Nothing to Sneeze At

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.

You know that feeling when you’re going to sneeze, and you’re going to sneeze, and you’re going to sneeze, and then you don’t?

Yes, I do know that feeling.

Well, our listener Carissa Bell asked us that question on Twitter. Is there a term for that?

And the best we could come up with, Grant, was arrested sternutation.

Right, yeah. That works, right?

I think it does.

Pest genutation in English means sneezing. It comes from a Latin word that also gives us the word in Spanish and French and Italian for sneeze.

And I think it works.

Yeah, that’s a really good one.

Yeah.

There are a lot of terms for this on Urban Dictionary for what that’s worth.

But the one I liked best was sneeze freeze.

Sneeze freeze.

That works, right?

Sort of like brain freeze, sneeze freeze.

I like that.

But we’ve all had that feeling. The body wants to expel, but the body cannot expel.

Well, I have many more words about sneezing that I want to discuss later in the show, so stay tuned.

We’re talking about language here, words and how we use them.

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

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, it’s Vivian Lewin.

Hi, Vivian, where are you calling from?

Montreal, Canada.

Welcome to the program. What can we do for you?

I just found out that some of my friends have specific words for something that for me was just a concept.

And the concept is this. Somebody’s coming to the house and there’s junk all over the place. So you throw it in the closet or in the drawer or something.

And I was talking to my friend Donna and she said, oh, yeah, I make a lot of lasagnas. And I said, like, what? And she calls it making a lasagna.

Oh, really?

Because you end up with a bunch of unrelated things in layers.

Right.

And later on you have to, like, yeah.

All piled up.

That’s good.

Yeah.

And then it turned out that I know at least two other people who have different words for this.

Oh, good.

Tell us.

Tanya, who’s originally Ukrainian, in their family, she said, oh, we call it mummification because only mommy is allowed to do it.

Oh, mummification.

But it also gets the idea of preserving something in layers.

And then I have another friend whose husband is an actor. They’re both actors. And she said, oh, we call it comedy closet.

Like a Fibber McGee closet, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

You open it up and everything comes pouring out, bowling balls and xylophones and everything.

That’s great.

So, but there’s, I guess there’s no real word for that. But I bet other people have words for it.

Oh, yeah.

Definitely.

We’ve talked about Fibber McGee closet on the show before. You remember that old radio show?

Right, right, yeah.

Well, no, I’m too young for that.

No, come on.

Well, as a 22-year-old, you should have encountered it by now.

We had the favorite McGee radio show. Remember, Martha?

Yeah, it was a running gag.

Yeah, it was a running gag. He’d tell his wife, he’s like, oh, I’ll go get the wrench. And she’s like, no, McGee, no. And he’d open the door and you’d hear this loud clattering noise. The Foley man would be having a ball with all this racket. And there’d always be one last little bead of glass bouncing on the pavement.

The sound effects guy must have had a good time.

Yeah.

Vivian, I have friends who call it shame cleaning.

Oh.

You know how you get more cleaning done in those 10 minutes before somebody comes home or comes to your house than the whole week before?

It’s just like, yeah, but that might be even real cleaning. Like they might be running the vacuum.

Yeah.

And you have to actually have shame for that to work.

Yes.

You even invite people over so that you can clean.

Well, exactly.

Isn’t there something that just happens when you know somebody’s coming over and all of a sudden you see those cobwebs?

Yeah, it’s just like, and you want your space to be the way you would really like it to be for you, but somehow you’re not as important as them, or what is it?

Oh, that’s perfectly fine.

Yeah, maybe it’s aspirational cleaning.

Of course, that could also be with the vacuum cleaner, you know, aspirational.

I have a term myself for it. I call it going to camp. And that’s because when I was little, I was always given dolls and I didn’t like playing with dolls. And so I just always threw them in the closet and said, dolls, you’re going to camp.

I did. So now I say that to stuff around the house. You’re going to camp. Maybe never to nose in your closets. You don’t want to do that.

Well, Vivian, I think you’re probably right. Our listeners probably do have a term for that kind of quick cleaning you do when somebody’s going to come over or for the stacks that you make where you take a mess and at least make it orderly around the edges.

Yeah.

If you’ve got a word for that in your house, let us know, 877-929-9673, or tell us an email, words@waywordradio.org.

Hey, Vivian, thanks.

You’re welcome.

Happy cleaning.

Thanks for calling. Bye-bye.

Thank you. Bye-bye.

877-929-9673. Call us.

Hello. You have A Way with Words.

Hello, my name is Drew Davis, and I am calling from the Washington, D.C. Area.

Hi, Drew.

My mom and sister have been a long-time listener of your show.

Oh, great. Welcome to the show. What are you doing in D.C.?

My question comes from when we lived in California last year. In my English class, we were reading The Odyssey. And you know the line in the beginning about the muse, like, oh, great muse?

Right, the invocation of the muse that used to be traditional in poetry, right?

Yeah.

Yes. Well, that line, we had to do an essay on that, and it got stuck in my head that day after school when I was running cross-country. It was like, it fit in with my rhythm somehow.

Nice.

