Niblings and Nieflings (episode #1525)

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 1994, a software engineer named Anu Garg started wordsmith.org, the popular website for language lovers.

And this includes his immensely popular A Word A Day email, his anagram server, where you can go to test anagrams.

And to celebrate the 25th anniversary of wordsmith.org, he conducted some worldwide contests with limericks and anagrams and pangrams.

Now you know what a pangram is.

Yeah, pangrams. These are sentences that contain every letter of the alphabet, and they have to be grammatical.

Right, right. So, for example, the famous one is, the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

But he asked people to write an original pangram that describes an event that happened in the last 25 years.

So something from science or the arts or business or politics.

And I happen to be one of the judges for that contest.

And I am here to tell you the winner of the Pangram contest.

Emoji having been popularized, texts acquire wacky faces.

Wow, that’s pretty good.

And short, too.

It’s short.

It’s just 48 letters.

And it makes sense, too.

Yeah, it does make sense.

It’s hard to say, though.

Yeah, it’s tricky to say.

I was lobbying for a different one, which was Watson excels at Jeopardy, quickly out buzzing human favorites.

Oh, that’s really good, too.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But I’m going to share some more of those later in the show.

Outstanding.

And, you know, if you’re a pangram coiner, if you’re the kind of person who loves to mess around with words like this, we want your pangrams.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

Or let’s start a conversation about pangrams on Twitter @wayword.

Hello.

Welcome to A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is David Baker. I’m calling from Seeger High School in rural Warren County, Indiana.

Well, welcome to the show, David. We are glad to have you. What’s up?

I was attending a funeral for my grandmother in February, and my family all, I’ve known them, I’m almost 50, and I’ve known them for so long, and they’ve used a lot of terms, but there was a term they used, and I’ve never heard it before, and I’ve never heard it anywhere else, and I’m very curious if you can tell me about it, anything else about it.

And the story was being told about that we’re celebrating my grandmother’s life and telling stories.

And a gentleman in the story early on had walked into a church service and was being disruptive.

The term they used was that he was swarping down the aisle.

Apparently he had been drinking and was causing a ruckus.

And the word swarp, S-W-O-R-P-I-N-G, the G is optional, swarping down the aisle.

And I just never heard it before and wondered if there was any kind of context you could help me with.

Yeah, sure. Was this in Indiana?

No, this was in Virginia.

Yeah, that makes a lot more sense because SWARP, spelled either S-W-O-R-P or S-W-A-R-P, is something you usually hear in the Appalachians.

So I’m really interested to hear that you heard it in exactly the way that I’ve read about but never heard in the wild.

It comes from an old dialect term that means to strike or hit.

And so you might talk about walking through a forest and brush swarping you in the face or something like that.

And it can also be used to mean to move something in a sweeping motion, like whisking a biscuit through some honey or something on a plate.

Or, you know, somebody’s dress was swarping the floor.

It also means, besides to move in sort of a wriggling or staggering, weaving kind of way,

It’s sometimes used specifically to refer to somebody who’s under the influence of alcohol

And engaging in noisy behavior where their arms are all flapping around or their legs are, something like that.

So that makes perfect sense that this person was, what was he, swarping down the aisle?

Swarping down the aisle.

And she also used it.

They told the story and specifically quoted my grandmother saying they were driving down a mountain at one point in the winter.

It was very icy.

She said we were just a sliding and a swarping all down the mountain.

I love it.

I love it.

Yeah, that fits perfectly with the idea of swarping, meaning to move erratically.

Right.

Yeah.

Oh, that’s fantastic.

Oh, thank you so much.

That’s amazing.

I appreciate that.

All right.

Take care, David.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is James Bell. I’m calling from Tribuco Canyon, California.

Welcome.

What can we do for you, James?

I had a question that was, how would you spell a letter and if it’s possible?

You mean like the letters of the alphabet?

Yeah.

How do you spell the letters of the alphabet? Any guesses?

My dad told me something about, like, just the letter by itself.

Sometimes, yeah.

I was wondering if there was, like, a proper way to spell, like, the letter J.

-huh.

That’s a good question, and I think it’s something that most people don’t think about, but the answer is yes.

All of our letters, as far as I know, have at least one way to spell them.

Some of them have more than one.

So J is spelled like the bird, J-A-Y.

Words like H are even more interesting to me.

Do you know how to spell H?

I do not.

It’s A-I-T-C-H, at least in this country, in the United States, where we don’t pronounce it as H.

Some parts of the world, they say H, so they spell it H-I-T-C-H.

And then, so every letter’s got a way to spell it.

So your name is James.

So James is J-A-Y.

And A is usually either just the letter A or A-Y-E, although that’s pronounced I.

M is E-M.

And E is E-E usually, or sometimes just the letter E.

And then S is E-S-S, James.

Yeah.

Do you want to know the other weird one besides age, at least for me, is Y.

The letter Y is spelled W-Y-E, which is really unusual, isn’t it?

Yeah.

James, what got you to wondering about all this?

Most people don’t think about it.

Well, I was just watching this show, and I thought, I was just thinking about the alphabet

And just the English language in general.

