of things over the years, everything from ancient Roman jewelry to modern engraved wedding rings.

And you’ve got to wonder how somebody lost that, or maybe they got angry and threw it in the river. But there’s so much history in each one of those objects.

One of my favorite examples is the fact that she’s always finding these little clay pipes. So I’m talking about tiny clay pipes. And the reason they were tiny is because tobacco was initially very expensive when it was first brought to Britain.

And she also finds a lot of Elizabethan-style pins because in those days everybody was having to pin their clothes. And she’s even found Mesolithic flints. And Grant, I know that will appeal to you because you’ve talked before about just what that feeling must be like of picking up something that you know has only been touched by a human thousands of years ago.

Oh, yeah. But I’m also interested in those ancient one-hitters. Any modern vapor or pot smoker would recognize that. Yeah, these are little bitty clay pipes.

Oh, that’s a lovely book. It sounds wonderful. Can we talk more about this later? Because I have some stuff to toss in.

Oh, great. I do too. It reminds me of the kind of stuff we do on the show, of course. You know, we see that little glint in the mud and we follow an object story or a word story.

Yeah, an object has a story, connects us to history and to other people. It is in itself interesting. A word is interesting, but it’s part of a larger fabric, a larger culture, a larger civilization, right? It’s not its own thing. It’s always about context.

We’d love to hear about the hobbies and the pastimes of your life and the language that belongs to them. We’d also like to hear about what you’re reading and any particularly beautiful passages that you think the world needs to hear.

Hit us up, words, at waywordradio.org. Talk to us on Twitter @wayword. Of course, you can always call us 24 hours a day, toll-free in the U.S. and Canada, 877-929-9673.

Hello, welcome to A Way with Words. Hi, this is Barney. I’m calling from Carmel, Indiana.

Hi, Barney. Welcome to the show. Thank you. Around the holidays, when we are cutting Christmas snowflakes out of paper, as lots of kids do at this time of year in school projects and otherwise, when you’re folding them all up and cutting all those little squares and circles out of them, and then we would make a big mess on the floor, and my mom would ask us to clean it up, and she called all that detritus on the floor, clean up all the schnittles.

And I never really knew what that word meant, and we’ve all said it. She also referred to schnittles as when you tear notebook paper out of a spiral-bound notebook and all those little pieces of paper that snowflakes fall on the ground. We always called those schnittles.

I sort of had forgotten the word, and it kind of popped back into my head again, and I happened to be listening to your show when that word popped back, and I thought it was an excuse to call.

Great. Is she of German extraction by any chance? She is. It’s from my mom’s side of the family. The family, I believe, tales mostly from Luxembourg or has descent in Luxembourg, but it’s between Germany and France.

Are you originally from Carmel or from somewhere else, maybe closer to Chicago or even Wisconsin? I was born in Chicago, grew up in the suburbs of Chicago. I ask because I can hear it in your vowels.

Yes, I am a Chicago boy. Chris, paying attention to your vowels. It has nothing to do with schnittels. It’s just your vowels.

Yeah, it sounds like schnittels is a variant of a more common term for those little bitty scraps, which is schnibble. And it comes from the German word schnippel, which means simply a scrap, S-C-H-N-I-P-P-E-L in the German. And S-C-H-N-I-B-B-L-E in English, although there are lots of different variants of this, schnipfel and schnivel and schnufel and snibble and snibblen.

It all has to do with those little things that result from a lot of snipping. So it could be paper, it could be cloth, it could be pieces of plant matter, just any bunch of small anything, right?

Yeah, yeah, little scraps after sewing. Yeah, sometimes people refer to diced meat as schnibbles, and you can hear the German in there, schnibble.

That’s fascinating. I always assumed it had something to do with German, but I never really looked it up, and it was something my mom said her aunt used to always say to her, and so it just sort of passed down. And I hadn’t really said it much until more recently, again, making some with my own kids, I suppose, and sort of forgot the word.

That’s how it goes. Yeah, so you use a T sound in there, huh? Schnittel? If you asked me to spell it, I’d probably say spell it with a D.

Oh, okay. Yeah, sometimes maybe it’s pronounced more with a T, the way my mom says it, schnittles. Yeah, or schnittles. Yeah.

Yeah, but I’m really glad to have a word for this because you just made me realize, Barney, that I never had a word for those little scraps. And schnittles works perfectly.

Well, when we were very resourceful as children, we would pick up all the schnittles, and then we would save them and pretend they were snowflakes and throw them in the air, which just meant cleaning them all up again.

Sounds like childhood, for sure. Yep, sounds like the olden days, Barney. Hey, thanks so much for calling.