As I was running, the question came to me, the word muse and amused really aren’t that similar, although they sound a lot alike.

Like, amused is someone who, like, inspires, right? Like, creates you to do something or is the thing that makes you paint a picture or write a poem.

But to be amused is more like to be entertained.

Exactly. So you’re wondering if there’s a similarity as a common root between those two words?

Yeah, I’m wondering, like, why they’re so different. Like, is there any common ground between them?

Not really.

The only common ground, really, is that superficial resemblance, but they come from completely different roots.

The muses in ancient Greece were the mythological creatures who inspired people. As you said, they presided over the arts and sciences.

And the word a muse has a whole different history. It actually goes back to a Latin word that has to do with the idea of staring stupidly. It may be related to muzzle. And sort of when you’re musing on something, you’re sort of, you got that kind of look on your face.

Like a hot dog?

Well, or…

Not the edible kind.

No.

You know, well, or like a dog that’s lost the scent, you know.

Oh, I see.

You’re thinking. And so the idea of a muse eventually came to mean you’re sort of distracted from whatever’s at hand.

Oh, I see.

Yeah, so completely different routes. But it slowly changed, and now we think of it as being entertained.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, diverted from something serious.

But I’m delighted that you were reading The Odyssey and had that going through your head. You were running cross-country, did you say?

Yes.

Excellent.

That’s great.

And so what muse do you use when you run cross-country?

I guess my coaches. They kind of make us run faster.

Maybe Calliope, the muse of epic poetry, would work there, right?

Yeah, maybe.

Thanks for calling.

Thank you so much.

Bye-bye.

Okay, take care.

Bye.

877-929-9673 is the number to call or send us an email to words@waywordradio.org.

We were talking earlier about sneezing. Have you ever gone to a matinee and then you come out of the movie and the sunlight hits you and you start sneezing?

Oh, I know this. My son does this.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

He has the photic sneeze reflex. I do it too.

And usually you do it more than once.

I didn’t know there was a name for it.

There are actually several names. It’s called the solar sneeze reflex and the light sneeze reflex.

It’s also known as autosomal dominant compelling heliophthalmic outburst syndrome, otherwise known as achoo.

Seriously.

But no, it’s a real thing.

It’s a genetic trait.

So probably other people in your family do it.

And it has to do with the trigeminal nerve, we think, that when it gets stimulated by light, this nerve is very close to the optic nerve.

And it may signal the nose that there’s an irritant.

Very interesting.

It would happen to us when he was a baby and he would need his diaper changed in the early morning or in the middle of the night.

And we would put him on the changing table and turn on the little lamp and he would sneeze instantly.

Every time.

Like clockwork.

Guaranteed.

That’s hilarious.

This cute little baby sneeze.

It’s like the baby panda sneeze.

Yeah.

Something like that.

We’ll link to that video.

That’s fuzzy.

877-929-9673.

words@waywordradio.org.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Yes.

Hello.

This is Mark Weller calling.

Hi, Mark. Where are you calling us from?

I’m calling from Liberty Lake, Washington State.

What can we do for you?

My dad, who has passed away, would have a favorite saying that he would say.

If he didn’t agree with someone or feel like they knew what they were talking about, he would say, you don’t know sycam.

And we always understood, you know, what that meant just by the way he used it.

But we started thinking, gee, where did that word sycam come from?

So that’s why we call him in.

And is he from Washington State as well?

Yes, he was.

Okay.

And so the idea was you don’t know anything.

You don’t know nothing.

Bubkus.

You don’t know nothing.

You don’t know sycam.

Interesting.

Wow, this is good.

And there’s a story behind it.

Well, a small one.

Grant’s eyes are lighting up, Mark.

Well, what you’ve got there, Mark, is a shorter form of a longer phrase.

And it’s put a couple different ways in the historical record.

But usually it’s, he doesn’t know come here from Sikkim.

And the Sikkim is the Sikkim that you would say to a dog.

And Sikkim itself is a corruption of seek them.

And it would mean to follow, go after.

In the modern use, it almost always means to attack, right?

Or to fight with them.

So what you might be talking about if you say that somebody doesn’t know come here from Sikkim is you’re talking about a dog that doesn’t know how to obey commands.

But the whole thing has kind of been shortened to just siccum, and it’s so far removed from its etymological and historical roots that siccum is spelled a wide variety of ways, and it doesn’t even look like the command that you might give a dog.

It’s like S-I-C-C-U-M or S-I-C-C-E-M.

How about that?

Yeah, so how do you spell the command you give a dog?

The command you give a dog is usually spelled S-I-C space apostrophe E-M.

Oh, sick M.

So sick M, short for seek them.

And the reason I asked where your father was from and why I’m so delighted that you are both from Washington State is that this term is largely found in the northwest of the United States.

It’s got a regional component to it.

And we’d love that because as a national radio show, we like to take your regional term and introduce it to the rest of the country.

Welcome.

You know what I’m saying?

What do you think about that, Mark?

Very interesting. That makes total sense.

He was a big Latin scholar and would always have these Latin sayings he would throw out as we were growing up.

So I didn’t think it had a real Latin kind of base.

