Now You’re Cooking with Gas

Even though this is a recorded podcast, you can always call us anytime. The number is 877-929-9673.

Leave your questions and stories about language, and you might just end up discussing them on the air with us.

Thanks for listening.

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.

Last week I was giving a talk about language here in San Diego, and I did what you and I both love to do beforehand, which is to pass out index cards to everyone and say, tell me something you think I should know.

Tell me something about language, a story, or a word, or a phrase that has caught your ear lately.

And I love getting home and going through all of those because it’s sort of like getting a swag bag from your own talk, right?

Yeah, exactly.

Dumping out the bag after you’ve gone trick-or-treating, all kinds of great stuff.

Last week, one of our listeners who was there in the audience gave me a great word, which is pluff.

Pluff.

Do you know this word?

I don’t know it.

P-L-U-F-F.

Is this a family word?

No, it’s not a family word, but it’s particular to South Carolina.

It’s a word that refers to a kind of fine, silty mud, and there are all kinds of references to it online.

You can go to YouTube and see people playing in the pluff.

It’s a particular kind of mud that you see there on the coast.

So the reason that we ask people to tell us things we don’t know is because there are only two of us.

And even though we’ve got a lot of great correspondence and email and wonderful things come over the transom in social media, and we’re out meeting and greeting when we do our public events, speeches and whatnot, and presentations and this and that, we’re still feeling behind, right?

There’s always more to learn.

It’s like shoveling snow in a blizzard, right?

Yeah.

And I had the experience recently.

These two lovely young women came up after an event, and they’re from two different parts of San Diego County, and they had two different slang uses of the word burnt.

And one of them used the word burnt to kind of mean played out or finished or kind of like, that’s burnt, that’s over with.

And the other one used burnt to mean like, we don’t have anything to do with him because he’s burnt.

He’s just not one of our people.

Not desirable.

Not desirable, yeah.

Uncool.

It was really interesting that in San Diego County, in these two women’s vocabulary, were two different forms of the slang word.

I had no idea.

Very cool.

Yeah, so this is why we’re asking you right now to tell us things that you think we don’t know, but you’re pretty sure that we should.

Fill out those virtual index cards by calling us at 877-929-9673 and tell us something about language that you think we don’t know.

Or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Chris Stone and my fifth grade classroom, and we’re calling you from Francis Parker Lower School in San Diego, California.

Well, hello, Chris.

Oh, my goodness.

They’re all there.

Hello, everyone.

Well, we were recently doing an assignment about the power of adjectives and especially more mild-mannered adjectives.

For instance, if you have an old car that you need to sell, we looked into using words like mature instead of old or well-traveled instead of letting the buyer know that there were actually 200,000 miles.

Okay.

So I asked my students to write an ad about an obnoxious pet that they had to sell, and they had to use mild-mannered adjectives to describe the pet so that someone would actually want to buy it.

And one of the boys named Leo looked up the word okay, and on the online thesaurus one of the things that came up was the phrase cooking with gas.

And he came up to me and asked, well, what does this mean?

And I said, I really don’t know.

My only guess was that it came about at a time when people didn’t have gas to cook with, so it was something they were very excited to have.

And that’s where it came about.

So I said, well, we need to call A Way with Words because they’ll know.

So we’re asking that as our question.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

Fantastic.

I feel invested with hope and honor here to have a classroom listening to our words.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And you’re pretty close to the right answer.

It came about at a time when cooking with gas was happening in the home because people were using that kind of gas on a stove.

But there were electric stoves that were starting to compete with gas cooking.

Oh, okay.

That did not come into our discussion at all.

We thought it was going from wood maybe to gas.

No, no.

These stoves had been around for a while, the ones that were using gas.

But the natural gas industry actually had a campaign to encourage people to use those kinds of stoves.

And so they had a catchphrase that was, now you’re cooking with gas.

Oh, my gosh.

The kids are going to love this.

That wasn’t even on our radar.

So it’s natural gas and not gasoline like you might put in a car.

That’s since they throw the modern year.

But the other thing is the way they started this campaign was really surreptitious.

They didn’t launch any newspaper ads or nothing big in the movie theaters.

What they did is they went to the writers of the popular radio shows of the day.

These were the people who were like the TV stars of their day before there was TV.

And they got them to put this line in the script for people like Jack Benny and Bob Hope.

And so anytime something wonderful happened or somebody did something that deserved a sentiment of agreement, they said, now you’re cooking with gas, meaning now you’re doing the right thing, or now we’re on the road to success.

Wow.

Yeah.

So about what time period are we looking at here?

We’re talking about the mid to late 1930s.

1930.

Yeah, and it also got picked up by jazz musicians.

It became very popular among musicians to use that phrase, and the general public picked it up as well for exactly the reason that Grant was describing.

Okay, well, we had no idea that it went this deeply.

Pretty cool, huh?

It’s very cool. They’ll be very interested to know all this.

Well, it’s great that Leo came to you with that question, huh?

It is very great that Leo came to us.

Do you want to say thank you, Leo?

Thank you.

Thanks, buddy.

Hey, thank you, Leo.

Keep on learning, dude.

Thanks so much for all of your help.

Yeah, sure.

Sure thing.

Bye, Chris.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

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

We were talking earlier about gifts from listeners, that is, things that they’ve shared with us that we didn’t know about.

