Oh, For Cute! (episode #1506)

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.

A compound word consists of two words that are put together to express one idea.

Like the word houseboat is made up of two words, house and boat. Same with steamboat.

And both of these specify a particular kind of boat.

But there are a few compound words in English that work differently.

A scarecrow, for example, isn’t a type of crow, and a pickpocket isn’t a type of pocket.

And words like scarecrow and pickpocket belong to a small category of compounds that name people and things by describing what they do.

And the interesting thing is that centuries ago there was a real fashion for forming words like this.

And it was a whole lot of fun, like a quake breach.

Can you guess what a quake breach is?

Somebody who’s shaking in their boots?

Yes, yes, in their breeches.

Yeah, they’re a coward.

Or a saddle goose.

What about a saddle goose?

Somebody who’s a bad horse rider?

Well, somebody who’s a fool, who’s silly enough to try to saddle a goose, which if you’ve had experience with geese, it’s not so easy.

And Breanne Hughes is a linguist who spent years studying this category of words.

Technically, they’re called agentive and instrumental exocentric verb noun compounds.

What?

But she calls them cutthroat compounds.

Oh, that’s better.

Because cutthroat is another example of that.

It’s not a type of throat.

And she’s collected more than 1,200 of these.

Like, for example, a scrape gut.

Any guesses?

Somebody who tans hides?

I would have thought the same thing, but it’s a violinist.

Oh, okay. Very good.

Yeah, or tangle legs. I like this one.

Somebody who’s not a sure-footed dancer?

Well, you’re not a sure-footed dancer after you’ve had moonshine.

Tangle legs is an old word for a strong alcoholic drink.

Oh, I see.

She’s got a bunch of these on her website, which she calls Encyclopedia Brianica.

Nice.

And I’ll share a few more of these later in the show.

Cutthroat words.

Cutthroat compounds.

Cutthroat compounds.

Outstanding.

Well, We’ll Wait With Words is a show about all facets of language.

We know you say something weird in your house or your workplace, or you came across a phrase in your reading.

We’d like to talk about it, 877-929-9673, or email words@waywordradio.org.

And you can talk to us on Twitter @wayword.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Todd Shippey-Kong from Fond du Lac, Wisconsin.

Hey, Todd.

Welcome to the show. What’s up?

Well, I have two complaints.

I was a firefighter paramedic for a long time, first in Grand Rapids, Michigan,

And then here in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, right at the foot of Lake Winnebago.

And actually, Fond du Lac is a French word that stands for bottom of the lake.

And it’s interesting that these words followed me from Michigan back to Wisconsin.

So my first one is smell.

When we get dispatched to a gas leak, they’ll say,

Respond to such and such an address for a smell of gas.

And it’s not a smell of gas. It’s an odor of gas.

When I get there, I’m going to try to detect the odor by smelling.

Have you run into that before?

So you’re arguing that the smell shouldn’t be a noun?

No, it should be a verb, right?

You smell an odor.

You don’t smell a smell.

It’s both.

It’s been a noun and a verb for 900 years.

You’re saying that I’m wrong on that one.

Okay.

You sound like a great guy.

Because that’s been a constant argument.

I’m saying it’s not a smell.

It’s an odor.

You sound like a great guy, and as a fireman, I salute you.

But yes, you’re wrong on this particular thing.

Okay.

Now, I know I’m not wrong on my next one.

My second one is oriented, orientation.

When a patient is alert and oriented, not orientated, people call into the hospital and we say we have a patient that is alert and orientated times three.

And I think that you orientate somebody, they go through an orientation.

When they’re done, they are then oriented.

Okay.

We can break this down real quickly.

Typically, orient is the better choice for all of the sentences that you have there, at least in the United States.

Orientate tends to be more British, but they have identical meanings, similar histories.

But there’s a little bit of stigma against orientate because it sounds so unusual to the American ear.

So you go through an orientation period, and when you’re done, you still are orientated, not oriented?

Either one, whichever you prefer. It’s a style choice, so maybe you need a style guide in your…

It sounds like you need a style guide in your firehouse.

So you have a firefighter that was wrong on both accounts for my main gripe from Michigan all the way to Wisconsin.