But it does sound a little bit like it, right?

It does.

You don’t know thus.

Yeah.

Well, Mark, now you do know Sikkim.

All right. Well, thank you for clearing that for me.

Take care, Mark.

Thank you for calling.

Great history there, Grant.

Yeah, you know, the language is filled with these wells that you need to only bring a bucket.

And what you’ll bring up will be the freshest water that you’ve ever tasted.

That’s beautiful.

Where’s the Kleenex?

877-929-9673 is the number to call to talk about language.

Hop on the Word Bus.

We’re taking more of your calls about language.

Stay tuned.

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You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett. And on the line is John Chaneski, our quiz guy. Hello, John.

It’s me. Hi, guys. Hi, Grant. Hi, Martha.

Tis you.

I’m on the line. I’m in line. Probably in line somewhere.

In New York, you’re on line.

For an exclusive Shake Shack or something. I don’t know.

Well, you have something for us today?

I do. Remember that scandal at the National Scrabble Championships?

Oh, yeah.

A young player ejected it because he was caught cheating.

And his method of cheating was this.

While putting the tiles back in the bag, he held on to two blank tiles, which, as you know, can be used for any letter.

And that can be a big advantage.

Let’s play a non-copyrighted generic word building game that uses tiles.

In our game, you are both the cheaters who have two blank tiles up your sleeves.

I’ll give you a word.

Your job is to use both blank tiles at the beginning and end of the word to make a valid Scrabble, Excel-less Words with Friends play.

Okay.

So it’s one tile at the beginning and one at the end?

Right.

Okay.

For example, if I said the word rouse, R-O-U-S-E, was on the board, what would you play on that?

Probably A-D.

How about trouser?

Ooh, nice.

T and R?

Very good.

Good.

I’ll take multiple answers on any of these that you’ve got.

Some of them only have one answer.

Or grouse.

Oh, a rouse.

Yeah, that’ll work.

Very good.

I should tally up the points.

Now, the first few have two or three valid plays.

Here’s the first.

The word eight, E-I-G-H-T.

Okay.

Martha has one.

Yes.

Grant?

Yes.

Okay, what do you got?

I have Heights.

Heights is good.

Grant?

Mine is Weights.

Weights is good.

I would take in Weighty is good.

Those are probably the only three valid plays on eight.

Very good.

Let’s try Ravel.

R-A-V-E-L.

Okay.

Ravel.

I have one, but…

Oh, one’s good.

Yeah, I’ve got one.

Maybe the same one.

Grant, let’s go with you first.

What do you have?

Bravely.

Oh, very good.

Martha, do you have another one?

Very good.

I went with travels.

Travels, gravely.

Bravely and travels are two of my three.

I also have gravely is also good.

How about event, E-V-E-N-T?

Seventy?

Seventy is one.

Okay.

Seventh.

Seventh is right.

Very good, Martha.

Got them both.

Now, for almost all of the others, I’m pretty sure I only have one valid play.

So let’s see how we do.

Okay.

Rob, R-O-B.

Probe?

Probe is it.

Very nice.

How about hose, H-O-S-E?

Chosen.

Chosen’s right, Grant.

Thank you.

Sorry, I should have raised my hand.

Let’s try.

This one’s a tricky one.

Ears, E-A-R-S.

Ears.

I see a proper name, but we can’t use that, can we?

Yeah, hearse doesn’t work, I don’t think.

That might lead you to it, though.

You’re close with that.

Oh, really?

Oh, hearse.

Hearse is right.

Very good.

How about the word gains, G-A-I-N-S?

I have one.

Against.

Against is right.

Very good.

Let’s try the word witch, W-I-T-C-H.

Twitchy.

Twitchy is correct.

Very good.

And let’s end up with, this one I think is kind of challenging, the word ought, O-U-G-H-T.

This one’s hard.

Is it?

No, it’s knots.

Oh, you know what that is?

I guess knots would be correct.

That’s not the word I had there.

I have one.

What do you got?

How about doughty?

Doughty, right.

Very nice.

I thought doughty was very challenging.

Well, triple word scores all around for both of you.

Nice work on that.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

That was a very good one.

I can see that my Words with Friends games have paid off.

That’s right.

Hey, thanks, John.

Thanks, John.

Much appreciated, buddy.

Take care.

Thanks, guys.

Take care.

If you want to talk about Words with Your Friends, call us, 877-929-9673.

Or send your comments about language to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, Martha.

This is Wayne from Palm City, Florida.

Well, hi, Wayne.

From where?

Palm City, Florida.

Palm City on the Atlantic Coast, right?

On the Atlantic Coast, about 45 miles north of West Palm Beach.

Gotcha.

Well, welcome to the show.

What can we do for you?

Hi, Wayne.

What’s going on?

Hi, Grant.

How are you?

All right.

I have a word that I used when I was a child or in my early teens or it was used around me.

The word is hoopie.

Hoopie?

Hoopie.

The definition, I guess, would be white trash because my dad would say, tuck your shirt tail in and you’ll look like a hoopie.

Huh.

Interesting stuff.

And so you’ve got to tell us where you and your father are from.