Thanks, Barney. Take care. Thank you. I love your show. Thanks, Barney. Thank you. Appreciate it. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

877-929-9673. Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hello, this is Michael from Morgantown, Kentucky.

Hey, Michael, welcome to the show. What can we do for you? Well, I got a question for you, and it’s about a story my granddad told me when I was a boy.

So he’s from a little place called Hell’s Neck, Kentucky, which they use words there now that you don’t hear anywhere else in the world. But he told me a story when he was a kid. This would have been in the 1920s.

There was an old guy that lived down the road, and he said he spoke the old tongue. I’ve always wondered what the old tongue was, but he told me that they went fishing one day, and they was using cane poles.

So the old guy got a bite, and he grabbed a cane pole and jerked it back over his head. And when he did, his feet came out from under him, and he slid down into the water.

Well, he turned around to my granddad, and he said, I fought to heave and catch to fall. So I was just kind of wondering, you know, with just that little bit, could you tell me maybe what he meant by the old tongue and what that meant?

Say it again for us. Fodged a heave and catched a fall. Well, that’s just well put. That’s beautifully said, isn’t it? It is, yeah.

And I don’t remember a lot of the stories he told me, but that one just always stuck with me. Yeah, that’s a particularly succinct way of expressing the moment. I started with a cane pole myself as a boy in southeast Missouri and fishing on a money bank.

Yeah, I do. I do. Fishing on a money bank. I know that whole feeling. Trying not to let the turtles get the bait instead of the fish, that sort of stuff.

Yeah, you don’t want that. You want the fish. And that’s when he was on that creek bank, you know, he had to set that hook. So when he did, I mean, I’m sure he reared it way back over his head.

And then that’s all it was.

He went down the bank.

Yeah.

I never did find out if he got the fish or not, but he foshed a heave anyway.

Let’s break that down.

I think the most interesting word here is foshed for sure, because that’s probably the one people are scratching their head over the most.

And it’s got a long history, more than, well, about 250 years or so.

Foshed is an old past tense form of the verb to fetch.

And now fetch typically means, as you know, to go get.

But it also has a bunch of other meanings.

And it can mean things like fetch up can mean to stop, as in the horse has fetched up lame.

You know, it stopped lame.

Or you can fetch up a child means to raise it or bring it up.

You can fetch a pump means to prime the pump with water, so the pump will begin to pull water up from a well.

You can even fetch around in seafaring.

It means to change course or to attack your sea craft.

It’s an action.

He was describing what he did with the cane pole.

Okay.

Yeah, so when he fetched a heave, that means that he basically did a heave.

He jerked a heave.

So he fetched a heave, basically.

So fotched is just an old-fashioned.

And again, we have Noah Webster himself, the great dictionary maker, noticed fotched and fautch as far back as 1789 and wrote about it.

So it’s been in the American language for a very long time.

So when you talk about the old tongue, we’re talking about pretty old.

So this guy, which this would have been the 1920s or 30s, because like I said, my granddad was born in 1920.

So this guy was old then, so he could have been more like 1850 or something.

Sure, absolutely.

So he probably used words like that all the time.

And for some reason, my granddad remembered it, and now I’m telling you 100 years later.

Yep, and it’s fading, but you’ll still find folks using it, particularly in the American South and Appalachia.

It’s got a long history, both in the U.S. and the U.K.

It’s rarer than it used to be, but it’s not unknown or unheard anymore.

And then the rest of it, a heave, well, a heave can be a jerk or a fall or a quick movement of the whole body.

And then catched is a nonstandard past tense, so to catch a fall.

And to catch here doesn’t mean that you caught something in your arms or your hand.

It means that you had a moment where something happened to you, like catch a breath, for example.

We don’t actually catch the breath.

It means you took a moment for a breath, right?

So if you catched a fall, you had a moment where you had a fall.

Well, that’s very interesting.

I appreciate it.

So there you go, Michael.

Fought to heave and catch to fall.

Fought to heave and catch to fall.

Yeah, that’s it.

That’s it.

That’s pretty sweet.

You’re the ex-post.

That’s why I called.

Well, Michael, I think you’re an expert when it comes to great stories.

I’m sure you’ve got more, and we’d love to have you call again sometime.

If I remember any more, I’ll call back.

Please do, Michael.

Take care.

Okay.

All right.

Thank you.

Be well.

877-929-9673, or talk to us on Twitter @wayword.

We’re still getting pangrams from listeners, those sentences that contain every letter of the alphabet, and ideally they’re as short as possible, and they make sense.

This one came in from Sarah McCall.

Just mask up and be extra careful that you don’t quit always sanitizing everything.

Whoa, wow. How appropriate, right?

Yes. I think that ticks all the boxes.

It’s timely and succinct and makes sense.