I will tell you something, Todd.

I have never been called out to help people with a gas leak.

So props to you.

True.

I hope you never have to.

So you have your area of expertise and we have ours.

And let’s just both be great at it.

All right.

Sounds good.

Thank you very much.

Take care.

Have a great day.

Bye.

All right.

Bye bye.

A plus to Todd.

Right.

Going out to the gas leaks and thinking about language on the way.

I know.

Right.

I should have asked.

Is there a dictionary in the trucks?

Yeah.

Kind of like there’s a Bible in every hotel room.

Maybe every fire truck should have a dictionary.

Yeah.

Yeah, I wanted to ask him about involved.

You know how they always say that the house is involved?

Yeah, what does that mean in fire lingo?

Completely on fire, I think.

Oh, completely on fire, right.

So it’s just not nearby.

It’s actually subject to flame.

Yeah, I think it means being completely consumed by flames.

I remember hearing that when I was a cub reporter, hearing the dispatches.

Everyone has a work conversation that goes pretty much like Todd’s, and this is the kind of thing that we love to talk about on this show.

Call A Way with Words, 877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hey, this is Sydney. I’m calling from Indianapolis, Indiana.

Hello, Sydney.

Sydney, welcome.

What can we do for you?

Thanks for having me.

I was reading the narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass a few weeks ago, which I know sounds kind of obscure.

But anyway, in it, he used the word stereotyped in a way that I had never heard before.

And I was wondering if the way he used it is connected to how we use it.

So his sentence, let me find it.

It says, straight away, a meeting was called among the colored people under the stereotyped notice, business of importance.

So he’s talking about like the newspaper.

So I just kind of wanted to know about that use of stereotype and how we use it today, I guess.

Boy, what a great example of the old use of stereotype.

Right. If I were still making dictionaries, I would choose that as a quote because it’s nicely put.

Yeah, it’s really great.

The term stereotype as we use it today usually refers to a fixed idea that you have about somebody or a group, right?

Right.

Yeah, but this sounds like it’s referring literally to the origin of that sense of stereotype,

Because stereotypes originally were a kind of printing tool.

You would just have a stereotype, which was one block, like a metal block,

That had the images or the letters on it, and you printed with that.

And stereotype comes to us via French, and it goes all the way back to Greek words,

Stereos, which means solid, and type, which refers to, or the term that gave us type, that refers to

A dent or an imprint. And so it’s a method of printing. Oh, wow. Stereotyping. Yeah. Just to be

Careful, it actually is relatively new. It doesn’t predate movable type. What it is, is where you take

The type and you cast it. You cast a mold from that, and then you make a plate from that mold

So that you can then reuse the type for other purposes.

And you’ve got this plate from the mold that you can continue to use to print from

When you’re using your type for other things.

And what’s interesting, too, is that we also get from that same notion

The idea of the word cliché, which comes from the French words

That may have to do with the sound of that metal.

Right, cliqué or cliché, which is very similar sounds, meaning to click or make the noise.

Yeah.

Oh.

So we start out with the printing process, and people start to recognize the value of something that is identical and then refer to other things that seem to be identical to something else in a figurative sense or non-literal sense.

Yeah.

Oh, wow.

So there’s like that connection that I was really looking forward to.

Oh, that’s so cool.

Well, Sydney, thank you so much for calling. If you come across anything else in your reading, just let us know, all right?

Yeah, I definitely will.

Thank you guys so much.

All right. Take care.

You too. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hey, how are y’all doing?

This is Matt Johnson. I’m from San Antonio, Texas.

Hi, Matt. Welcome to the show.

Well, my girlfriend and I were driving down the road listening to the show one day, and she kind of posited the question about which language has the most words in it. And so we kind of thought on it and talked back and forth a little bit. And then I kind of thought, well, would you count every word or just the main root words or all of their conjugated versions? And we thought, you know, this is a good question for Grant and Martha. So I thought we’d go ahead and posit it to y’all.

That’s a huge question.

It’s enormous.

It’s enormous.