And I thought about spelling the alphabet

Or like spelling a certain letter.

And then that got me wondering.

That’s good.

That’s great.

You sound like one of our listeners.

I appreciate you thinking about it, James.

Yeah.

All right.

Well, take care of yourself and thanks for calling.

Call us again sometime, all right?

All right.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

One of the reasons that you need to spell letters

Is particularly for documents where you’re repeating something that someone else has had,

Say a transcription, right?

So if I said to you J-A-Y and there was a court reporter here, what do they write down?

Do they write J-A-Y?

Possibly, but they more likely would spell out J-A-Y, J-A-Y space, letter A space, W-Y-E,

To indicate that I said them as letters and not as a word.

Does that make sense?

Sometimes you indicate through capitalization, you J-A-Y, and that shows that I spelled it out.

But court reporters may have their own traditions and styles that they do.

And as I recall, also in plumbing, I mean, you can look at plumbing catalogs and there will be a Y type, right?

W-Y-E, yeah, that’s interesting.

W-Y-E.

Although you often find, just like in the U-turn, you find it’s spelled with the U.

The letter U, yeah.

To represent the shape.

And so often a Y joint or an L joint in hardware catalogs is just spelled with the letter and not the letter spelled out as a word.

Right.

Complicated.

Spelling letters is weird because it’s kind of like counting numbers.

It’s kind of self-referential, self-looking ice cream cone.

You can keep spelling the letters that spell the letters that spell the letters.

Oh, my gosh.

Like the cream of wheat box, right?

It’s fractal.

877-929-9673.

Welcome to A Way with Words.

Hi.

This is Margo Dillard in Denton, Texas.

Well, hi, Margo. Welcome to the show.

Hey, Margo.

What’s up?

Hello.

My grandmother, when I was growing up, and this was in South Alabama,

Always used the expression cold as Aga 40 when it was really cold outside.

I’ve never been able to figure out what that means, where it comes from.

She was from Kentucky.

She was from the coal mining region of Kentucky.

I assume Aga might be a mispronunciation of 18, maybe 1840.

There was a blizzard or something.

I don’t know.

Wow.

Well, that’s a creative theory there.

So how cold are we talking about?

Are we talking below freezing or just a little nippy?

Oh, no, below freezing.

Cold.

And was she a drinker?

Oh, no.

Oh, no.

Okay.

Well, I tell you, the reason I ask is because to me, this sounds like the term agi-forti, which is an old expression that refers to a really strong drink.

It’s agi-forti or agi-fortis or agi-fortis or agi-forti.

And the common thread among all these terms, which are used primarily in the South or have been in the past, is that they come from the Latin aqua fortis, which means strong water.

And for that reason, aqua fortis morphed into agi-forti, meaning a really strong drink.

And aqua fortis actually comes from Latin terms that literally means strong water, but the name refers to nitric acid, which is something that’s used in explosives and fertilizer and dyes.

But since at least the mid-19th century, Aggie 40 has referred to a strong drink.

But why would that be cold?

That’s a good question, unless it has to do with the extreme nature of it, you know, like a really strong drink.

Right. It’s very bracing when you take a really strong drink, right?

It’s kind of hard to—it’s like inhaling ice cold air.

You said it’s used in explosives.

This stuff that’s called aqua fortis originally.

Nitric acid.

Could it have had anything to do with coal mining?

Maybe.

Her grandfather owned a coal mine.

Maybe.

You know, it was also sometimes used in cosmetics, creams in small doses.

But if you put aqua fortis or nitric acid on your skin, it burns a little bit, and maybe that reminded somebody of frostbite or super cold fingers.

I don’t know.

That could be.

But my guess is that it has to do with a really strong drink, the idea of a really strong drink.

Something just kind of knocks you back.

You knock it back and it knocks you back, right?

Yeah.

Well, and it’s probably something she picked up growing up in Kentucky.

Oh, that could be.

Because I never heard it from anyone else in her age group.

It was kind of her expression, but she was originally from Kentucky and grew up in a coal mining company town.

Eastern Kentucky then, huh?

I guess.

Somewhere near Corbin.

Oh, yeah.

Well, you know what? You’re the first person to ever call us or write us about this.

As far as I can remember.

Yeah. It’s never been all that common, and it seems to have faded away, and it’s probably considered archaic or at least old-fashioned at this point.

So it’s a rare one.

Margot, that’s all we know about that, but if we come across more, we’ll send it along, all right?

Okay. Well, thank you.

Thank you. Take care now.

Thanks, Margot.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

So just to recap, Aggie Forty is a corruption of aquafortis.

Aquafortis is another name for nitric acid, but agiforti referred to strong drinks often in the American South.

Right.

Okay.

Yeah.

I could see that being applied to cold.

Yeah, because cold as, the number of things that follow as in all these different expressions that we have, thousands of things come after as cold as when you look at American folklore.

877-929-9673.

More about what we say and why we say it as A Way with Words continues.

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 John Janeski, our quiz guy in New York City.

Hi, John.

Hi, Grant.

Hi, Martha.