My favorite one is, and then he said, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, O, P.

It works, right?

Right, right.

That’s like the kid who was told to write a 50-word book report.

And he said, I like this book very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very.

It’s such a little stinker.

Yeah.

We have a lot of people who love wordplay.

Maybe you do the wordplay section of the newspaper.

We’ve got this book on the shelf that you can’t leave alone.

That’s because it’s filled with puzzles.

Share some with us.

877-929-9673.

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

I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

And we’re joined by that gigantic and handsome man, John Chaneski, our quiz guy in New York City.

Hi, John.

Hi, Grant.

Hi, Martha.

It’s so nice to be here again.

You know, the comedy world lost a singular talent recently with the passing of Norm Crosby.

Now, there’s no one I know who is currently doing the kind of comedy he performed, a style which gained him the nickname Mr. Malaprop.

Now, even if many of our younger listeners have never heard of Norm Crosby, and I wish they have, they might know that a malapropism is the mistaken use of a word in place of a similar sounding one, often having an amusing effect.

You guys know that, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, good.

And you’re familiar with Norm Crosby, I hope?

Yes, absolutely.

Very good.

For example, Norm once said that the human body is prone to many melodies.

Now, you can see it should be maladies, but he’s in maladies for comic effect.

Exactly.

Now, what I’ve done is take some Norm Crosby-style malapropisms and replace the malaprop word with its definition.

Now, I want you to repeat to me the phrase with the malaprop infract.

I mean intact.

For example, if I said, Norm once took his trousers to the tailor because they were in need of a noisy public argument.

A row?

No, that doesn’t work.

He had to take him to a place that did altercations.

Altercations instead of alterations.

That’s right.

Very good.

Now, of course, as a stand-up comedian, you have to remember to always speak from your schematic representation.

Speak from your chart instead of your heart?

No, that’s not very good.

Well, you have to breathe from the diagram.

Breathe from the diagram instead of the diaphragm.

Very good, Martha.

Speak way down from your diagram.

That’s right.

Diaphragm.

Now, that wasn’t the worst of it.

My surgeon told me I tore up the ink container inserted into a printer in my knee.

All the cartridge in my knee.

Yes, I tore up all the cartridge in my knee.

It’s supposed to be cartilage.

Norm Crosby played many fancy casinos and hotels, ones which had all the brightly colored flowers of the buttercup family.

Anemones. All the anemones.

That’s right. They had all the anemones instead of amenities.

All the amenities, yeah.

Right.

Now, you know, we could go on arguing like this all day, but really, it’s a speechless point.

It’s a mute point instead of a moot point.

That’s right. Exactly. You got it.

Now, just like the audiences who saw Norm Crosby, I hope that this quiz inspired you to give me a standing ovulation.

Thank you very much, guys.

Take care.

You’ve been wonderful.

I’m here all week.

Try the veal.

I really appreciate it, John.

We’ll talk to you next week.

And everyone, check out Norm Crosby on YouTube or see if you can find his books.

They’re really funny, good for all ages.

And if you’ve got some great comedian or great comedy that you think we should know about, talk to us, 877-929-9673, or send the funny stuff to us in email, words@waywordradio.org or find the best thing you can on the internet and send it to us on Twitter @wayword.

Hi there. You have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Cassandra. I’m calling from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Welcome to the show.

Hi.

So I’m originally from South Africa and I’ve been living in the U.S. now for about 17 years.

And so I’m really interested in the differences between the British English, which is what I grew up learning and speaking, and American English.

So some of the differences are the obvious ones in pronunciation and spelling and so on.

But one of the ones that I’ve been puzzling about for a while is the rules around abbreviations.

So for example, in the U.S., from what I’ve established, whenever you abbreviate a word, you always put a period at the end of it, regardless of what that word is.

But growing up in South Africa, I was taught that the rules around abbreviation depended on what the word was.

So, for example, if you abbreviated the word professor, P-R-O-F,

You would put a period at the end of it because at the end of the abbreviation.

The F letter was in the middle of the original word.

So you put the period on to show that it was truncated.

But if you abbreviated a word like Mr. or Mrs. or Doctor, the R or the S at the end of the abbreviation was at the end of the original full word.

So you do not put a period at the end of it.

So it would just be DR or MR or MRS.

And so that seems to be different from the rule here in the U.S.

And that took me a while to get used to.

So my question is, is this still a difference?

Did I learn this wrong?

I don’t think I did because I have gone back to some of my books from when I was a child and they do have things like Mrs. and Doctor and Mr. with no period at the end of it.

So I think I learned the rule correctly. But I wanted to hear from you.

I work in university. I’m a university professor. I’ve asked my English faculty colleagues about this and none of them knows about the British English rule.