We’re from northeastern Ohio, Alliance, Ohio.

It’s about 60 miles south of Cleveland.

Okay.

This fits.

This fits the pattern.

It’s really interesting stuff because in the Dictionary of American Regional English, under the entry for Hoopy, all of the citations except one come from Ohio.

This is a very Ohio word.

And it’s got a cool history.

I don’t suppose you know very much about barrel making?

Barrel making?

Barrel making.

I’m an HG fan or a Discovery fan, so I’ve seen barrels being made.

Okay.

Well, there’s this history of in the Ohio River Valley, when the Ohio River was the way to get east and west in that part of the country, we’re talking pre-airplane, pre-highway, right?

Mm—

There was a culture of pottery making and a culture of barrel making, and there was all this commerce associated with the river where these folks would come from the hills, usually West Virginia, but also the rural parts of Ohio, and they would cluster around these river towns and they were hired to do the lowest, meanest work possible.

And a lot of times this had something to do with barrels or barrel making.

For example, the businesses that made lots of pots or china or crockery, that sort of thing, would use barrels packed with straw in order to ship their stuff.

And somebody had to hammer down the barrel hoops to hold the staves together so this stuff could be shipped.

Think about the cardboard box today.

The barrels were the cardboard box of their day.

That’s how you ship stuff, at least during this period, in that place.

That’s interesting because my father was from Sebring, Ohio, which is like a town of 6,000 people, and their main industry was pottery.

I’m not surprised that the industry is still there.

And so there kind of became an us-versus-them division where these people from the rural parts of West Virginia and Ohio would come to what seemed to be the big town, and they were looked down upon.

They were seen as rubes or hicks or hillbillies.

And so they were hoopies because they worked with these hoops on barrels.

I mean, it’s low manual labor.

You’re just hammering away.

Or even you might have a long pole across your shoulders with all these hoops on it, and you would walk from, you know, you would go to river town after river town trying to sell these hoops that you’d made.

Just the basest, lowest work.

And so it’s very much a derogatory term.

And it reminds me of the term Hoosier and not the term Hoosier for somebody from Indiana, but the term Hoosier as we use it in St. Louis, where I’m from, which is Hoosier there.

It means exactly the same thing.

It’s always somebody from somewhere else who we think is a Rube or a Hick.

Same in North Carolina.

Well, that’s interesting, too, because I have kin from West Virginia.

Oh, are they Hoopies?

Are they Hoopies or Hoosiers?

I heard Mountain Hoosiers.

Hoogers.

Oh, that’s a good one.

That’s a good one.

So are your relatives hoopies?

No, no.

We wouldn’t say that.

Using the word hoopie is you use it more through a window than a mirror.

Oh.

So anybody else would be a hoopie, but you wouldn’t look like a hoopie.

I love that.

Oh, that’s fantastic.

We are writing that down.

More through a window than through a mirror.

Beautiful.

Wow.

Well put.

That’s great.

Wayne, I hope we helped you some.

Thank you very much.

It’s been very informative.

Our pleasure.

Thank you, Wayne.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye now.

Call us, 877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Vicki calling from Santa Rosa Beach, Florida.

Hi, Vicki, welcome to the show.

Hi, Vicki.

Hi, thank you for taking my call.

Yeah, no problem. What’s up?

Well, I have a question.

And with the presidential election coming up, this is something that I’m frequently hearing that is just kind of confusing.

And I want to know what is the correct way of referring to elected officials currently holding office and previously elected officials who no longer hold office.

For example, TV and radio reporters, commentators, and analysts will refer to President Obama as Mr. Obama, and former U.S. Presidents, governors, senators, and representatives as President Clinton, Governor Huckabee, or Senator Kennedy without using the word former before their title.

For example, my guests today are President Clinton and Governor Huckabee who will discuss their opinions about Mr. Obama’s health care plan.

There doesn’t seem to be any consistency in the media with title use and rarely is the person referred to as former, whatever they were.

So, yes, it is confusing and different news organizations have different styles and that’s part of the confusion.

They’re consistent within themselves, but they’re different.

Like the New York Times is different from the Associated Press.

And NPR is interesting because on their first reference to President Obama, they’ll almost always say President Barack Obama.

The full name and the title.

Yeah. And then the second reference is Mr. Obama.

And they don’t use Mr. with anybody else on the radio. It’s very interesting.

So they show him the additional respect because of his office by giving him the Mr. title on second and reference beyond.

Yes. So I was listening to a report just this morning and they were talking about Mr. Obama and Romney.

They didn’t use any title in front of Romney’s name at all.

And I think the traditional idea is that if you’re going to refer to a sitting president, that’s the one who gets the title president and everybody else should be former president.

But what you also get when you’re on the chat shows and you’ve got these roundtables, you’ve got these people who are so used to having access to all these people in high office that sometimes they use those old titles, even though they no longer imply, either out of habit or because they just want to demonstrate their direct connection to this person of authority.

Yeah.

Or shorthand.

And on a roundtable, like on NewsHour, for example, on those kinds of roundtables, they’re not bound by some kind of internal style guide.

It’ll be whatever comes out of their mouths, you know?