Hi, John.

Now, it’s a pretty well-known trivia chestnut that Walt Disney considered many, many more names for Snow White’s Seven Dwarfs.

Did you know that?

No, really?

Is this conceit or is this truth?

No, this is absolutely true.

They have notes.

They have notes.

I kid you not.

The list includes names like Nifty, Dirty, Goopy, Wheezy, and Chesty.

There’s about 40 of them.

Wow.

I don’t even want to think about what a dwarf named Goopy would be like.

Goopy.

Walt wanted the dwarf’s personalities to match their names, like Grumpy and Happy.

And looking at the list, I can see why most of these didn’t make the cut.

But then why stop at seven?

I think Disney stopped too soon and neglected to add wordplay into the mix.

For example, what about a dwarf who’s very pious and contemplative?

Maybe one that took a vow of poverty and or silence?

What would his name be?

Monkey? I don’t know.

Yeah, Monkey. Right, Monkey.

Dopey is silent. Maybe he’s Monkey. I don’t know.

As you can see, the name also means something else.

So if you can’t guess the dwarf name from the following clues, I can tell you what all else it could mean.

Got it?

Now, unlike Snow White’s dwarfs, none of our dwarf names are actually adjectives.

Now, we never found out the dwarf’s background, so maybe there could have been one from Southeast Europe, maybe one from around Ankara or Istanbul.

Turkey.

Turkey, right.

It was very likely partial to large birds, or maybe he had a fleshy wattle, perhaps?

Yeah.

Now, we know the dwarfs were minors, but who’s to say they couldn’t have other jobs?

Maybe one of them was an agent who would post money so that someone in pretrial detention could be released in exchange for a fee.

Bailey?

Bailey, right, right.

Yeah, you could probably find him patrolling the outer courtyard of a castle, probably.

The seven dwarfs wore those sort of floppy hats, but suppose there was one that was more geometrically inclined, and he insisted that his hat be of a similar shape but tapered smoothly to a sharp apex.

What do you think?

Pointy?

No, not pointy.

How about TP?

Not TP, but all these are pretty good, yeah.

It’s the kind of headwear you might associate with someone who would be called Dopey.

Coney?

Coney, yes.

Oh, Coney.

Coney.

Yes, exactly.

He may have been partial to rabbits or a seaside amusement park in Brooklyn.

Yeah, okay.

We’re up to speed now.

Good.

Oh, and while Doc was very smart, and even Dopey still had a degree in geology, there must have been at least one dwarf who didn’t make the grade.

You know, maybe our dwarf failed the test.

Flunky?

Flunky, yes.

Oh, flunky.

That would force him to act as a henchman for more accomplished dwarfs.

There we go.

Similarly, one of our dwarfs could have been a stevedore or a longshoreman and distinguished himself by the tool of his trade, a piece of metal with a handle.

Forklifty.

No.

I’m thinking a little more old-fashioned than forklifty.

Crowbar-y.

Leaver-y.

No, it’s a curved piece of metal with a handle.

Hookie.

Hookie, that’s him, yes.

Unlike, yeah.

Unlike Flunky, instead of failing, this guy just never showed up.

Those are our dwarfs, guys, and that’s pretty good.

Well, thanks for the quiz, John.

We really appreciate it.

We’ll talk to you next week.

My pleasure.

Talk to you then.

More about language on the way, 877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org and talk to us on Twitter @wayword.

I haven’t also ran in the Pangram contest where people were trying to use every letter of the alphabet in a sentence.

Ariana Grande visited a bakery, licked a glazed donut, and made an unpatriotic jejun exclamation.

She was required to apologize thereafter.

Wow, that’s crazy. She did that. She actually did that, right?

I didn’t realize that, but apparently so. I just kind of like the poetry of it.

Although jejun is kind of out of place there.

It doesn’t really match the context.

Well, they’re all kind of tortured.

What are people doing licking donuts?

I guess if you can’t have sweets because you’re on a permanent diet for your career, I guess that’s the most you can do, right?

I don’t know.

Send us your pangrams, words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Alicia.

Hey, Alicia, where are you calling us from?

I’m calling you from Wilmington, North Carolina.

Oh, welcome.

What can we do for you?

What’s going on there on the coast?

Thank you.

So my father was raised in King, North Carolina.

And whenever we would go visit his family in that area, for example, he might walk across the street and visit his cousin.

And when he comes back to the house, my mom would say, hey, what did Dean have to allow?

And he would tell her what he had to allow.

And when I mentioned that one time to my husband or asked him that maybe when he had gone to talk to somebody or whatever, he’s like, what?

What is allowed?

What do you mean?

And I can’t find anybody that’s ever heard of that phrase before, but I swear I grew up with it.

It makes perfect sense to me.

And I just wondered.

So I called y’all.

We believe you, Alicia.

Thank you.

We do.

I would say that somebody who hasn’t heard this just hasn’t read a lot of American literature.

Okay, good.

And that’s not necessarily an insult so much as it’s a thing that you should improve if you haven’t done it.

Because it is a term that you will find in the writings of Mark Twain and Bret Hart.