So I thought I’m going to have to come to the experts and ask you what the rules really are, why there’s this difference between British English and American English, and has it changed over the years from when I learned it?

Oh, what a mess.

I’ll do my best, though.

I’ll frog this thing the best I can.

All right.

So you really summarized this very well.

I want to quote, though, the Economist Style Guide, which I think is a very efficient and very good example of British style.

Because what we’re really talking about here isn’t grammar, it’s style.

And style is different from grammar because it’s the choices that we make on how to represent verbal language in print.

And so this isn’t something that’s dictated intrinsically in the language.

It’s something that we can decide either as individuals or institutions to do with the language once we put it down on paper or on the screen.

And so the economist says the British convention is to use full stops after abbreviations, but not after contraction.

So that’s their brief way of putting what you said.

So an abbreviation is where you remove something from the end.

That’s what you were explaining there.

So adjective abbreviated as ADJ period.

And a contraction would be doctor because you’ve removed letters from the middle.

So DR means nothing is removed from the end but only from the middle.

And so there’s no period after DR.

It makes a lot of sense.

There are exceptions to this.

And even in the United States, we don’t put periods in all of our abbreviations.

We don’t always put periods after the U and the S in the U.S.

Or UN or CEO or CFO.

And there are exceptions in the U.K. and the British style as well.

And you’ll see exceptions if you look in the Times style guide versus the Economist style guide or the Oxford style and usage guide.

So they’re not 100% consistent.

And God help you when you go to Canada, which is a mishmash of the British and the U.S. styles.

Yeah, don’t go to Canada.

No, Canada is a lovely, wonderful country.

And I recommend you go there.

Just don’t write for their newspapers because your mind will explode, Cassandra,

Because you’re going to have to reconcile South African style and British style and American style.

And figure out which parts the Canadians chose to use.

The main reason there are all these differences

Is we established this regularization of the printed style

Long after all of these different countries

Really became culturally independent of each other.

That is, they had their own literature and publishing

And journalistic practices already well underway,

And the U.S. had stopped looking to the U.K. for its influences.

And South Africa had done the same thing.

It had stopped looking to the U.K., at least for as English goes, had stopped looking to the U.K. for its influences.

And Canada, even now, as its Commonwealth means less and less than it used to, has slowly stopped looking to the U.K.

And more and more is under the sway stylistically of the U.S.

And so each country has its own traditions.

But even within the countries, the styles don’t agree.

In the U.S., the New York Times style guide doesn’t agree with the Chicago Manual of Style,

Doesn’t agree with the AP style on everything.

So you just pick a style guide and you stick to it.

So when you ask if you were taught incorrectly.

You were taught 100% correctly.

It was right for the place and time.

The advice is please your boss, please your editor, and then please yourself.

That’s the order.

But, yeah, it still rankles me to put a period after, you know, doctor or whatever.

It just doesn’t come naturally to me.

Yeah, and I can see the logic for sure.

Thank you so, so much.

I love your show.

Bye-bye.

Thank you, Cassandra.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Well, put foot to the telephone.

Give us a call, 877-929-9673, or put foot to the computer and talk to us on Twitter @wayword.

The other day, somebody mentioned the term creature comforts.

This term for material comforts, like food and clothing and accommodation,

Goes back at least to the 1640s.

Oh, so not quite Shakespeare.

Yeah, I mean, it might be in Shakespeare, but I don’t know.

But I was just very surprised.

It seemed like something that some journalist came up with for a lifestyle magazine or something.

Creature comforts.

The way we talk about it.

So creature comforts are the things that satisfy the animal within.

Yeah, yeah, the creature within.

But who knew it was that old?

So the lizard brain likes the hot sun and the mammal likes the warm blanket.

And the food, right?

And the food, right, yeah.

Talk to us on Twitter @wayword.

You know, we’d love to hear what you’re reading and the strange words that you found

And the language argument that you’ve been having at work.

Hi there.

You have A Way with Words.

Good morning.

My name is Scotty Pearson McDonald, and I’m calling from Dallas, Texas, with a question that has been befuddling my family for years.

Oh, wonderful. Welcome, Scotty. What’s up?

So my family, my mother is from Mississippi. My father’s from Georgia.

But growing up, when we would go visit my grandmother in Mississippi, she would often use a phrase called Jack Roses.

So the situation here is we would be sitting around, having conversation, and then the topic would change mid-sentence.

Whenever that would happen, someone would say Jack Roses, and that signals whatever we were just talking about, we’re not talking about anymore, we’ve moved on.

But we don’t know anything about the history of that term.

Jack Roses, like the name Jack, J-A-C-K, and roses like the flower?