You could write books on this. Whole monographs have been written. They’ve taken people months or even years to compose about what constitutes a word. The layperson’s definition isn’t anything like the professional’s definition of what a word is. Really the only reason that you really need to know how many words there are in any given language, the only good reason is if, say, aliens said that they were going to disintegrate the earth if you didn’t tell them. Because really, it’s too involved to actually ever come up with this answer. There is some joker out there who purports to know exactly how many words there are in English, but he can’t be believed, and I won’t even mention him. The thing is, we have to agree what a word is, right? Some people say, oh, well, you know, it’s a string of characters with spaces on either side. But the thing is, what about hyphenated words? Do they count? What about compounds that behave like single lexical items? Like ice cream is pluralized and treated in all the other ways that a closed compound where there’s no space is treated. So maybe that’s actually a word, right? And what about words like abbreviations like doctor, dr, period? Do we count that as a word or only the longer form?

So yeah.

So your second point was really good. Do we count inflected forms, conjugations, pluralizations? If you just even look at the word book, you know, we have dozens of different variants depending on the ending, right? And then what about multiple meanings? So I have book verb and book noun. Do I count them as separate words or the same? And then book noun has something like 14 different meanings. And book verb has something like seven. So, yeah, so there’s no really good way to come up with this answer. And really, it’s just an exercise in futility. I mean, if you’re immortal, if you’re going to live forever, this is a task for you.

Well, it’s good to hear that because we looked it up on Google and found in a Conrad article that she kind of briefly read through. And the main point of it was, why do you even care?

Yeah, that’s a good point.

Well, what I often tell people when people ask about the number of words in English, just out of curiosity, I say, look, there are possibly as many as 15 million different chemical formulas alone. Chemical names, like the stuff you see on the back of your shampoo bottle, 15 million different ways to put those prefixes and roots and suffixes together to come up with all these actual real chemicals. And we don’t count those. So you’re talking millions just to start, right? And then if you say, well, only the common ones, well, why not the archaic ones? What about the stuff that’s in Shakespeare that nobody uses anymore? Why wouldn’t we count that? You know, if I’m ever bored one day sitting around twiddling my thumbs, I’ll kind of ponder on it a little bit more.

Yeah, if immortality comes your way, you have a great task to undertake. And please share.

Thanks, Matt. Take care now.

Thank you all. Take care.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

More about what we say and why we say it. Stay tuned.

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

And I’m Grant Barrett, and we’re joined by our quiz guide, John Chaneski.

Hi, John.

Hi, Grant.

Hi, Martha. What is up?

I have a really wordy word puzzle for you today. You know, when you’re solving a crossword, sometimes you can figure out if the letters you’re missing are vowels or consonants. And one of the relatively uncommon word patterns is VCCV, or vowel, consonant, consonant, vowel. To my mind, it’s like as if the peanut butter and jelly were on the outside of the bread. You know what I mean? Got it?

Exactly.

Now, let’s pretend I’m solving a crossword, and luckily Abba is not one of my answers, but I’ll give you a short clue, two-syllable clue, two-word, two-syllable clue, to a vowel, consonant, consonant, vowel word I’m missing. For example, teen woe would be a clue for…

Teen woe.

Acne.

Acne.

Oh, okay.

All of these are two-syllable words with the pattern vowel, consonant, consonant, vowel. V-C-C-V. All right? Now, if you want, I’ll give you the vowels that are sandwiching the consonants. I’ve got that much already while I’m solving. Here we go. The first one is backtalk.

Backtalk.

Backtalk.

Yeah. Begins with an E and ends with an O.

Echo.

Echo is right. Very good. How about sax type?

Alto.

Alto.

Yes, very good. I said all of these are two-syllable words.

Wheel bar.

Wheel bar, like a tire iron?

Wheel bar.

Not a tire iron. Like a crowbar.

But it’s a bar. How about an axle?

Axle is correct. Vowel, consonant, consonant, vowel.

Right. How about brown shade?

Ecru.

Ecru, yes.

Oh, I was going to say umbra, but that’s Latin.

Umbra.

Yeah, that’s okay. And that’s fine. We allow a Latin here.

Oh, it’s a fine.

Sure. How about proof word?

Proof word.