And I can’t even, hundreds of authors, I’m sure, from the 1700s, 1800s, 1900s have used a form of allow, which basically means something like to say, to declare, to declaim, to claim, to state.

Yeah, right.

Okay.

So you, and sometimes it’s given as lao, like I’ll lao, L-O-W, but it’s just an abbreviated form of a lao.

Gotcha.

Okay.

Yeah.

So it’s, this goes back to the 1700s, 300 something years or so of this word.

And there’s some different uses of it that I won’t get into here, some different substances, but generally it’s about saying a thing.

Sometimes it’s saying it with force.

Sometimes it’s saying it, meaning to admit, like someone says, were you on the bank on the evening of the 4th?

And you’ll be like, well, I’ll allow that I was there, but I was not doing anything harmful, right?

You allow, you admit.

But in general, it can be used to say.

He allowed.

He allowed that the dinner was good, and he’d be back next Sunday.

And I hear it more as allowed as how.

Oh, nice.

My Aunt Mazo there in North Carolina would say, oh, he allowed as how.

He was 23 years old or something like that.

Yeah.

How is it spelled?

Just like the other word, A-L-L-O-W.

L-O-W, okay.

And conjugated the same.

I feel so vindicated.

Oh, absolutely.

Our pleasure.

It is primarily Southern at this point.

You will sometimes hear it in what’s called the Midlands or Southern Midlands.

These are the states or the parts of the country right above the American South.

But you will find it here and there in places like the Northeast and Vermont and the rural speech of people in the mountains of Montana.

It will pop up now and again.

That’s wonderful.

Good.

Well, I’m going to keep using it, and I can’t wait for my husband to hear this.

And my kids are going to be thrilled because they’re avid readers and love some of those authors that you mentioned.

So, yeah, this is great.

Oh, that’s where I first heard it.

Nobody in my family used it, even though I had some Southern folks that might.

But I learned it from Mark Twain.

That’s where I first heard it.

Well, thank you so much.

Our pleasure, Alicia.

Thanks for calling.

Take care.

All right.

You too.

Thank you.

All right.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

Following up on our conversation about cursive handwriting,

We heard from Rachel Reggie in Newport News, Virginia.

And she writes,

I was curious how many millennials or Gen Z people weighed in on your argument about the need to learn cursive in school.

I’m 23 and I learned cursive in third grade and have never used it since.

My mom uses cursive, and I can’t read it because it is handwriting versus standard typed cursive, which I can still read.

Additionally, when I was studying in Japan, the English teacher asked me to write my name in cursive because she was demonstrating the need to learn cursive, at the very least so we can sign our name.

But the reality is, most people scribble their name or use a mix of cursive and print anymore.

And truth be told, I couldn’t write my whole name in cursive because I didn’t remember all the letters.

My son learned, who is now 12, learned only his name in cursive and nothing else.

And he can write it very laboriously.

If he gets a check from grandma for his birthday, he can write his name on the back of that.

But yeah, he had no need, very much a Gen Z-I guess.

No need for cursive.

He just doesn’t need it.

Wow.

Well, it’s fascinating to see all these responses.

But the truth is, you don’t actually have to have your cursive for signatures.

Anything can be in signature.

You can make a little picture of a house.

You can use block letters.

You can use an X that all counts as a signature as long as it’s consistent and as long as it means you.

Is that right?

It’s true.

I can just draw a picture?

Absolutely.

Well, how do you think people who use pictogram-based languages do it?

I guess they use pictograms.

It’s not really pictures, but they don’t use cursive, right?

People who sign things in Chinese or Japanese or Korean don’t use cursive.

They just write them the same way they would anywhere else.

I’m picturing my new signature right now.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Patrick from beautiful Bolton Landing on Lake George in the Adirondack Park in upstate New York.

Oh my goodness, you sound like you’re in a very lovely place.

I am. I recently had the pleasure of visiting America’s only plastic kazoo factory.

It’s in Beaufort, South Carolina.

I think that’s how they pronounce it.

Yeah.

D-E-A-U-F-O-R-T, South Carolina.

Wow.

And it was lovely.

They had a little museum.

They had a factory tour, a little gift shop.

It was a lovely afternoon.

But they had a little documentary film before the tour started.

And they kind of just glossed over where the word kazoo even came from.

So I talked to the tour guide after the tour, and I said, nobody knows where kazoo came from?

And she goes, no, we don’t know, and no one knows.

And I was just a little surprised by that.

And I was like, you know what?

I’m going to find out where kazoo came from because I have some friends that are going to help me out.

No pressure or anything.

Sit down, Patrick.

I’ve got some bad news.

Nobody knows.

Nobody knows?

Nobody knows.

Really?

No, there’s guesses.

There’s theories.

There’s surmise.

It’s all rubbish to be ignored.

Nobody really knows.

We know when the kazoo first appeared.

We know that sometimes it was called the gazoo with a G instead of a K.

We know that there was another instrument that preceded it that was very similar.

Instead, it played straight out of the mouth like you smoke a cigar.

It was played to the side like a flute.

This was called a eunuch flute or a merlotone, a very similar instrument.