That’s right. My grandmother used this with her friends. She’s at the family.

And it’s just something that we’ve always said, but we do not know anything about who Jack Roses was, if it was a man or a thing or where it came from.

So is the idea that the conversation just is like a period at the end of a sentence,

Or was it like, oh, we’re in risky territory, I need to change the subject?

That’s a great question.

It would occur when we would literally change subjects.

So there was no period.

It was my grandmother might be rambling off a sentence and then change topic.

And then someone said, Jeff Roses.

Oh, so it’s after the subject is changed, not as an introduction before the subject changes.

Correct, correct, because that was sort of, again, everyone’s clue.

Forget what we were just talking about.

We’re not on that anymore.

Grant, I’m baffled.

The only thing I can think of is the Jack Rose Cocktail.

Yeah, that’s really strange.

Yeah, the Jack Rose Cocktail, what is that?

That’s apple jack, grenadine, and limiter lime juice, right?

Right.

Not that common anymore, I don’t think.

Maybe called that because it’s got apple jack,

And it has a pinkish look because of the grenadine.

Well, I got to tell you, we’re going to have to put this in out to the callers because I don’t think we have anything else.

I mean, we have a ton of stuff on other ways that people change the conversation, but we don’t have that.

That one is super strange to me.

We had a message quite a while back from Anthony in San Diego who says his hard of hearing grandma misheard a conversation and said, speaking of taxis. And then she started telling a story and everybody was like confused because they weren’t talking about taxis. So now for the last 25 years in his family, that’s how they changed the subject. Everyone says, speaking of taxis, which I think is funny, a nice little family story.

And then there’s Regina in San Antonio says that for some reason in her family, they say her grandmother’s name. They say Olga Garza to quickly change the subject. Olga Garza. And I don’t know what that’s about either.

So perhaps Jack Rose’s is just like those two stories, one of those family traditions that just grows up out of a tale that is no longer told and an in-joke that is no longer remembered.

Well, we’ve all been really excited to think that you might have an answer. Yes, because, again, it’s been making us crazy for years, and I now have introduced all of my co-workers to the term because we always change subjects. Now everybody at my company knows Jack Roses.

If you can help Scotty out, do you know the phrase Jack Roses being used when someone changes the subject? Let us know, 877-929-9673, or tell us an email, words, at waywordradio.org.

And, Scotty, if we get good responses, we’ll let the world know, all right? Oh, I hope somebody calls in with the answer.

Okay. We do, too. Take care now. Thank you so much for your help. I appreciate it.

Sure. Bye-bye. Sure. Take care. Bye-bye.

Hello. You have A Way with Words. Hi. My name is Zoe. I’m near Kingston, New York, in Hudson Valley.

Hi, Zoe. Welcome to the show. This arose after I received a photograph of a blueberry pie. With this beautifully sculpted crust in the shape of an octopus on top of the blueberries, and it had this long leg circling around the pie top, and this amazing head and these really intense eyes. It was really well made out of the crust.

And the caption read, the plural of octopus is octopi. It’s spelled P-I-E. Points for the pun. Yeah. And I thought that was good punny. And I always thought the plural of octopus was octopi. So I thought this was nice and I reposted it. This was on Facebook.

And I very quickly got a lot of replies that they enjoyed it. But pretty soon I got a reply that started a series of things about the plural. And a friend said, actually, the plural of octopus is octopus, same spelling. And I never heard that. And then within an hour, another person wrote and said the plural is octopuses or octopodes. It just seemed too complicated.

And I thought of way with words and thought we better ask you. Well, yeah, Zoe, I think the answer here is to say what comes naturally. I mean, I was sitting here thinking, oh, my gosh, she’s talking about this pie that has blueberries in it. And it’s got an octopus on the top. And my immediate thought was, I hope no octopuses were harmed in the making of that pie.

Absolutely not. I think just good crust work, crust crafting. Because you can say it either way. You can say octopi or you can say octopuses, which was my natural response. And you’re right that people have been puzzling over this for a long time.

There’s a wonderful article in a newspaper from the 1870s in England where they’re talking about octopus philology. And they’re talking about how you should make the plural of this word. And I love how they put it. They say, some daring spirits with little Latin and less Greek rushed upon octopi. As for octopuses, a man would as soon think of swallowing one of the animals thus described as pronounced such a word at a respectable tea table.

Right. It’s a little awkward. All right. So there’s a strata here, Martha, right? The strictest copy editors might prefer octopuses.

Yes. Some people say because the word is of Greek origin and not Latin origin, the octopi plural is not etymologically sound. But because English didn’t get the word directly from Greek but got it from New Latin, that’s not correct.