And here’s one from Jennifer Bishop Cole.

She writes, my mother is from West Yorkshire, and I thought I knew all my mom’s colloquialisms by now, but this morning she threw a new one on me.

I couldn’t make moss or sand of it.

Moss or sand of it?

Yeah.

I haven’t heard that one either.

Never heard that either.

It’s kind of opaque to me, too.

I don’t know why moss and sand would be involved.

Sort of like chalk and cheese, just things that heads or tails.

Oh, I see.

Moss and sand.

Can’t make any sense of it.

I like that.

The place to send your words and phrases is words@waywordradio.org, or you can always call us 877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Tierney. How are you?

Hi, Tierney.

Hi, Tierney. Where are you calling from?

Doing well.

Yeah, I’m calling from Charlottesville, Virginia.

Oh, welcome to the show.

Great.

How are things in Charlottesville?

I work for a new home builder in Charlottesville.

And first of all, I love my boss. He’s just wonderful.

But we are very active with Habitat for Humanity.

So in March of this year, we had a company, Habitat, built.

So, of course, everybody from the office sales on down went on the job site, and, of course, you have to wear a hard hat.

Well, my hard hat fell off, and I asked a co-worker to assemble the insert for me, and they’re really, really hard to put together.

So he struggles with it, and he puts it on, and it feels great.

About an hour later, I went to the ladies’ room, and I looked in the mirror, and my hard hat was sitting about 12 inches above my head.

It looked ridiculous, just like Jiffy Pop.

So I go back up to the build site, and I said to my boss, Frank, why didn’t you tell me I look like this?

And Frank said to me, T, I was thinking you were looking too plumb shy of a Happy Meal.

And I looked at him, and I was like, what?

And he often uses two plums shy from a Happy Meal, two fries shy of a Happy Meal, or a cheeseburger shy of a Happy Meal.

And I am dying to find out where did this phrase come from.

I think it came from the need to address situations like yours.

Yeah, the jimmy-pop head.

And might I say, I’m considerably older than my boss.

Okay.

We have a name for these kinds of expressions that your boss uses.

We did a whole episode.

Well, we did an episode that was very popular a couple years ago.

We call them full deckisms because it comes from the expression, she’s one card shy of a full deck, you know?

Oh.

She’s a full deck except for the aces.

Is the Happy Meal, is that a regional thing or an age thing?

No, that’s the McDonald’s thing.

That’s the McDonald’s thing.

Yeah, that’s a post-McDonald’s thing.

It didn’t exist prior to McDonald’s.

That’s pretty much where it comes from.

I’ve never seen plums in a Happy Meal.

You could say one cheap plastic toy shy of a Happy Meal.

It ain’t really a bad shy.

But the two cheeseburgers I’ve heard are cheeseburgers shy of a Happy Meal.

I’ve seen that one and heard that one.

A few fries short of a Happy Meal.

But it’s pretty cool because you’ve given us three variations that your boss uses, which really demonstrate kind of in this small way how we all play with the language.

We change it, even though there have never been plums in Happy Meals as far as I know.

Why not?

No, not that I know of.

That one sounds as outlandish as one I saw recently, which was a few fish short of a hat stand.

Ooh, I love that one.

Right.

Utterly mysterious.

No sense.

That’s like the fur coffee cup, right?

It’s just very absurd.

That’s so funny.

Are these phrases regarding shy of a Happy Meal, is it used all over the United States, or is it regional?

Are you familiar with where it may have just originated in terms of the Happy Meal?

No, the Happy Meal one we don’t know, but the larger group of these full deckisms, these kind of euphemistic ways of saying somebody’s not that bright or not that with it.

Yeah, which is great.

Yeah, also the origins of those are kind of lost at time, except there’s always been this culture of kind of teasing your best friends and family in a way that kind of points out how dumb they are, but with love.

These generally aren’t said to be mean.

Well, I do know it was dumb with love because I love my boss and you better love me.

They’re usually not mean because you are trying to hide the fact that you don’t think that other person really is all there.

Yeah, it’s just kind of a gentle poke.

A gentle poke.

A little nudge.

A pickle shy of a bucket or whatever it is.

Yeah, a few pickles short of a jar.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, thank you so much, and I really appreciate the information, and I hope you are not too plumb shy of a Happy Meal today.

Me neither.

Take care now.

Thank you so much.

Thanks for the story.

Thanks.

Bye-bye.

Okay.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

So the class of 2014, the kids who are graduating this year from high school, are actually, many of them are writing the year is 2K14.

Really?

Yeah, it caught my eye.

Wow.

I don’t know that I’ve seen that before for other years.

And so I was, maybe it has happened.

So I was wondering why now, why this year, 14 years into the millennium, they’re now doing the 2K14.

I like the sound of it.

I like the rhythm of it.

2K14 is very definitive.

Well, it’s interesting to throw the K in there.

It doesn’t actually solve any problem or it just makes it more visually interesting and makes you pause for a moment.

2K14 for 2014.

I like it a lot.

Yeah, why not, right?

2K15.

No, I like 2K14.

Maybe it’ll only be 2K14.

We’ll see.

Well, if you know more, give us a call, 877-929-9673, or email us, words@waywordradio.org.

One language, many voices.

Stay with us as A Way with Words continues.