It sounded very much the same, and that’s from much older than that.

And we also know that there are a bunch of slang words from the 1800s about the time that the kazoo appears that sound a lot like that word, including gazook, gazabo, gazebo, and gazoo.

And they all just kind of mean dumb person or stupid person.

Oh.

And it’s possible when you blow a kazoo that you sound dumb.

Well, it does kind of have a little onomatopoeia going on there, right?

I mean, the word sounds like kazoo, you know.

That’s what all the dictionaries that I can find say.

They basically suggest.

They don’t say for sure, but they suggest that it’s onomatopoeic.

But that’s the most that’s known about it.

I’m sorry to say most words have that storied.

Most words that are not obviously from Latin and Greek have unknown origins.

Do we know when it first appeared in print or anything?

I mean, how could I kind of run this down on my own?

If you only have a minute, check the Oxford English Dictionary,

Which you can sometimes get free access to through your libraries.

If you have a half hour, an hour, go to one of the digital newspaper sites like newspaper.com, newspapers.com or newspaperarchive.com.

Oh, okay.

And see how far back you can find it.

You will probably not be able to find older uses than the Oxford English Dictionary has, but that’s the short version.

Okay.

Well, I certainly appreciate it.

It was a pleasure speaking with you.

Great talking with you, too, Patrick.

I have to ask, did you come away with a collection of kazoos or a special kazoo that—

Well, it was—

I loved it for a sight when I saw the electric kazoo.

They had a kazoo with a little pickup attached to it that I can plug into my amp here and go wild with the distortion and everything.

Are you serious?

I have to fall with that.

Yeah.

Outstanding.

Oh, I want to hear that.

I desperately want to hear that.

You have to send me an audio file of that.

I will.

I will.

Please do.

Yeah, that would be great.

I will.

Thank you, Patrick.

I had no idea.

A kazoo with a pickup.

Who knew?

Who knew, right?

As soon as I sum up, it’s like, I have to have that.

I feel a rap coming on.

Don’t.

No raps, Martha.

Patrick, thank you so much for calling.

Okay, thank you.

Bye.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org or talk to us on Twitter @wayword.

I was talking earlier about judging a pangram contest where people submitted sentences that had every letter of the alphabet.

And here was one that I really, really wanted to win.

A quivering butterfly wing conjures a zephyr that expands to a storm.

Wow, that’s beautiful.

That’s a poem in itself.

I know, but you know what?

It doesn’t qualify.

Here’s the sad part.

It lacks a K.

Oh, did they not realize that when they sent it on?

I guess not.

You know, can you imagine being so proud of a quivering butterfly wing conjures a zephyr that expands to a storm?

How about an inky storm or something like that?

Yeah, an inky storm or a storm.

Okay.

Question mark.

877-99-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Robert, and I’m calling from Hamlin, West Virginia.

Hello, Robert. Welcome to the show.

We’re glad to have you here. What’s going on?

Well, I have a question about a word that I used to hear a lot when I was further down south.

I live in West Virginia, but I used to travel full-time with a gospel quartet that was based in Alabama.

And I was the only guy that was not from Alabama or Georgia in the group.

And so sometimes we would eat somewhere, or there would be a meal that was especially good,

And they would say that the meal was Larabin.

And the first time I asked them what this meant, they looked at me like they just couldn’t believe that no one had ever heard that word.

But we have never used it anywhere that I’ve lived, and I had never heard it before just a few years ago down south.

No kidding.

I’m curious about where it came from and, you know, how it kind of landed in Alabama and, at least to me, seemingly nowhere else.

Well, you know, you usually hear it in places like Texas and Oklahoma and more toward that area.

And it means terrific, right, or striking, right?

Yeah, that was kind of the sense I got because it was always, I mean, if you had a good meal, they would say it was good or delicious.

But it was like reserved for the best of the best.

-huh, -huh. Larapin good pie, something like that, right?

Exactly. Exactly.

Yeah, and it comes from an old dialect term, larrup, that means to beat or strike or thrash or whip.

And it’s one of those words in English that has to do with beating or striking, but that also means something really the best of its kind.

Oh, interesting.

Yeah, yeah. It may go back to a Dutch word that means to whip, but I usually associate it with Oklahoma and Texas.

It’s interesting that your friends heard it where they grew up.

And by dialect, you mean English dialects because it was widespread throughout the minor linguistic regions of the United Kingdom, right?

Yep. Means to beat or strike. L-A-R-R-U-P.

Except in the non-literal use, which just means more of the same or emphatic or very or awesome.

Right.

That’s awesome. That’s fascinating.

Robert, thank you so much for your call. We really appreciate it.

Hey, thank you for having me on the show. I love to listen.

Thank you. Take care.

Great. Thanks, Robert. Bye-bye.

Thanks. Bye-bye.

This is a Lairupin’ good place to have your questions answered, 877-929-9673.

Or have a whopping good time composing a huge email and send it to words@waywordradio.org.

Here is another pangram that I really liked that has a scientific bent.

In the Kuiper Belt, Pluto is judged as dwarf planet, vexing the status quo by making size count.