And anyway, the Greek plural would be octopodes, and nobody uses that at all. Nobody says octopodes. They say octopodes, which is wrong.

Yeah, and we should point out that the word octopus itself comes from Greek words that mean eight feet literally, like octagon. So in the end, my opinion is people are whimsical. We love plonking Latin endings on Greek roots because it annoys stuffed shirts. And so why not say octopi and have a little laugh?

Good. Okay, well, thank you. That’s great. Thank you, Zoe. Appreciate it. Thank you so much, Zoe. Take care.

Thank you. Take care. All right. Bye-bye.

Well, unfurl one of your eight tentacles. Press those buttons. Give us a call at 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.

We were talking earlier about the book Mudlark in search of London’s past along the River Thames by Laura Makelum. It may go by a different name in your part of the world. But I wanted to share a story from that book that will be of particular interest to people who love books and writers.

In the late 19th century, the leading bookbinder in London was Thomas James Cobden Sanderson. He founded Dove’s Bindery near the Thames in Hammersmith, and he printed his books using movable metal type, but not just any type. He was obsessed with creating the ideal typeface, almost a spiritual quest. He wanted to design a font that was so perfect, so beautiful, that it could be used to print the greatest works in the history of literature, the Bible and Shakespeare and Goethe.

So he took on a younger business partner named Emery Walker, and together they studied books from the Italian Renaissance to develop and refine this font that they called Dove’s Type. And it’s this gorgeous font, Grant. You can see it. It’s clean and spare.

But by 1909, he had become so obsessed with perfecting this font that he didn’t want to trust it to anybody else, and he tried to buy out his younger business partner, but Walker refused. Eventually, they dissolved their partnership, and they agreed that Cobden Sanderson could continue using Dove’s type as long as he wanted, and then upon his death, all rights to the type would pass to Walker.

But secretly, Cobden Sanderson couldn’t stand the idea of his precious metal type going to his former business partner. And mind you, by the time he started winding down his business, he had accumulated lots of those bits of type, like about half a million at least of these little metal pieces.

So in 1916, he started taking these nighttime strolls to Hammersmith Bridge, and he casually tossed his bits of type into the river a little bit at a time. And he was really proud of this. He actually wrote about it in his journal.

So you got a picture this 76-year-old guy strolling along the Thames, gleefully scattering those metal letters and numbers and punctuation like he was tossing fish food. And it took him about six months, 170 visits, but he ended up disposing of literally more than a ton of metal type.

And it turns out that a few years ago, a graphic designer named Robert Green became obsessed with this story. And he tried to figure out where the old guy might have tossed his type. And he started mudlarking in that spot. And darn if he didn’t find dozens of letters and bits of punctuation.

And there’s lots more to that story in this book, Mudlark, including a discovery that Laura Makelum makes, a piece of punctuation that the other guy hadn’t found. But isn’t that wild?

I love that story. That’s so perfect. I mean, I remember when I started out as a Macintosh tech support guy working for advertising agencies and publishing companies. This is many years ago.

And our art directors would be so obsessed with type, I felt like half my job was helping them with type and managing type and buying type. And at one point, I could spec, that is, identify, I believe, every typeface in the Adobe Type Library.

And that was thousands of types. Yeah, seriously. I could tell you what it was. No, I can’t do it anymore because I’d spent so much time with these people working with type.

There’s something about it, right? There’s something about it, yeah.

And it’s directly connected to kind of the obsessiveness of a dictionary editor, which I am and have been.

And the obsessiveness of a word historian, which I am, you know, you and I have that.

And so I totally appreciate this old man going to the bridge because he wanted to protect his baby that he worked so hard on.

His baby, right?

I get it.

I get it.

Yeah.

Well, we should link.

There are all kinds of stories about this particular type.

There are videos, and you can see examples of it.

It is a beautiful typeface.

And we should link to those on our website.

Absolutely.

We’ll link to our website.

We’ll put the book there for you to check out.

And if you’ve got a story that you read that you think we should know about and share with everyone else, let us know.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Laura.

I’m calling from Escondido, California in San Diego County.

Welcome to the show.

What can we do for you?

Yeah, there’s a word or a phrase that my sister uses right before her son goes in to perform.

And she says it’s for good luck,

But we’re trying to figure out what exactly it actually meant

And how it came about to being used.

Your sister uses it when her son does what?

Oh, he goes up to perform.

He’s a ballet dancer for San Diego Ballet.

And right before he goes up for performances,

I guess they’ll say it in the hall,

They’ll say like or something before he goes up there.

And thought it was kind of funny.

And any idea how to spell that?

She told me it was like T-O-I, T-O-I, T-O-I.

Yeah, yeah, that’s how it usually appears,

As three words, toy, toy, toy.