Yes.

No, not exam. That doesn’t work.

Proof. Is it alcohol proof or mathematical proof?

No, math. Well, more like philosophical proof.

Oh.

So a logical thing maybe?

Yeah. Begins with an E, ends with an O.

Ergo.

Ergo.

Ergo.

Yes. Very good.

Arm bone.

Arm bone.

Ulna.

Ulna.

Vowel, constant, constant, vowel. Very good.

Take back.

Take back.

Take back.

Take back.

Undo.

Oh, good.

Undo, yes. Very good. Control Z, as it were.

Big brute.

Ogre.

Ogre is right. Very nice, Martha.

Finally, this one’s a tricky clue. South side? With the crossword puzzle question mark that means pun. Question mark at the end.

That’s right.

South side.

Oh, oh, I got it, I think.

Yeah?

For south side, I would say okra.

Okra is right. Yes, very good, Martha. That’s great.

Oh, a southern side dish.

A side dish, yes. South side okra.

Okay, that’s my quiz for VCCV, vowel, consonant, consonant, vowel.

Outstanding, John. Thank you very much. We’ll talk to you next week.

Thank you. Talk to you next week.

And if you’d like to talk with us about language, call us 877-929-9673 or send your questions and comments and stories to words@waywordradio.org.

On our Facebook group, Betty Ann Flanders asked, what are some terms you’ve heard for folks having hot flashes?

Oh, boy.

I was surprised at all the terms. I mean, I’ve heard personal summer, but a lot of people came up with other things like short private vacations in the tropics. Or Stephen talked about a personal trip to the Sahara or temperature tantrums was another one. And Penny said, I’ve said warm waves. I’m having warm waves. All these terms for hot flashes, right?

Yeah, but my favorite was from Linda. She said, my friend Phyllis refers to it as my inner child playing with matches. And she added, matches my foot. My inner child plays with a blowtorch.

Well, if you’ve got other terms for hot flashes, do send them along. words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Joe Winkler from Worland, Wyoming.

Hi, Joe. And what can we do for you?

Well, I have a question about horses.

I’ve always wondered how horses got their names for their color, because you have names like Sorrel, and a Sorrel is a brown horse.

Right, yeah.

And then you have like Bay, which is a brown horse with a black mane and tail.

I mean, there’s dozens of them.

There’s Palomino and Roan and Dunn.

I mean, this has bothered me since I was six years old.

Wow.

Well, we’re going to scratch that itch for you for sure.

So I’m going to talk about just a couple of these, and then I’m going to refer you to a book that’s going to have some more answers for you, all right?

Okay.

The first one I want to talk about is Palomino.

And I think Martha’s eyes lit up when you said that word before because it’s got this Spanish connection.

And basically what it means is young dove.

And so it refers to the color of a young dove, which does not fully come into its adult plumage.

And of course, there are different kinds of doves and there’s different kinds of plumage they might have.

But in general, it’s the kind of dove that you might have found in a typical Spanish town, not even a Mexican town, but a Spanish town.

The thing with all of these horse colors is they come from three different linguistic traditions, at least three, maybe four.

So from the English, the United Kingdom English, from Spanish, two different kinds of Spanish, Spain Spanish and Mexican Spanish, and then from French.

And then you might throw in Arabic in there because there’s a little bit of Arabic and maybe even a tiny bit of Basque.

It just depends which color you’re talking about.

So tons of different traditions here all coming together in English, which is no shame whatsoever about borrowing words wherever it likes.

And here they are in horse names.

So Palomino, young dove.

The bay is interesting to me because it is the same thing for the horse color that it is in cooking.

So bay leaves are where the term bay for the color of a horse comes from.

And both the term for the leaf and the term for the color come from the same French word, which means bay leaf.

So it’s about the color of that leaf, the leaf when it’s dried, I believe.

Yeah.

Really?

Yeah.

It’s another reddish brown.

Just like sorrel is kind of a reddish brown, bay is a kind of a reddish brown.

Now sorrel, the problem with sorrel is there are lots of, it’s S-O-R-R-E-L for anyone who is not quite understanding the word.

There are lots of sorrels in the world.