Wow, yeah, that’s pretty good.

Yeah, it makes sense.

It’s a long one, though.

That’s part of the problem.

How many letters is that?

73.

73.

You wanted to be brief.

Yeah, but I like it.

Pangrams are pretty cool.

What’s the shortest one you know?

Do you know?

Just the alphabet song?

Yeah, yeah, that’s just 26, right?

Well, there’s an and in there at the end, and Z or NZ.

877-929-9673.

This show is about language examined through family, history, and culture.

Stick around.

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 just learned a slang term from the world of theater.

It’s billboarding.

Do you know this term, billboarding?

No.

When an actor billboards a word, it means he or she gives that word a special prominence.

And you’ll find that really good Shakespearean actors do just that when they deliver their lines.

They billboard the names of people and places, especially if they’re the first person in the play to say that name.

They’re trained to set that word apart to give it just a little extra.

I learned that and many, many, many more things from the new edition of a book called Thinking Shakespeare.

It’s by Barry Edelstein, and he’s the artistic director of the Old Globe Theater here in San Diego.

And the book is based on his distinguished 30-year career as a stage director and producer.

Thinking Shakespeare is a working guide for actors and directors,

But really it’s a great book for anybody who wants to have a better appreciation for the work of the Bard.

Edelstein taught for years at Juilliard and the Public Theater in New York,

And he’s the best kind of educator because his book is really joyous.

You know, that favorite teacher, that favorite professor you had,

And you just wish you could go out for a long dinner with them

And have them tell you all the reasons they love their subject so much

And tell you little background information.

He offers lots of funny asides and allusions,

And he provides these useful paraphrases of what’s going on in a scene.

And he sets up the passages by reminding lay readers what’s going on

So it’s not like you come to the passages cold.

And it’s just so much fun reading about how he teaches actors to wring out all the juice from a single line in Shakespeare.

And the way they do that is they really dig into the words.

He talks about how, you know, the spectacle is fun in a play and the action is interesting.

But you can get that from HBO.

What we go to Shakespeare for is the language, is the words.

And he’s forever urging actors to ask themselves, why is this character using this particular word right now?

And the answers are thrilling, even if you never set foot on the stage.

So that book is Thinking Shakespeare by Barry Edelstein.

Well billboarded.

Thank you.

We’d love to talk to you about Shakespearean words or plays or how to perform language well, 877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org or talk to us on Twitter @wayword.

Hi there. You have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Tatiana Hemrich, and I’m calling from San Antonio, Texas.

Welcome, Tatiana. What can we do for you?

So I’m kind of curious. It’s come up more recently this thing that I have said, I think, my whole life.

I’m originally from D.C. where it didn’t seem to cause too many confused looks,

But here in San Antonio, I really get a, what is wrong with this person?

So the phrase that I’m referring to is hairy eyeball.

And so I usually use it in terms of like, you know, that person’s giving me the hairy eyeball.

And it could be either I’m doing something they think is unusual or maybe someone is just questioning what I’m doing.

Or they’re just giving me like the New York once over, but just, you know, with the hairy eyeball.

Expression.

So Harry Eyeball, thank you for doing the Johnny Appleseed work of spreading it

Throughout Texas. That’s important.

But it’s been around since at least the 1960s.

And what’s interesting to me is that the first use that we know of in print was by Carol Burnett.

She was very young. She was kind of early on in her career.

She’d established herself and had a name.

And she was being talked to by a gossip columnist. And she was talking about not understanding the slang of her younger sister who was 16. And she quotes her younger sister as saying, he gave me the hairy eyeball that meant he liked her. So the hairy eyeball, at least to Carol Burnett, meant something different. It’s possible since the whole premise of this is that Carol doesn’t understand her younger sister’s slang, that Carol got it wrong accidentally or got it wrong on purpose. We don’t really know. But now it does mean that you’re squinty-eyed at somebody.

And just imagine your eyelashes kind of occluding your eyeball. They’re kind of in the way, a hairy eyeball. There’s a lot of eyelash and very little eyeball, right? Squinting suspiciously at somebody. It pops up here and there in literature and newspapers. It’s never been all that common. It’s kind of, I would call it performance slang. You use it in a knowing way because it’s so evocative. It’s not throwaway slang that just is kind of casually unremarked upon. If someone says the hairy eyeball, people notice. So the hair in this case is the eyelashes. Yeah, it’s the eyelashes. Although the idea of a hairy eyeball seems really gross. I know. The first time I heard it, I thought. And I think that’s why I would get the questioning looks like hairy eyeball. I never even, you know, thought about the actual eyelashes.

You get the hairy eyeball for using the term hairy eyeball. There are a ton of eyeball-related terms like this in cultures around the world. I’m thinking of the way that people, well, gestures. People pull their lower eyelid down. I believe we’ve talked about that before. The buckeye. The buckeye. And there’s also the stink eye, which I believe originates in Hawaii, which is very similar to the hairy eyeball. You give someone a distinct eye, you’re showing them your displeasure with a sharp look. Very interesting.