As far as I know, it refers to this superstition

That if you say that, the person will have a good performance.

And I’ve always seen it linked to the idea

Of the superstition that involves spitting,

You know, throughout history, all the way back to classical times and around the world, people have connected spitting with somehow warding off the evil eye or warding off evil.

I once read this article, I kid you not, called The Saliva Superstition in Classical Literature, which talks about all these writers in antiquity talking about different ways that you can use spit to either keep snakes away from you,

Or the Roman historian Pliny said that you could spit if you meet a person who’s lame in the right leg,

And that way nothing bad will happen to you.

So there’s this long tradition of, you know, there’s something in saliva or something in spit that keeps the evil at bay.

And there’s at least one story that toy, toy, toy has to do with the sound of spitting.

And this has even become, in modern times, this has even become a hashtag.

Sometimes performers will text each other before a performance and it’ll just say hashtag toy times three.

Oh, my God. That’s so funny.

Isn’t that wild?

You know how some performers, like in France, will say maire to each other before they go on stage.

I’ve heard that one before.

Oh, okay. All right.

Same idea.

Yeah, there’s a variety of these things, like break a leg and so forth, or Hausenbrunenbock.

So in English, we got this from where, Martha?

Where did we pick it up?

Well, that’s a good question.

I mean, there are some suspicions that perhaps it comes from German or Yiddish.

The German word Teufel means devil, and it might have to do with that.

It’s probably one big mess.

That’s my sense of it anyway.

Yeah, that’s what I gather as well, is that there was this,

We picked it up from maybe German opera and German performing.

There were these two hit songs in the 1920s and 30s that really brought it to light.

There was one that might be translated in English.

The song was called Knock on Wood, Toy, Toy, Toy.

Well, the German word is umberufen.

I can’t even say it.

U-N-B-E-R-U-F-E-N.

It doesn’t really translate, but it basically means away or avoid the badness, something like that.

And in English, we would say knock on wood because that’s what you do to avoid the badness.

It’s pretty cool.

And Yiddish has a long tradition of all these different sounds rendered a bunch of different ways where you spit to show your rejection of the possible bad things happening.

Yeah, so I guess it’s a more dignified way of just saying those three syllables rather than actually doing the spitting.

That’s so funny.

Oh, my God.

I can’t wait to tell my sister.

Excellent.

This is really funny.

All right. Thanks, Laura. I really appreciate the call.

Thanks, Laura, for calling. Toy, toy, toy.

No problem. Bye-bye.

Toy times three.

All right. Bye-bye.

There’s a weird language about everything we do, whether it be a hobby or a job or our time in the military.

Maybe it’s something that happened on a trip a long time ago that your family still brings up, and it’s kind of an in-joke.

You know, Martha and I love to hear those stories.

Tell us about the little jargons and slangs that you’ve come up with, 877-929-9673.

Or tell us about the ones that have been passed down from generation to generation,

Be they from boss to employee, from grandparent to grandchild, or from cousin to cousin.

You can tell us words@waywordradio.org or on Twitter @wayword.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Dean from Shadron, Nebraska.

Hey, Dean, welcome.

So I have a question about the use of the verb visiting.

I grew up in Florida, but now live in northwestern Nebraska.

And people in this region use visiting in place of talking or conversing, as in the sentence, for instance,

I went over to Mary’s house and we had a really nice time visiting.

And where I’m from in Florida, you visit a place such as someone’s house or business,

And there you have a nice conversation, discussion, or talk.

And I’ve never heard visiting used as a form of dialogue between two people before moving here to Nebraska.

So my question is where this usage originates from.

Dean, I’m curious where in Florida you’re from.

I grew up in Pensacola, Florida, so it’s a northwestern can handle.

I’m surprised. I would expect in that part of Florida that you would have heard a visit to mean conversing or talking

Or having a long natter?

Never.

Never, really.

Because this is so, it originates in the American South, really,

As far back as the 1860s,

And then kind of spreads throughout the United States,

And it’s very much an Americanism at this point.

It’s long been noted, and it’s really an outgrowth of the idea of to visit,

Meaning to go to someone’s house informally for a short stay

Where you have a light dessert or coffee or something,

And then you leave.

You’re not there for weeks or something like that.

So it’s all about the social.

It’s like an outgrowth of the social visit,

The brief social polite visit.

It’s very interesting to me

Because the American linguist living in the UK,

Lynn Murphy, has written about this on her blog

Where she talks about the differences

Between American English and British English.

And she was noting how it has to do also with the person who’s doing the visiting.

Like, for example, it sounds normal to say, Dean came over and visited with me, right?

That sounds normal, but you wouldn’t say, Dean came over and I visited with him.

That sounds a little weird, doesn’t it?