Support comes from the Ken Blanchard Companies, celebrating 35 years of making a leadership difference with Situational Leadership II, the leadership model designed to boost effectiveness, impact, and employee engagement.

More about how Blanchard can develop your executives and leaders at kenblanchard.com slash leadership.

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

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

And joining us now from New York City is our quiz guy, John Chaneski.

Hiya, John.

Hi, Martha.

Hi, Grant.

What’s up, buddy?

It’s good to be back.

Well, you know, I was just thinking lately, when I’m in a conversation with people, this is something pretty much only my wife knows up until now.

I have this go-to question that I use when I’m really bored.

Is that if I’m really bored with our conversation, I’ll ask you what your first concert was.

Oh, really?

My first concert was the Beach Boys, Eternal Summer.

And that figures into this quiz because this is a quiz about the word summer.

Okay?

This is Eternal Summer.

Eternal Summer.

Okay, great.

Good.

I’m going to give you some clues to words that contain either the letters sum or the letters mer.

So S-U-R-M or M-E-R.

Okay.

The letters can appear anywhere in the word, but they will always be in order.

Okay, great.

For example, if I said this is a piece of paper that means you have to go to court, you’d say?

It’s a summons.

Summons, yes.

Or if I said a citizen of the United States, you’d say?

An American.

American, that’s right.

So this is our eternal summer.

Summer all the time.

Here we go.

All right.

A slang term for this is a crumb catcher, and it’s usually worn with the pleats facing up.

I was going to say a moustache, but that’s…

A crumb catcher?

Yeah.

Usually more with the pleats facing up.

Yes.

Cumberbund.

Yes, cummerbund.

Yeah, there’s your mer.

There’s nothing funny about this bone except its name.

Humerus.

Humerus.

H-U-M-E-R-U-S.

Humerus.

Everest’s is 8,848 meters above sea level.

Summit.

Summit.

Yeah, there’s your sum.

You need two hammers to play this stringed instrument.

Dulcimer.

Ooh.

Dulcimer.

Very good.

On a roll.

On a roll.

Here’s an example.

Dorothy goes to Oz.

She meets the scarecrow, tin man, and lion.

They defeat the witch.

She goes home.

Summary.

Yes, a summary.

A rather short summary at that.

On August 15, Catholics celebrate this event in which Mary was taken up bodily into heaven.

The assumption.

Yes, the assumption.

According to the book The Once and Future King, this person experiences time backwards, though he does not seem to grow older or younger.

Merlin.

Yes, Merlin. Good. Good trivia there, too.

This is a German word meaning a sadness upon thinking about the discrepancy between an ideal world and the real world.

Weltschmerz.

Weltschmerz.

That word is up there with pickle as far as automatically funny. I’m sorry.

Yes, Weltschmerz.

I think it’s sad.

This adjective means impressive, expensive, and of high quality, like a grand feast.

Ooh, sumptuous.

Sumptuous.

There’s your sum.

This is a plan or course of action that is not possible to achieve, or a Frankenstein-like mythological creature with a lion’s head, a goat’s body, etc.

Chimera.

Chimera.

There’s your M-E-R.

Chimera.

Very good.

Finally, this is the belief that it benefits a country if its people buy and use many goods and services.

This one contains both S-U-M and M-E-R.

Oh.

Consumerism.

Yes, consumerism.

Oh, good one.

Nicely done, Grant.

Okay, you guys did fantastic.

Now go out and grab a Frisbee and hit to the beach.

We are in San Diego.

It is sometimes an endless summer.

I was going to say.

Thank you, John.

Another great quiz as always.

We will talk to you again next week.

Thanks, guys.

Looking forward to it.

Bye-bye.

And if you’d like to talk about any aspect of language, you know what to do.

Call us 877-929-9673 or send them an email to words@waywordradio.org and find us on Facebook and Twitter.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Jake from Cleveland, Ohio.

Hi, Jake. Welcome to the show.

Hello, Jake.

Well, I came across your guys’ podcast a couple months ago and I thought I’ve got a perfect word that I want to share with you guys that I’d also like to learn a little bit more about for myself.

Okay.

And that word is ship-tion.

Would you like to know a little bit about that?

Yes, please.

Schiption?

Yes, Schiption.

It’s from my German grandmother.

She would always call when you put your lip out when you’re being sad and you’re protruding your lower lip.

She would say, don’t give me that Schiption.

And so it’s whenever your lower lip is pouting out.

Oh, a term that literally means little shovel.

Oh, see, that’s what my uncle had said.

Right.

Yeah.

And, in fact, if you Google the word, which is spelled S-C-H-I-P-P-C-H-E-N, you’ll see people making that little shovel with their lip.

You know, the little sort of glistening plump lip that you have when you pout.

Oh, yeah.

In my house, we call that shelf lip.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

Shelf lip.

Yeah.

My son is really good at it.

I bet.

I do it occasionally, too, but it doesn’t have the same response.

Well, usually it’s effective, right?

Yeah.

We also do the cat paws.

You hold them up in front of your…

You know, kind of like the Japanese style, like kawaii and the shell flip and cock your head like a dog.

It’s a little puppy, kitty, and shell flip all together.

Yeah.

They would also, sorry, they would also warn, you know, that a bird is going to come and poop on it.

Oh, nice.