I like the Carol Burnett reference. I am a fan of hers and used to watch her, you know, when I was younger. Right. And she has eyelashes that go on for days. So I love picturing her now that you’ve brought this to our attention. Tatiana, thank you so much for calling. Thank you very much. No, thank you so much. It’s been quite a pleasure. Thank you. Take care. Bye-bye.

Carol was 27 when she was quoted in this newspaper article. Oh, my. So she had yet to reach her heyday, but she was well on her way. She established herself early and had a reputation as the wild comedian who’d do anything just to get a great laugh. Oh, I know. So now I’m going to stop thinking about her earlobes and start thinking about her eyelashes. Very good.

877-929-9673. Email words@waywordradio.org. And you can talk to us on Twitter @wayword. Here’s a pangram that our quiz guy, John Chaneski, would love. Brexit, loved by many fans who are creating quick word puzzles just now. That’s pretty good, yeah. Every letter of the alphabet in that sentence. Brexit, loved by many fans who are creating quick word puzzles just now. You can see it, right? Crossword puzzle constructors. You’re saying the constructor crowd is going for Brexit. I’m just not seeing that. I’m just not picturing that as being their thing. Oh, good point.

877-929-9673. Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hi, Martha. How are you? Hi, I’m doing well. Who’s this and where are you? This is Patricia Keck calling from Fort Worth, Texas. Well, welcome, Patricia. What can we do for you? Well, I had a question about an expression that my husband’s grandmother used that sort of mystified me. I grew up in South Texas on the border between Texas and Mexico, and Spanish was my first language. So when I married into his family, I ran across lots of expressions that I had never heard before. And one was from his grandmother. And she often would say when she didn’t want to maybe perhaps answer completely or actually didn’t know where something was, she would say, it’s gone, where the woodbine twineth and the wang doodle morneth. And I really didn’t know what to make of that, and in some ways still don’t.

Where the woodbine twineth and the wang doodle morneth? I know. Imagine that one, where the woodbine twineth and the wang doodle morneth. We’re going to have to break this down, but I want to tell you a little story first about a man named James Fisk Jr. In 1870 or so, he and another fellow were accused of trying to embezzle millions of dollars worth of money from the U.S. Government. Basically, what they were trying to do was artificially inflate the price of gold. And then they were trying to lure President Grant’s administration into the scheme. And as part of that, they gave $25,000 to Mrs. Grant to spend as she wished, basically. Now, it’s really complicated, and I’m oversimplifying, but that’s the gist of it.

And so they were called to testify. And this fellow James Fisk apparently was quite a character. He is described in the newspapers as delivering a profane torrent of words. And when he was testifying, it was a broad farce or roaring comedy from beginning to end. So this guy, he was a real piece of work. And so they asked him point blank. They’re like, where did the money go? What happened to the money? And he replied with what you’ve said. Only he said a shorter version of it. He said, where the woodbine twineth. And this sentence was repeated in newspapers from coast to coast repeatedly over a period of weeks and months, and it kind of became like one of these catchphrases of 1870. This was just a thing that you would say to mean that something went away and I don’t know where it went.

And the reason that it means that is even more interesting to me because woodbine is a name that’s been used for a couple different kinds of creeping vines. Even Virginia creeper, for example, which is very common in the United States, will wind around a drain spout or a down spout on a house. And so where the woodbine twineth means the place where the vines wrap themselves around, and that is the spout. And it’s an indirect reference to another slang term that we don’t really use in English much anymore. To say that something is up the spout doesn’t mean that they got pregnant, which is another version that’s unrelated to this. It means that it went away. And so something goes up the spout, it means it’s gone.

And the reason up the spout means up the way has to do with pawnbrokers. I kid you not. Are you following all those? Pawn shops. Because when you went to a pawn shop in the 1800s, they didn’t store the merchandise that was being pawned on the level where you would hand it over and get some money in return. What they would do is they would send it upstairs. They would send it into storage. And often there was a hole in the floor of the ceiling called a spout. And it had like a pulley system or a dumbwaiter, even just a bucket on a rope. But there was this chute or funnel or hole called the spout. And so when you went to the pawnbroker to try to get money for your most valuable possessions, your watch, your fine jacket, your good hat, whatever it was, your belongings are said to have gone up the spout. And you got very little money for them. And they’re considered gone forever because if you’ve ever gone to a pawnbroker, even now, typically, most of the stuff that is given to a pawnbroker for a little bit of money is never redeemed by the original pawner. It’s later sold on by the pawn shop to somebody else. It’s a black hole for personal possessions. You tend not to get them back.

And so this whole complicated story, where the woodbine twaineth, has to do with pawnbrokers, the expression up the spout mean gone, and this guy talking about vines wrapping themselves around a downspout. Well, that timing sounds, you said about 1870, sounds just right because she was born in 1890, and her parents both used that expression. So, you know, from Ohio and Pleasant Lake, Indiana. So that was a usage that was not uncommon in her family. Absolutely. I totally believe it. Well, but what about the whang doodle? It’s a kind of a catch-all word for an unknown animal, either a mythical animal or one that you can identify.