I see.

I see.

There’s no script there.

It’s just they’re asking each other questions and answering off the cuff.

And so, yeah, it’s a mishmash.

The different style guides, each of these broadcast organizations has their own rule set.

Right.

Each of these print organizations has their own rule set.

There are some guides upstairs like AP and New York and things like that.

But, boy, they’re just not adhered to.

For anybody who’s been in the jungles of New Guinea for the past year or in a coma and they’ve just come up, you know, it’s really confusing because you just think, well, we’ve got six presidents of the United States.

It’s run by a committee.

Right. And it’s just very confusing.

You’re right, Vicki, and you’re not alone.

Yeah. We get emails about this all the time.

And a lot of times they insinuate that there’s some kind of bias represented there.

And I think we really have to say it’s almost never a lack of respect.

It’s almost always just internal inconsistency, just some kind of behavioral kind of pattern that doesn’t, they’re not thinking about it.

They’re just doing it.

So why can’t we just declare it’s one way and move on?

Right, exactly.

Drop all titles.

Just use everybody’s first name or their nickname and go forward.

Vicki, I nominate you for president of this group that’s going to change the language.

Great, Martha.

Well, thank you.

Good luck with that.

I’ll be the other president.

You found a really hard rock.

Let’s see how you can bang your head against it.

I love your show, and I guess I’ll just have to continue to sort this out every time I listen.

But thank you both for your help.

Yeah, sure.

No problem.

Thanks for calling.

Thanks for listening.

You’re so fabulous.

Oh, boy.

Thank you, Vicki.

Take care now.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673 is the number to call to talk about language or email us, words@waywordradio.org.

Well, speaking of sneezing, I have an English proverb about the day on which you sneeze.

Are you ready?

Yes.

If you sneeze on a Monday, you sneeze for danger. Sneeze on a Tuesday, you kiss a stranger. Sneeze on a Wednesday, you sneeze for a letter. Sneeze on a Thursday for something better. Sneeze on a Friday, you sneeze for sorrow. Sneeze on a Saturday, your sweetheart tomorrow. Sneeze on a Sunday, your safety seek, the devil will have you the whole of the week.

Oh!

Well, no pepper on Sundays.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hey, how you doing?

My name is Danny. Calling from Tallahassee, Florida.

Welcome, Danny. What’s up?

How you doing?

Well, I guess I was calling about some of the terminology you hear at a gym. I’m wondering if, you know, I don’t, there’s a few terms that I don’t know where they come from, even though they’re super simple.

Well, give us an example.

You spend a lot of time in gyms, I guess?

Oh, yeah. Work out like maybe four or five days a week.

Okay.

Wow.

All buff and stuff.

Like, there’s, you know, the one term, it’s the simplest one everyone says, but jack. I have no idea where it comes from.

You know, I worked on a definition for that exact term a couple of years ago when I was putting together a collection of meanings of the word jack that weren’t in mainstream dictionaries, and that was one of them. My conclusion at the time is that this jack had two possible associations. One was there’s a lot of meanings of jack which have to do with lift or to raise or to increase or to make something higher.

Sure, like with a car.

Exactly, like a mechanical jack. And so it might have something to do like that. And if you think about the motion of lifting weights, you can think about this kind of repetitive up and down motion that kind of is similar to the jack that you might lift a car with.

Yeah, or getting pumped.

Getting pumped, yeah. Feeling the pump.

And then the other one is, and this one is a little less, I’m a little less sure about this, but there’s a possibility that this contributed as well. There is a culture of steroid and drug use and part of the bodybuilding community, right? And when you put a needle into your arm, you are jacking a drug into your body. And this is kind of related to like jacking in to be online or putting a phone jack, right? So this actually inserting something into a place that is intended to go. And so that’s my impression is that if you’re jacked, it means like you are elevated, hyped, raised up, that you’re physically or emotionally or in some other way kind of lifted to a new level.

Does that sound familiar, Danny?

Yeah, that does sound, I guess, kind of familiar. I was thinking about like a car jack, you know, but wasn’t sure if it made sense. I didn’t think about the drug use.

So what else is going on in the gym? What other kind of language do they use?

Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of slang terms like, let me think here, January joiners. Everyone knows what those are.

Sure, they’ve got the new motivation.

Yeah, she’s on Mad Men. They’ve got the new motivation, right? And they show up the first week and maybe the second, but not the third are on.

Yeah, all the people that make New Year’s resolutions. And then by the end of January, they’re usually gone.

That’s good.

January joiner.

I haven’t heard that.

Cardio queen, I guess.

What’s a cardio queen?

It’s those girls. They show up with kind of a decent amount of makeup on. And then they just kind of walk on the treadmill, and that’s really all they do. They just walk and read a magazine so they never lose any weight or anything.

Nice.

But their makeup is perfect.

Love it.

Well, these are great terms. You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to find some of these more reputable glossaries online, and we’ll share them with the rest of the audience. This is good stuff, Danny. Really appreciate it. Thanks for educating us.

Take care.

Oh, thank you.

Bye-bye.

Bye, Danny.

New slang, Grant?