Why would a bird be aiming for my ship-tion?

Oh, right.

Pull that in, right?

It’s too big a surface to be put out like that.

Yeah, that makes sense.

I never heard that, but I might have to borrow that.

Did they say that in German or English?

I’ve heard other people say that a bird is going to poop on it other than just our family.

But Schippchen was only a thing in our family.

Okay.

Well, yeah, Schippe in German is a shovel and Schippchen is a little one.

Oh, that’s nice.

Schippchen.

Yeah, because we always use Shen.

So, like, my uncle was always Tommy Shen and my dad was Chrissy Shen.

So whenever someone was, you know, oh, they were feeling bad about themselves, it was always, oh, poor Chrissy Shen.

Right.

So it’s a little suffix that kind of adds cuteness to the name, right?

Yeah.

That’s right.

I guess like a Y at the end, like whenever we say, you know, oh, little Jakey and those kind of things.

Exactly.

Yeah.

That’s cool.

Well, it looks like Martha was able to help you, Jake.

Yeah, that was pretty good.

Thank you very much for that.

Okay.

Thanks for giving us a call.

Take care now.

Yeah, you’re welcome.

Have a great day.

Okay.

Bye-bye, Jake.

Bye-bye.

Do you have a linguistic heirloom in your family?

Give us a call.

We’ll help you figure it out.

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

I was talking earlier about South Carolina terms like pluff or pluff mud.

And I found a whole bunch of other cool ones.

How about Broadus?

Do you know Broadus?

No, Calvin Broadus, though.

Isn’t he a famous hip-hop artist?

I don’t know.

No, what does broadus mean?

How do you spell that?

Yeah, B-R-O-A-D-U-S, broadus.

It is the same thing as a lanyard.

It’s a little extra something that you give to a customer.

What’s the origin of that?

It may come from an old Spanish or Portuguese word meaning a bargain.

Like barata in Spanish is cheap.

I wonder if Snoop Dogg knows that his last name means bargain.

I don’t know.

Well, if anybody knows Snoop Dogg, let him know.

And let us know your words and phrases, 877-929-9673, or send them an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Jan Hensley, Arlington, Texan.

Hello, Jan. Welcome to the show.

What’s up?

My mother used a word that used to drive us absolutely crazy, my sister’s name, kluge.

Kluge.

And I assume it’s, yes, K-L-U-D-G-E.

I assume that’s the way it’s spelled.

Okay.

But she would use it for, the freeway was Kluge today.

This paperwork’s all Kluge-ed up, you know, to mean something like that.

Or, wow, look at that Kluge, you know, things like that.

To mean a big mess.

She used it in so many different ways, it didn’t make sense as to what the definition was.

And what was her background?

She worked for my father. She was his administrative assistant. She’d been a housewife. We were military.

My dad was career military, Air Force.

Okay.

What was his business, though? What kind of industry did they work in?

Mergers and acquisitions.

Oh, interesting.

Yeah, kind of investment banking.

How interesting.

The reason we asked about this is that there’s a word that started in computing circles in the 1960s to refer to any kind of like not very good solution where you had, let’s say that you replaced the part with something that you made out of cardboard when it should be made out of metal, or you used a bit of software that you kind of just wrote on the spot and barely works but does work, and you kind of leave it in place.

And so it came up in a journal called Datamation several times, used by a guy by the name of J.W. Granholm.

And from there, it spread into the larger computing circles.

And even today, kludge, or kludge, as some people say, is used to refer to any kind of half-assed solution that really is just not the way that things are done.

Yeah, that’s kind of the way she used it.

It’s kind of ugly.

It’s kind of ugly, imperfect.

Put together with duct tape and wire.

Inelegant and messed up, yeah.

Yeah, it sounds a lot like clogged, too, when you’re talking about a freeway.

But that’s why we were wondering if she picked it up from the computing world or if when she worked with your father that they were in somehow big data systems.

She had gone to an executive secretarial school when my father started his business.

Interesting.

Yeah, for a long time, it was kind of stuck in the engineering and electronics world and didn’t really enter the mainstream until the 1970s.

Okay, that may be an explanation.

My dad was in armament electronics and engineering in the Air Force.

There we go.

I think that’s your connection.

Jan, I wouldn’t be surprised if he probably subscribed to these very journals where the term first became popular, because they were kind of like a big deal in the industry at the time.

Wow. Okay.

The guy who invented the word kind of mixed together the words bodge, which is a form of botch, B-O-D-G-E, and fudge, which is a form of a word we can’t say on the air.

Yes, I understand.

So he kind of mixed them together to kind of create this new word.

But there’s a funny fake story about the origin of kludge, that it’s the noise that a machine that’s broken that you’ve tried to fix with a kludgy solution makes when you drop it into the ocean.

It goes, kludge.

I like that one, too.

That’s not the real one, but it’s a better one, I think.

Thank you for calling today, Jan.

We’re glad to help, all right?

Well, thank you.

Okay, take care, Jan.

We will.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

That’s interesting what you said about throwing it into the ocean.

I once met somebody from Beloit, and she said that the name of her town is the sound of a corridor in a toilet.

Bloit?

Bloit.

No offense to the folks in Beloit, but that’s just what somebody from Beloit told me your town’s name sounds like.

We know you’ve got a collection of words that you’ve been wanting to find out about.