When you hear an animal in the bushes and you can’t quite make out the call and you don’t really know what it is, that’s a wingdoodle.

Well, it’ll be right there with the jub-jub bird and the bandersnatch and the jabberwock. The wingdoodle is in good company.

Yeah, what’s interesting is the where the woodbine twineth and the latter part of what you quoted, the where the wingdoodle mourneth for her firstborn is the longer expression.

They’re two separate catchphrases that later joined up to become one. The where the wingdoodle phrase actually is older by about 20 years.

Yeah, it reminds me of those phrases that parents use when kids are being too inquisitive. It’s sort of like there’s one that goes, I’m making a, you know, a kid says, what are you doing, mom? And she says, I’m making a whim wham for a goose’s bridle. Or a whimmy-doodle or something like that. Sort of like a wang-doodle.

Patricia, thank you so much for introducing all of our listeners to this expression. It’s a fantastic one.

Thank you, Grant. Thank you, Martha. All right, take care.

Yeah, thanks for sharing these memories. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

Well, is there a word or phrase that’s been kicking around your family for a while? Call us about at 877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Emily calling from Madison, Wisconsin.

Hello, Emily. Welcome to the show.

Hi, Emily. Thank you. What can we have with?

So I have a question, and my question is whether there’s a gender-neutral way to refer to nieces and nephews, similar to what we would have for, like, the word cousins that wouldn’t necessarily imply gender. A gender-neutral term for nieces and nephews, so kind of all together instead of saying the phrase nieces and nephews.

Yeah, that’s right. And, Emily, what got you wondering about this?

A couple things. I have three nieces and a nephew, and I’d say in conversations, you know, describing visits and time spent together, it just always occurred to me, like, you know, why there wasn’t such a term like cousins that didn’t imply male or female.

And another thing that I have been thinking about in this context is just the way kind of our society has changed in a way and whether the English language will adapt to that. So I think it’s more commonplace now to hear, even at younger ages, people defining themselves in nontraditional ways and, you know, being more commonplace maybe to define yourself as transgender or gender nonconforming.

And, you know, if we have, you know, just certain definitions in the English language for male and female, you know, is there a way for kind of our language to adapt to what is becoming like a changing societal norm, I guess?

I understand everything you’re saying and agree with your description of the direction of the language. But this pursuit of one word to describe nieces and nephews together precedes the current movements of gender identity in the English language. It’s 50 or 60 years old, maybe even older than that.

I mean, I have citations from the 1940s of people proposing words for it. Yeah. And it’s been this sort of not exactly a hole in the language or a barely patched hole in the language for the last 50 or 60 years. But I’ve always, as an English speaker, been a little bit envious of other languages that have more specific terms for familial relationships.

The one that was proposed 50 or 60 years ago that you sometimes hear in discussions like this is the term nibblings, which is sort of a combination of niece and nephew and sibling. But it’s not really that satisfactory.

Oh, nibblings, for me, was the best one of all the ones that have been proposed that I know about.

Yeah. Yeah. Because a niflings is commonly proposed.

Yeah, I like niflings. And Nieblings. There’s that B from sibling again. Cuzzlings. Meh. Nafises. Nafises. No, I don’t like that one. And Nieskews. No, I like Nieflings. I think it just sounds cute. My little Nieflings.

But I’m sort of envious that in German you have Geschwisterkind.

Oh, wow. Gefisterkind.

Yeah. Do any of those appeal to you, Emily?

Oh, Niblings I wrote down. I love that.

You like Niblings? They’re very adorable.

Yeah, because if you really love your nieces and nephews, there’s something about nibbling on their little tootsies, right?

Oh, yeah. There’s something about the long E-nieflings that I really like.

So a lot of these have been proposed. None of them have caught on, unfortunately. Who knows? Maybe one day they’ll catch on. Certainly it’s much discussed, and usually when something is discussed, something is resolved. We’ll find out, I guess, in 50 or 60 years, maybe 100.

Well, maybe if I start using it, it can catch on a bit.

There we go. Exactly. So stay tuned. Thanks for your call, Emily.

All right. Take care. Thank you so much.

All right. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

Foreign languages seem to have solved this. We got an email a while back from Ole Christian Rudstadten, and he says here in Norway we have the two words, I’m going to mispronounce these, pardon me, Uncle Lunger and tanto Lunger, which basically mean uncle kids and aunt kids, because the gender is based on your gender, not the kid’s gender.

So you describe them as, right. It’s about the relationship to you through another person.

Right. It’s like more and more in far, far in Swedish. Which I love. Mormor and farfar are the best names ever, right?

So that’s mother’s mother and father’s mother, right?

Right. Yeah. He says they also have Norwegian words for niece and nephew, of course. And the word cousin is suskebaran, which basically means siblings, children. Pretty cool, right?

Nice. Yeah. Thanks for that email, Oli Rudstadten.

We also welcome your emails about anything that you hear on the show. Or if you’ve got something you want us to talk about, words@waywordradio.org.

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

Our toll-free line is always open in the U.S. and Canada, 877-929-9673. Or send us your thoughts to 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.

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.