Yeah, it’s tons of great stuff, right? I mean, that’s what happens. We’ve talked about this before, but you get a bunch of people in one place, occupied in the same enterprise, and they feel a little different from the outside world. They develop their own language, their own shorthand.

Yeah, great stuff.

Cool stuff.

877-929-9673.

Call us.

I have another word for you, Grant. Ptarmosis.

Ptarmosis.

P-T-A-R-M-O-S-I-S.

What is that?

Well, it comes from the Greek word for sneeze, which makes a lot of sense. Ptarmos.

Ptarmos, okay.

Yeah, with a P. And it means spasmodic sneezing.

Oh, like how?

Do it.

You know, a whole bunch of sneezes.

Oh, I see.

I have a word for that. It’s related to the one we talked about before. We talked about sternutation is sneezing in general, but sternutamentum is a fit of sneezing, where you sneeze three or four times in a row.

Love it.

877-929-9673 is the number to share your sneeze words or any other comments about language. Coming up, a story about the power of forensic linguistics as A Way with Words continues.

You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

What do you think of when you hear the word forensic? Maybe you picture an investigator from a CSI unit, the guy who picks up a single hair or straight fingerprint from a crime scene, and from that one piece of evidence produces the perpetrator.

Well, what about the term forensic linguistics? This refers to linguists analyzing samples of writing or speech to extract information that’s not readily obvious. And it’s a relatively new field. The first graduate program in forensic linguistics was established just last year at Hofstra University.

And if you’re a forensic linguist, for example, you might work for Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. You might be used to help evaluate people who are seeking asylum, to listen to them and see if their grammar and slang and idioms match the country that they say they’re fleeing.

And we’ve talked on the show before about pioneering linguist Roger Shai and the dramatic story of how his analysis of a ransom note helped law enforcement officers find the right suspect in a kidnapping. You remember this grant. He left a ransom note that said, put the money in a green trash can on the devil’s strip at the corner. And that was the giveaway. Roger Shai turned to the investigators and said, do you have anybody by chance who’s a suspect who’s an educated man in Akron, Ohio? And they were dumbfounded, and the reason is that in Akron, Ohio, that’s the one place in the country where they referred to that strip of grass between the sidewalk and the street as the devil strip. And so that helped pinpoint the guy, and he later confessed.

All of this is the subject of a fascinating article by Jack Hitt in the July 23rd issue of The New Yorker. And forensic linguistics isn’t by any means a silver bullet. It’s not foolproof, but increasingly it’s turning out to be a useful tool for investigation, if not in courtrooms. And it goes beyond the party trick of just listening to people’s vowels and trying to guess where they’re from, which is what linguists love to do.

Yeah. Where the future of this lies is in analyzing mass quantities of data. You know, people are figuring out computer algorithms to analyze people’s style.

Yeah, Roger Shai is an interesting fellow and has a number of books under his belt. We’ll list some of them on the website. But they have amazing titles like Fighting Over Words, Language, and Civil Law Cases. And he talks very plainly about what it takes to win a case based on linguistics. You can do it. The field of linguistics itself is almost a professional witness. This is still a very young discipline and there’s a lot of controversy about it. But we’ll link to a summary at least of the New Yorker article.

Right.

And we’ll try to find some more information about forensic linguistics and recommend a couple of books.

You can find it all on our website at waywordradio.org.

And you can call us, 877-929-9673, to talk about any aspect of language.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Angela Duff, and I’m calling from Citrus County, Florida.

Hi, Angela, welcome.

How are you doing?

Citrus County.

I’m just fine.

Well, you know, my husband and I are from very different backgrounds.

I was a Navy brat, so I just kind of have a mishmash of language in my head.

And I studied linguistics, so I like to think about it.

But he was mostly from Massachusetts and New England.

And so every once in a while he’ll throw these words at me or these terms, and I just have no clue what he’s talking about.

And the other day we were actually riding in the car, and he spotted a man that looked very well-to-do, and he commented that this man probably still had his blueberry money.

And I had no clue what he might be talking about.

And he said that, you know, up in Massachusetts and even Maine, growing up, people would comment on that, and if a person was, like, really stingy, they would say that he still had his blueberry money.

And he wasn’t sure, but he thought that it was because, growing up, the children would pick blueberries because they were around, and that their first money would be that blueberry money, maybe.

Exactly.

He wasn’t sure.

Exactly. What’s your husband’s name?

Tie.

Angela, tie has it exactly right.

You can find this repeatedly throughout history where people just kind of pick blueberries that are on the property or by the side of the road or out in the woods.

And then they go sell them to the fruit stand and they make a little pocket money or pin money, right?

And it comes up again and again.

There’s one thing I saw from a book about women getting the right to vote where the women would pay for their poll tax with their blueberry money, whatever little money they’d managed to gain from just like picking berries here and there and then selling them and pocketing the change.

And so it’s actually even older.

Yeah, it’s quite old, actually.

And it does. It’s from the northeast.

It’s from the part of the country where blueberries might easily just grow in the wild or in the fields or in the hedgerows.

What a poetic expression, blueberry money.

That’s gorgeous.