It’s a common name for many different types of plants.

But it’s a particular European variety which has this deep reddish brown hue to it.

That’s the color that they’re talking about.

Okay.

Well, thank you for the information.

One more thing before you go.

There’s a great book.

It’s a classic book by Ramon Adams.

R-A-M-O-N Adams.

It’s called Western Words.

And so it’s a dictionary of kind of cowboy speech.

And it’s pretty reliable and pretty thorough.

It’s a fantastic work.

And he has all the colors for horses in there that I’ve ever thought of.

The list includes, just for a few, albino, bald face, bay, bayo, coyote, blaze, blood bay, buckskin, calico, chestnut, chinspot, claybank, cramello, flea bitten, grula, moros, overo, paint, palomilla, piebald, pinto, race, rhone, sabino, skewbald, snip, snop, snip, socks, sorrel star, starstrip, stew ball, stocking, tobiano, tregano, and zebra, dunn.

And I skipped a few.

You know, and then I’ve owned every one of those.

You have.

No kidding.

You are a true horse person.

No, no.

It’s just some of those, like Snap, those deal with the color on their nose.

Right.

And the star is like that, too, right?

The star strip, yeah.

Well, thank you for your call.

We really appreciate it.

Yeah, thanks, Joe.

Happy trails.

All right.

Take care, Joe.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Goodbye.

Goodbye.

Call us about the ones you’re thinking about, 877-929-9673, or send them to us in email.

That address is words@waywordradio.org.

Earlier I mentioned cutthroat compounds, which are a particular type of compound word, and the fact that linguist Breanne Hughes has collected more than 1,200 of these.

A lot of them really old.

Like another one is smell feast.

Oh, I think I know this one.

This is somebody who invites themselves to your meal.

Yes, yes.

Like a parasite or a greedy sponge or somebody who walks by your house and smells whatever is cooking and just happens to stop in at that moment.

A smell feast.

I like that one.

And smell fungus is a discontented person or a grumbler or a fault finder.

Oh, so maybe they have a look on their face like they smelled a nasty fungus?

Yeah, I think so.

You can find more than 1,200 of these on Breanne Hughes’ Encyclopedia Breannica.

That’s her website.

And there’s also a great video where she talks about these.

877-929-9673.

Welcome to A Way with Words.

This is Elizabeth, and I’m calling from Lawrence, Kansas.

Hi, Elizabeth.

Welcome to the show.

Well, I wanted to ask you about the name of a large flying insect, which I grew up calling a gollywombus, which to me reminds me of like Lewis Carroll and the Jabberwocky or something.

But I always grew up calling these large insects that would get into the house, particularly in the summertime.

And they kind of look like flying daddy long legs with wings.

They’re just really large flies with really long legs that kind of stumble around and sort of seem to be like Wompus, Wompus, Wompus and just bumping into things.

And so this was a normal thing to call them for me.

But when I first got married, I was in the kitchen of our rental house and maybe the back screen was open and inch or something.

And one of these got inside and I shouted at my husband, Nathan, kill the golly wampus.

And he was in the other room and I think he thought I was having a stroke or something.

And he was like, what are you talking about?

And I pointed at the insect, and he’s like, that’s like a large fly.

And I was like, it’s a gollywampus.

And so then we had to do a bunch of Googling, and we determined that it’s a crane fly.

But I was just wondering where gollywampus came from.

Elizabeth, I’m loving this story and wishing I were a crane fly on the wall to watch it.

These are the ones that are often mistaken as mosquitoes by people who don’t know better, right?

But they’re bigger than mosquitoes usually, aren’t they?

They’re really big.

Yeah, they’re pretty large.

And they’re kind of clumsy.

They fly pretty slowly, and they’re not particularly intimidating.

It’s just, you know, a large flying insect, which can be alarming.

These insects go by a lot of names that sound similar to that.

A lot of people call them gallinippers.

Have you heard that one?

No.

Yeah, there’s gallinipper and gabbernapper and gallawopper.

And granny nipper.

Granny nipper.

Which sounds very ominous, doesn’t it?

Yeah.

It may have been influenced by the term golly whopper, which is a term in the South that’s used for something that’s really extraordinary, like extraordinarily big or something like that.