Maybe you’ve got long passages or rhymes or riddles or jokes, the things that you were always told at bedtime.

This is the place to find out more.

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

Another South Carolina term for you, Grant.

Do you know what a joggling board is?

No.

Part of an automobile.

No.

This is the weirdest thing.

I mean, as I mentioned earlier, a listener gave us a term from South Carolina, and I just went down the South Carolina rabbit hole looking at terms that you pretty much hear only in South Carolina.

It’s pretty sad, Martha.

It’s great.

It’s great.

A joggling board is a thing that you sit on, and it’s really long, and it’s like a bench, but the wood that you sit on is really bouncy.

It’s kind of arched in the middle.

Yeah, yeah, and you pretty much only see these in South Carolina, and they were, you can court on them or just get a little bit more exercise.

A joggling board.

So it’s kind of the same principle as a rocking chair, just something to keep you moving.

Exactly.

Okay.

Exactly, in the heat.

Never heard of this, the joggling board.

Nice.

Mm—

We’d love to hear the words from your hometown, 877-929-9673, or email us the whole story to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, how are you?

Hi, doing well. Who’s this and where are you?

My name is Vadim Grant. I’m calling from Montreal, Quebec.

Vadim.

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

Well, I had a question. English is not my mother tongue, and sometimes it can be quite confusing.

And the conversation came up that the word climb or climbing, that the B is silent.

And I was wondering if it’s always silent.

I sometimes tend to pronounce B definitely when I say climbing, but I’m not sure if it’s right,

Because someone once mentioned that it’s not.

And is there like a hard and fast rule in terms of when sometimes the consonants are silent and when not?

So climb as in C-L-I-M-B, right?

Yeah.

That’s a really good question.

Like caught climbing.

Yeah, you kind of got caught that second language trap, right?

English has got all these traps all over it for people who don’t learn it from their mothers, right?

Yeah.

Sometimes the rules aren’t that hard and fast.

There’s a couple of interesting things happening with this word and a couple of other similar words.

There’s a fellow by the name of John Wells who’s written on this, and I’ve read his stuff.

He’s a phonetician.

And he talks about how interesting it is that in the 1300s, the B stopped being pronounced in words like climb.

We used to say climb, right?

Climben.

Climben, right.

Climben, yeah.

And same for bomb, B-O-M-B.

We used to, we got it from Italian.

We used to say bomb, right?

So the reason it disappears is really simple, though.

It’s actually mechanical.

Our M sounds and our B sounds, the M and the B, both happen with our lips.

And they tend to combine, and the B gets swallowed up, more or less.

These are non-technical terms, and all my sociolinguistic friends are, like, smacking their foreheads.

But it’ll do for us.

And so that’s pretty much what happens.

So for mechanical reason, we’re looking for an easy way to say the words.

We just dropped the B from them.

But as John Wells points out, there are some other words that are related etymologically where we still pronounce the B.

So, for example, climb is related to clamber.

And we will say you clamber up the slope of a hill to get to the top.

It’s kind of like hands and feet working together, all touching the ground to get to the top.

Or crumb, like a crumb of toast, and crumble, as in the toast crumbled.

So in the first one, we don’t say the B.

In the second one, we do, and they’re etymologically related.

Thumb, as in the thumb on your hand, and thimble, the little metal object that we use to sew with so we don’t poke ourselves.

So it’s interesting.

English is, again, lots of little traps here.

What’s your first language?

Russian.

But I learned French before I learned English.

Yeah, yeah.

So you have a great appreciation then for the language, right?

For English, I’m…

I do, I do.

It’s a beautiful language,

And I enjoy also reading Shakespeare as well.

But it’s a bit of a complication sometimes

With all the Germanic and Romantic rules

Combining to make one soup.

Soup is a good word for it.

If you’re looking for a general rule,

Any word, any root word,

Let’s say, the infinitive form or the noun form of a word where the B is not pronounced.

The B is not going to be pronounced if you inflect the verb comb, as in comb your hair.

It’s comb, combing, comer.

We just don’t do the B.

Okay.

I’ve been pronouncing Bs in all of those words.

You are utterly forgiven, and there’s no worry about it at all.

A man who speaks three languages is going to find himself making mistakes in all three languages,

And that’s totally fine.

All right?

Thank you very much.

Yeah, sure.

Thanks for coming.

Good luck.

Thanks a lot.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Have a good day.

Bye.

So that’s great, right?

That’s a really good question.

And maybe it’s a thing that a native speaker wouldn’t have thought of.

Exactly.

And we probably wouldn’t have made that mistake because we learned those words early and we learned them.

Never thought about it.

Yeah, we learned them without the B sound.

Yeah.

So the outsider coming in sheds new light on the thing that we take for granted.

Yeah.

I love that about language.

Yeah, yeah.

I love that about the people who speak English as a second or third or fourth or fifth language.

Incredibly competent in English to me, too.

Right.

Very good.

Right.

And learning more, as we all are all the time, right?

Yeah, not stopping, right?

Exactly.

It’s that movie Speed, right?

You can’t stop this bus.

Call Keanu and me.

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

And by the way, you can always find us on Facebook and Twitter.

As I mentioned, I’ve been reading up on expressions that you would hear in South Carolina.

And of course, the Gullah language there on the coast is really fascinating.