Oh, so it’s the person who is doing the visiting of the place that gets the form of conversing, or visiting is a form of conversing.

I see.

I think so. I mean, it would be also weird to say I went over to Dean’s and he visited with me.

There’s a nice remark by the editors of Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage.

They say to say that you visited with someone usually implies not only that you conversed,

That you went a bit out of your way for the sake of some friendly talk.

So it’s also about the attitudes.

It’s not just that you’ve talked like when the surveyors or the pollsters come to your door to ask your opinions.

That’s not a visit.

That’s not visiting.

I’m sorry.

That is a visit, but it’s not visiting.

But if a friend comes over and you share a beer, you could be visiting if you’re just having a chat about the ball scores or how the grass is growing or the state of the garden.

Oh, wow.

Okay.

So it’s about the, there’s kind of a notion there that it’s among friends or family or close acquaintances.

So familiarity matters.

Familiarity for sure.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Wow. Great.

So, Dean, we’re so glad that you called and visited with us.

Does that make sense to say that?

I’m trying to think.

We visited on the radio.

Well, it was nice visiting with you guys, too.

There you go. There you go.

Now you got it, Dean.

Yeah, no, Martha, all of the evidence that I’ve seen does say that you can visit with someone, meaning you chatted with them, over the phone, by voice.

And you don’t have to be face-to-face or in person.

Yeah, that’s a really good point.

Well, thank you very much for taking my call.

Thank you, Dean.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Well, this happens a lot.

You grow up in one place and you move someplace else, and all of a sudden you hear language in a whole new way.

Well, call us about at 877-929-9673 or send us an email.

The address is words@waywordradio.org.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hello.

Hi, who’s this?

Hi, this is Debbie Smith calling from Memphis, Tennessee.

Hello, Debbie.

Welcome to the show.

Well, I’m calling about the expression trade last.

This was an expression that was used when I was probably mid to late teenager.

I grew up in northeast Arkansas, fairly close to Jonesboro, in a little town called Tuckerman.

And at some point, my family started using this expression.

And I had completely forgotten about it until I was reading a book recently and saw it in there.

This is a Nora Ephron book, I Remember Nothing.

So she was talking about another woman having used that expression, and she said it is a strange, ungenerous, and seriously narcissistic way to tell someone a nice thing that has been said about them.

Wow. Was that your experience of it growing up?

Well, yeah, so it was kind of like a little game that you played.

So if you heard a compliment about a friend or a relative, then you would go to them and you would say, I have a trade last for you, meaning they had to tell you something nice that they had heard about you before you would tell them the nice thing that you had heard about them.

It devolved into the point where if someone hadn’t heard anything, they would just sort of make something up.

Huh, in order to get their compliment, huh?

Yeah, in order to hear what you had heard about them.

Yeah.

Okay.

So I thought y’all might know the history of it.

It’s got some history.

It goes back to at least the late 19th century.

I mean, I’ve always thought of it as this sweet little game.

It sounds like Nora Ephron maybe didn’t think it was so sweet.

But, I mean, you know, it’s finding something nice to say about somebody.

It’s gone by lots of different names.

Sometimes people call it Alasko trade or Alaskan trade even.

It’s sort of a mishearing of last go trade or lasso trade even, which I like, too, because you sort of get this mental picture of somebody lassoing a compliment.

But you don’t hear it that much.

You know, I think the last time I had a conversation about a trade last, it was with a dear friend of mine who’s in her late 80s now.

I don’t hear people talking about it today.

I mean, I don’t recall too many of my contemporaries using it.

But my family, some of the older women in my family used it.

I think you’re right that it’s a part of the parlance of an older generation.

And I think it’s a lovely little heirloom.

Well, it was fun.

Did you have a chance, Debbie, to teach it to a younger generation?

I have not yet.

But now that I have recalled it, I might try doing that with my grandnieces and nephews.

Might have a chance.

One more generation.

So start thinking up those compliments about Debbie, y’all.

I’m sure they don’t have to think very hard, Debbie.

Debbie, thank you so much for your call and thanks for the memories.

Okay, thank you.

Take care now. Bye-bye. Be well.

Okay, bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

Thanks to senior producer Stefanie Levine, editor Tim Felten, and production assistant Rachel Elizabeth Weisler.

You can send us messages, subscribe to the podcast and newsletter, and catch up on hundreds of past episodes at waywordradio.org.

Our toll-free line is always open in the U.S. and Canada, 877-929-9673, or email us words@waywordradio.org.

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

Many thanks to Wayword Board member and our friend Bruce Rogow for his help and expertise.

Thanks for listening. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. Until next time, goodbye.

Bye-bye.

Guitar solo.

Music.