It reminds me of pin money or maybe even a little bit mad money.

But what I like, though, is how close the whole expression of he probably still has his blueberry money is to other similar expressions for being miserly or stingy.

Like, she probably still has her first communion money.

You ever heard that one?

Or he probably still has his bar mitzvah money, right?

And these are fairly standard widespread expressions for somebody being cheap.

Or he probably still has his lunch money from grade school.

Well, she probably still has her Tooth Fairy money.

You heard any of those before?

Yeah, yeah, definitely the lunch money.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Angela, thanks for calling.

Yeah, thank you so much.

You’ve settled that.

Thanks, Angela.

Thank you.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Give her the best of time.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

877-929-9673 is the number to call about why we say the things we do.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Neil Smith-Willow calling from St. George Island, Florida.

What can we help you with?

Well, when I was a kid living in Pennsylvania and I had done something wrong or if I was being warned not to do something wrong, my mother would look at me and say, and if you do that, then down goes your shanty to the bottom of the sea.

Down goes your shanty to the bottom of the sea.

What did that mean?

Did you cower when she said that?

I froze.

You froze?

Yes.

I had no idea what it meant, but she was serious when she said it.

Something out of her past, but I haven’t got the foggiest idea what it meant or where she might have picked it up.

So if my son does something, and I’m like, if you do that again, down goes your shanty to the bottom of the sea.

There you go. You got it exactly.

This is interesting. I don’t have a lot for you on this, but I have something.

And one thing that we know for certain, that this appears in letters written by soldiers who were fighting in the American Civil War.

And so that gives us a date and it gives us a context.

We know at some point in history, this belonged to the language of the common person, right?

It’s not frequent.

It doesn’t appear all that commonly in the historical record.

It’s almost always just down goes your shanty.

To the bottom of the sea part doesn’t usually occur.

As a matter of fact, yeah, I don’t see it actually occurring anywhere else.

So it might have been your mother’s own addition.

Her embellishment, yeah.

But what it reminds me of, we had one phone call recently from Tom in Dallas.

And Tom reports growing up in Oklahoma and hearing, down goes your meat house used in exactly the same way from the maid who lived and worked with his family.

So I don’t know how old he is, but at some point in the last hundred years, I guess.

And I found a few examples of that when I was looking into Tom’s call of down goes your meat house.

And it’s used identically.

I mean, with the same kind of tone and register and situation, all of it.

And I wonder if there’s a relationship there.

And you say it was used somewhere in the Civil War in writing and letters?

Yeah, it’s been called.

It’s down goes your shanty.

Yeah, fortunately for us as language people, most of the letters from the Civil War period have, well, many of the letters from the Civil War period have been gathered up and collected, and they’re either available in book form or they’re in digital archives, and now we can mine them for lexical and language data.

Here’s one. This is from somebody who was a second Wisconsin corporal.

He says, if I ever get a chance to draw sight on a rebel, down goes his shanty.

I’ll be darned.

Yeah, it’s not that common.

My expectation is that it belongs to some kind of song of the period that a town minstrel might sing or that somebody might perform on the stage.

Kind of a standard bit that you would hear at a political rally.

I don’t know.

Yeah, it’s an odd locution.

What I think they mean by shanty, shanty historically has meant in the past, as it does now, a small house.

A very not.

Kind of ramshackle.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, but it could just be the place where you hang your hat without any kind of pejorative judgment there.

Yeah.

Well, I wonder if other listeners have heard of this.

Let us know.

Yeah, if you’re in a part of the country where they use down goes your shanty or down goes your meat house, give us a call, 877-929-9673, or email us.

The address is words@waywordradio.org.

Neil, thanks for calling.

Hey, thank you.

That was very enlightening.

Thank you.

All right.

Take care now.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Be good.

Speaking of sneezing, I have a good friend who always sneezes at the end of a meal.

At the end of a meal?

Yes.

As something she does on purpose?

No, not on purpose.

Reflexively.

Yes.

Every single time she gets full, she sneezes.

And apparently this is an actual phenomenon, a physical phenomenon.

And one name that’s been proposed for this is snatiation.

I saw it in a medical journal, the Journal of Medical Genetics.

There was something wrong with the meal?

You didn’t sneeze.

What do I have to do to make you sneeze after a meal?

It’s this little nerve tickle again, I think, is as well as we can explain it.

I baked that roast for hours.

I swear it happens every time.

I just wait for the sneeze.

Well, I know you have sneeze terms.

Let’s hear them.

877-929-9673 or send everything an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hello.

Hi, who’s this?

This is Lisa Williams, and I’m in Zachary, Louisiana.

Hi, Lisa.

I was calling about the phrase going forward, and that’s a phrase that I’ve just heard kind of recently in the last year or so.

And it seems to me that it’s kind of replacing the phrase in the future.

And it kind of drives me crazy.

So I just was winning y’all’s opinion on that.

And Lisa, do you find other people are bothered by it as well?

You know, I might be the only nerd around here.

Oh!

The nerds are everywhere.

That’s right, we’re everywhere.

So what’s your problem with going forward?

I guess I just don’t understand what was ever wrong within the future.