And one of my favorite new, to me, expressions from Gullah is the term day clean.

Day clean. What is that?

It’s a term for daybreak.

Daybreak.

You know, like I was worrying at dayclean.

So how did that get, is that English or does it just sound like English?

No, it’s English, but it’s probably a translation of a Wolof expression.

Oh, okay.

So that’s a West African language, right?

Senegal, I think, is where they speak Wolof.

That’s super cool.

The Gullah language is amazing, right?

Yes, we should do a whole show on location in South Carolina.

At the very least, we recommend that you Google Gullah, G-U-L-L-A-H.

You will find that delightful and interesting.

In the meantime, send us questions to words@waywordradio.org or give us a call at 877-929-9673.

More stories about what we say and how we say it.

Stay with us.

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 have a friend who never goes anywhere without reading material.

I mean, I guess both of us have a lot of friends like that.

But this one in particular, I never see her without a book of fiction or a book of poetry or a copy of The New Yorker.

Some people would say that she has a bibliophobia.

I mean, you don’t find that word in actual dictionaries, but people use it.

Bibliophobia.

Wouldn’t that mean she’s afraid of not having a book then?

Yes, a bibliophobia.

A bibliophobia.

Yeah.

Yeah. And apparently this was the motivation behind a new effort by Jonathan Saffron For to get works by famous writers on packaging in the Chipotle restaurant chain.

You read about this, right?

He was eating fast food one day and realized that he had nothing to read.

And he happened to have friends who worked at this at this corporation.

And they came up with this deal where some really high-powered writers

Like Toni Morrison and Michael Lewis and Jonathan Safran Foer

Are now writing copy, like two minutes worth of copy,

That you might find on a soft drink cup.

And I don’t know.

So literature in a new place.

Literature in a new place.

Wouldn’t it be funny if you could go to bookstores of the future

And they have a whole aisle of cups with books on them?

It’s the new medium.

Yeah.

Why go to Chipotle as my middleman?

Why don’t I just want the cup?

That’s right. Go directly to the copy. Yeah, I guess it’s like putting poetry on the subway. I didn’t go and actually try the food, but I read some of the works online and I think some work better than others. I mean, for example, I adore Toni Morrison’s writing, but I don’t really think it worked on the soft drink cup.

Yeah, I mean, because it was so dense and beautiful.

And I mean, there were great passages in it, like,

I saw a butterfly broken by the slam of a single raindrop on its wings fold and flutter

As it hit a pool of water still fighting for the lift that is its nature.

Now, that’s gorgeous prose.

Right, but on a cup in a quasi-Mexican restaurant with loud beats playing from the overhead music system.

Exactly, and people talking on cell phones.

And someone shouting in the kitchen and the kid over there screaming for more.

Yeah, yeah.

But maybe she brings civilization to a chaotic environment, a moment of peace, a respite.

Maybe, maybe.

I mean, her work is the kind of work that you just want to take and, you know, go off into a corner and read.

Well, I do that, too.

I bring my phone everywhere, and I’ve got hundreds of books on there and tons of articles I’ve saved and, of course, email, the never-ending stream of email.

Yes.

But, you know, those days that you forget your phone somewhere, they’re tough to take.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I’ll take a literature wherever I can get it.

Right.

I mean, sometimes the literature I see in public is in bathrooms.

Here I sit, brokenhearted and so forth.

I won’t finish that, but I’m just saying I’ll read whatever I can.

Right.

And it’s interesting to think about how the form dictates the content in that kind of situation and what really works.

I mean, that works on the bathroom wall, I suppose.

But there were a couple of things that I thought really worked on these particular soft drink cups.

Like Jonathan Saffron Ford

Just asked a lot of provocative questions.

It was just one long stream

Of provocative questions

Like what’s the kindest thing

You almost did?

Very good conversation.

That’s like a parlor game almost.

I love it.

I do appreciate that.

I mean, it beats going

To the front of the store

For the free publications

Like the penny savers

And the whatever there, right?

I mean, sometimes those are great.

Some of the local freebie pubs

Are like the all-weeklies

Are worth grabbing

And having a read.

My other favorite was they actually got Sarah Silverman to write for these soft drink cups.

And one of them was, I always confuse NRA and NPR, totally different tote bags.

That’s awesome.

It’s true.

Well, what do you read in the strangest of places and the weirdest of mediums?

Let us know.

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

And, you know, we’re all over Facebook and Twitter.

You can find us on iTunes and Stitcher and a lot of other places.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Megan.

Hi, Megan.

Where are you calling from?

Indianapolis.

Oh, welcome to the show.

Hi, Megan.

Hi.

My question was about a word.

I think it’s pronounced utkere, and it’s spelled U-H-T-C-E-A-R-E.

Okay.

And is it a noun or a verb?

I was a little confused about that.

I think it means to lie awake with dread.

Yeah, it is a noun, and you don’t see it that much.

Did you find it in a list of words that should be revived or something like that?

I think it was an article about that, yeah.

Yeah.

Uch que eres, I would say.

Okay.

Yeah, it’s Old English.

It’s one of those compound words.

There are a lot of words in Old English where they just put two words together,

And you might translate it as dawn care.

That is the cares and worries that you have right before the sun rises.

You know, you wake up and you start worrying about something that’s bad in your life.

And we only see it in one piece of literature, apparently, in an old poem from the 10th century that’s often called The Wife’s Lament.

And it’s a really sad poem.

There are a lot of these poems from that period of time in Old English that are just really, really sad about loneliness and family leaving you or your friends dying.

There’s a really sad corpus of poems, and that word appears in one of them.

So you said it could be broken down to dawn care.

That’s kind of like a direct translation of the two compound parts.

Yeah, uhtes.

So the U-H-T is dawn.

Yes.

And the C-E-A-R-E is care.

Right.

And which looks a lot like the modern care, but the meaning is different.

It’s still about feelings and emotion, but it’s not so much about caring for someone.

It’s your cares and your worries.

Exactly.

That kind of care.

What got you to wondering about that?

I liked the definition of it.

I wasn’t really sure how you’d use it.

I didn’t know how you’d use it in a sentence, I guess, because I wasn’t sure if it was a noun or a verb or what it was.

I couldn’t find anything about it when I looked it up.

Yeah, there’s not a whole lot about it.

In that particular poem, the woman is talking about Don cares that I had wondering where my husband was or something like that because he’s gone off someplace.

So you could say I have ut care if you wanted to.

But I hope you don’t.

I know.

No, I just, I’d never heard it.

And when I looked it up, I couldn’t find anything about it.

So I was just calling and thank you for answering my question.

Sure.

We’re glad to help.

Thanks, Megan.

Thanks.

Take care.

Give us a call, 877-929-9673.

Email us, words@waywordradio.org.

Or try us on Facebook or Twitter or SoundCloud or Stitcher or anywhere you find us.

Grant, did you ever have a music class in elementary school where you played the recorder?

I know about them, yeah.

A little flute-like instrument?

I think they’ve been heavily mocked in movies, but yeah.

Well, yeah, maybe.

You did this?

Oh, yes.

Yes.

I always thought it was weird that it was called a recorder.

Okay.

Isn’t that strange?

Yeah, good question.

So you found the answer.

I did.

I looked it up.

It turns out that record is an old word for to sing a tune.

Oh, I did not know that.

Yeah, you might refer to birds recording back in the 15th century.

And, you know, it has to do with practicing a tune.

And, you know, how a recorder has that little hole up at the top that you blow into,

And there’s a little block of wood that sort of makes the whistle happen.

That’s called a fipple.

A fipple?

Just in case you need a word for hangman.

Is that a real thing?

That’s a real thing, a fipple.

A fipple.

That’s not a made-up word, not one of those stunty words, right?

I don’t think so.

Oh, that’s really good.

So record actually means to bring to life or bring to memory originally?

To sing.

I mean, it actually referred to birds singing.

Language is interesting.

You should call us.

We’ll talk about it.

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

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello.

Hello, who’s this?

This is Michael.

Hi, Michael, where are you calling from?

I am calling from Bozeman, Montana.

Bozeman, Montana.

All right.

Welcome to the show.

How can we help you?

Well, I’ve got a bit of a linguistic conundrum here that has vexed me for some time,

And I’m hoping maybe we can sort it out.

Okay, vexing conundrums.

This is the place.

Great, great.

Well, here’s the deal. Many times in the English language, the letters TH are tacked on to the end of a word.

Usually it’s kind of a modifier to make a descriptive, maybe, like say something that is wide, it has width.

Or maybe something that is strong, has strength, things like that.

Well, I’m comfortable with this, and in fact, I like to use it whenever I can.

And I have a few favorites that I employ regularly, and every time I do, my wife looks at me like I’m crazy.

Obviously, I must be doing something wrong.

What are the words that you’re adding it to that sound crazy?

Well, my favorite, I think, by far probably is if something is just really, really lame, that is lameth.

Lame.

Lame.

Yeah, yeah, right?

Or you’re watching television, maybe, and someone on Congress says, you know, the dumbest thing you’ve ever heard, and you just sigh and say, oh, the dump.

The dump.

Right?

Yeah.

It just fits.

These want to be words.

But according to my wife, no, you can’t say this.

This doesn’t work at all.

And okay, she’s probably right if you think about conventional usage.

But this started to make me wonder, is there a rule?

How do we know, really, when you can or cannot stick T-H on the end of a word?

All right.

So let’s offer you a little bit more information about this.

So that T-H suffix, among other things, we have a couple of them in English.

But this particular one comes to us from Old English, and it attaches to words to make them into nouns.

All right?

Okay.

Okay.

Sure.

And it’s pretty much left behind in Old English.

Most of the modern words that are created with that T-H suffix were kind of done in a performance-y way, kind of ironically or self-consciously, like the word coolth to refer to how cool something is in this slang for awesome or great or good.

Although coolth, I mean just pleasantly low temperature, also exists.

But that’s modern, appeared like in the 1960s, I believe, maybe even the early 1940s.

But C-O-O-L-T-H.

And then you’ve got other words that end in like kith and mirth and month.

They have a th at the end that aren’t really about a suffix being attached to a word to make it into a noun.

But the problem is that you’re taking archaic suffix and trying to use it in modern English.

And that’s why you’re getting rolled eyes from your spouse.

I have a temporal problem then.

Yeah.

You need a time machine.

I recommend a blue phone box if you find one or a DeLorean.

There are only a few time machines that we know of.