You know what I mean?

It makes me feel like people are just trying to sound smart or, you know,

Trying to just really look uppity or something when they say that.

Can you put it in a sentence in the way you hear it that annoys you?

I guess when they’re talking about a change like,

So now we’re going to use this new form going forward instead of just in the future,

I would prefer you use this form.

Right, because they’ve already indicated the future with we are going to, so why add going forward, right?

It’s redundant.

Exactly, exactly, yeah.

Yeah, and Lisa, I would say I’m on the same page as you.

I agree with you.

I find it really annoying, although I find myself picking it up just because so many people use it now.

It’s really become an established part of business jargon, but it does drive me crazy, I have to say.

Crazy, really?

Yes, this explains it.

You should seek help.

I have seen going forward or even moving forward, and there’s dispute about which one is the more illegitimate term,

But I’ve seen both of these on the most hated jargon list for more than a decade.

They come up every single year.

Anytime someone’s collecting a…

Anytime there’s an article in one of these terrible British newspapers where people are decrying the use of the English language,

There are a thousand comments and going forward shows up right away.

And they usually blame the Americans.

Oh, no.

Well, I’m not the only nerd.

This makes me feel good.

There are legitimate uses of going forward.

You might expect me to automatically defend this usage,

And I’m going to fulfill your wishes, your expectations.

We knew this would happen.

Well, this is when it’s not clear what your verb is saying.

Okay.

Right?

If you say, we are establishing a foundation to help the hungry going forward,

The R has a problem because it’s showing something that’s currently happening, right?

And the going forward indicates that it’s starting at this point right now and continuing into the future.

If you say we are establishing a foundation to help the hungry, it might not be perfectly clear exactly when it’s going to start.

Yeah, but I think that this term is way, way overused.

Oh, yeah.

It’s become a crutch.

I mean, nobody would ever say, will you marry me going forward?

The problem with a term that’s overused and that annoys people, here’s the thing.

At some point, it stops being annoying.

They continue to overuse it, and they just get used to it, and they stop even noticing that it’s annoying anymore.

So what we are, we’re observing this term in a decades-long period of flux.

Are you saying that Lisa and I are behind the times?

No.

It would not be the first time.

On the larger opinion of overusing business jargon, definitely.

Oh, come on, guys.

It’s just the overuse of language.

Please, please.

All of your PowerPoint slides could be a lot shorter.

Well, Lisa, if it makes you feel any better, I have a fantastic essay written by somebody who I think is British, Lucy Kellaway, who had a great piece in the Financial Times about this.

We will link to it online.

But let me just give you some of what she says about going forward, and I think you’ll feel better.

She says that the problem with it, one of the problems, is that it seems to gesture confidently toward the future but is utterly vague on timing.

We’re still the phrase conveys the cheesy and misplaced idea

That we are on a purposeful journey to a better place.

In fact, the future comes whether you like it or not

With no effort from us.

And in terms of progress,

History has confirmed that the future can be a lot worse than the present.

So at the end of the day, you should stop using going forward.

There’s going to be a sea change with this word.

Oh no.

It’s going to be impactful.

Oh, oh, ouch.

Ouch, ouch, ouch.

Lisa, does this make you feel any better?

I feel like I have a kindred spirit, so it does.

You do.

You have one.

I’m with you on the overuse.

I would say that if you find yourself using going forward or moving forward, look at it with a jaundiced eye and poise the pen to cut it, to strike it out, because there’s a really good chance that you don’t need it at all.

Would you agree?

Very good.

All right.

I do.

Thanks for calling.

Much appreciated.

Great.

Thank you so much.

Yeah, sure.

Bye-bye.

Thanks.

Bye-bye.

You know, when those end-of-the-year lists come out, filled with all the terms that people hate,

They don’t change very much from year to year.

No, they don’t, do they?

But if you wanted to sound like a more intelligent speaker, here’s my advice to you.

Find those most hated word lists and stop using them.

I mean, nothing else needs to improve in your speech, but if you do that, you will sound great.

Well, going forward, you can call us, 877-929-9673.

We got an email from Jennifer Newton who asks,

When referring to a small handbill or circular, which is the correct spelling?

Flyer or flyer?

And she’s, of course, spelling that with a Y or an I.

Right.

And this is one of those questions.

Sends me to the dictionary because I never can remember.

And they don’t agree, do they?

Well, mostly in this country, it’s flyer with an I, the thing that you pass out.

And in Britain, it’s with a Y.

Right.

Yeah.

But you’ll see both in both places, right?

You will.

You will.

Strictly speaking, the more traditional one.

In this country, it’s F-L-I.

But I always have to look.

877-929-9673.

Things have come to a pretty pass.

Before we sign off today, we want to let you know that we have a brand new website.

We’re posting new language articles, we’ve added a one-of-a-kind dictionary,

And we’ve given the whole thing a new look.

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

Thanks for listening. I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett. Take care.

So long.

I like tomato, potato, potato, tomato, tomato.

Let’s call the whole thing off.

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

And oh, if we ever part, then that might break my heart.

So if you like pajamas and I like pajamas, I’ll wear pajamas.

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