Those are the two most commonly found.

We’re going to have to trade the Subaru.

That’s it.

There we go.

Not that many.

The phone booth from Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.

Sure, sure.

But in any case, yeah, so that’s your problem here.

You’re trying to resuscitate this old suffix, and it just is not going to work to the modern ear in most cases.

People are going to know you’re up to something.

And for those new words that you’re creating to survive, they’ve got to kind of be, how should I put this, surreptitious and not very noticeable.

They’ve got to be a little more subtle.

Sure, sure.

Born at the wrong time.

Okay, well, this at least puts some reason to this whole situation.

I’ve been flummoxed for some time, so thank you guys for helping me dig into this a little further.

Well, it sounds like you got most of the way there yourself.

We’re just providing a little guidance at the end, all right?

Well, I appreciate it much. Thanks for having me.

There was lots of fun.

Lots of, yes, I think there was fun.

Fun.

But you’ve taken a noun and you added TH to make it another noun.

So now I’m really getting, I’ve got a clue on my head.

We had lots of funness.

Funitude.

Okay, fair enough.

All right.

Thanks, Michael.

Bye-bye.

Thanks, Michael.

Thanks very much, you guys.

Have a good one.

In regards to your wife.

Oh, yes.

Thank you.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

If you and your spouse have a linguistic difference, we’d love to hear about it.

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

A little low-level slang for you, Martha.

Low-level?

Well, you mean…

It’s safe.

Okay.

I’m going to spit you a big and tell you something.

Spit me a big.

Yeah, that’s it.

That’s the slang right there.

Spit you a big means to do you a big favor.

Okay, do me a big favor.

So if you spit somebody a big, you’re helping them out.

Okay.

Yeah, spit you a big.

I don’t know that I think of that as a favor.

It’s not?

No.

Like I said, it’s like very low-level slang.

You’re not using this language with your boss or the president or anybody like that, right?

No, no, no.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Cirrus calling from Oakland, California.

Cirrus.

Hi, Cirrus.

Yes.

And welcome to the show.

Yes, exactly.

It’s spelled the same way as the cloud.

Oh, really?

That’s really cool.

Two R’s then.

What can we do for you?

Well, I have a question for you regarding flout and flaunt.

Okay.

So I had always used these two words, and they’re separate and what I understood to be correct meanings.

When you flout something, you’re ignoring it to blatantly disregard and to flaunt it to show off and to parade around.

But I had recently found out that there had, for quite a while, been some debate over the misuse of these two words.

But then I came across in Act 2, Scene 2 of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where this is after there’s been the whole switcheroo that’s gone on, and the lovers who were in love with each other are now getting all mixed up.

And Helena says to Demetrius, is it not enough, is it not enough, young man, that I did never know nor never can deserve a sweet look from Demetrius’ eye, but you must flout my insufficiency.

Flout, my insufficiency. Okay. And so it sounds like the wrong use of the word.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, there’s something interesting happening with flout here.

The modern use of flout, we think of, your definition of it was very good. What was that again?

To flout, as in to just blatantly disregard.

Right. So you might flout a law or rule.

But the larger, broader historical meaning of to flout is to show contempt towards something or someone.

And even more specifically, in more archaic uses, it meant to mock or to jeer at.

And so really what this line is saying is that must you jeer at my insufficiency, must you mock my insufficiency, rather than to show contempt exactly.

Oh, okay. It wouldn’t be proper than to say, but must you flaunt my insufficiency.

Right, exactly. They’re not flaunting here.

They’re flouting, but it’s an older meaning of flout that we tend not to really go back to much.

Oh, okay. That was actually a very simple fix.

Yeah. But, you know, I thought you were going to go down the whole road with flout versus flaunt here.

And I have a pretty good way to separate those.

You flaunt your bikini body, but you flout the rules if you do it in church.

Gotcha.

That’s how I think about that.

I’ll keep that in mind next time I put on my bikini bottom.

Yeah. All right. Send us a picture. Martha wants it.

Do. We’ll post it to our social media.

Put it on the library.

We’ll flaunt it.

We’ll put it on the word wall with flaunt and flout.

What are you doing reading Midsummer Night’s Dream?

Are you trying out for a role here?

Is this for schoolwork, just for pleasure?

No, it is as odd as it sounds, just for pleasure.

I enjoy Shakespeare.

No, no, no, that’s okay.

And at the end of the day, if I just feel like I need to unwind with something, it’s comfort food for me.

It’s familiar territory.

Oh, that’s very cool.

Do you have an annotated version?

And I’m guessing if you do have one, it doesn’t have a note on this particular use of the word.

I don’t actually have an annotated version, so that’s why I called about it.

Yeah, you might fish around.

I don’t know that they’re going to have this, but the annotated versions will save you from a lot of other places in Shakespeare where it looks like the modern word, but it’s not the modern word.

Yeah, the river song is really nice.

Cool. Thanks so much, Cirrus.

Thank you so much.

Take care now.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

Well, if you just happen to be reading old books like Shakespeare and you’ve got a question about how language was used way back when, this is the place to find out.

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

Things have come to a pretty past.

That’s all for today’s broadcast.

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The show’s coming to you from the Recording Arts Center at Studio West in San Diego, California.

Thanks for listening. I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett. Bye-bye.

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 call the whole thing off, then we must part.

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