But you also have the wampus in there.

Right, which is another whole path, right?

Yeah, yeah, which may be influenced by the term catawampus, which was kind of an imaginary beast.

So wampus and catawampus and galawampus were often used for either a large feline of unknown origin, kind of mythological, or it’s the thing that you would threaten the children with when they didn’t go to bed.

Or it was the punchline to the ridiculous story that you were telling to your friends as you were drinking around the campfire, that sort of thing.

Okay.

So maybe it has more in common with Jabberwocky than I thought.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Just a fun, fanciful word.

You definitely need to keep calling it that, Elizabeth.

Oh, I will.

I mean, I haven’t stopped.

I think my husband will correct me.

He’ll be like, it’s a crane fly.

And I’m like, well.

No, it’s a gollywampus.

Well, Elizabeth, thank you so much for calling.

Yeah, thanks for answering my question.

And I love the show and we’ll keep listening.

Take care.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

Well, what’s the word you’re debating in your household?

Call us about it, 877-929-9673, or send it to us an email.

That address is words@waywordradio.org.

I’m still thinking about a tweet that I saw from someone named Ellerin in Atlanta who wrote,

Just read something about replacing I’m sorry with thank you.

So instead of saying sorry I was late, say thank you for waiting for me.

Replacing negativity with positivity and gratitude breaks the I’m sorry cycle.

Powerful.

And I’ve been thinking about that tweet a lot, that it’s a really subtle change in language.

Right.

You invest the other person with a bit of your true gratitude that you have for whatever reason you were late.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It’s about the other person rather than yourself.

Right.

It also means that you don’t have to explain.

Right.

That’s true.

Yeah, but it’s just a subtle change that I’m going to start doing all the times that I’m late.

Sorry about that, Grant.

I’m looking forward to hearing it.

Thank you for waiting in advance.

877-929-9673.

Hi there.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi.

Yes, I’m Ann Norman from Fort Worth, Texas.

Hi, Ann.

Welcome to the show.

What’s up?

My elderly aunt, Benny Louise, lived with me for six years, and I was privy to a lot of her great colloquial expressions.

One she used was a way to describe people who were birds of a feather, who were alike politically or were in sync in other ways.

One day we were talking about two world leaders who were really chummy.

They got along very well together.

And she wasn’t too crazy about either one of them.

And so she said, well, those two wet around the same stump.

They wet around the same stump.

She didn’t want to use the stronger verb for urinate.

This was her way to make it sound a little bit nicer.

But she said, yeah, those two wet around the same stump.

Oh, my.

I’ve never heard anybody else say it, so I just wondered if you’ve ever heard of it.

I have not, but that conjures some picturesque images, doesn’t it?

Oh, it does, definitely.

There is a similar expression, which is a little more common, which is that someone smells around the same stump.

It’s exactly the same meaning, if you know that one.

Yeah, huh.

On Google Books, there is one novel from 1999 that uses wet around the same stump in the same way that you’re talking about.

Really?

Meaning that they pal around.

Yeah, and it’s called Virgin of the Rodeo.

Oh, I’m very familiar with that book.

You are?

Are you?

A friend of mine wrote that book.

Yeah.

I wonder if she wrote it.

Okay, great.

All right, well, I’ll have to go look at it.

Okay.

Well, ask Sarah Bird if when she wrote Virgin of the Rodeo, she’d heard that expression from you or your aunt.

She heard it from me, I think.

Oh, that’s great.

She’s mining you for material.

No, no, no.

She’s just a good novelist, and novelists pick up all kinds of stuff.

Absolutely.

Yeah, well, to me, it sounds like dogs sniffing around the same stump.

Yeah, exactly.

I used to call that reading their pee mail.

Huh.

Yeah.

You know, there are a bunch of expressions that have different meanings, but they all involve the stump as a source of contention or a problem that needs to be solved.

And I’m not really seeing it here, but I’m throwing it out there for what it’s worth.

There is an expression, two ways of getting around the same stump, meaning two ways to solve a problem.

There’s or to go around the same stump.

I don’t know if you’ve ever heard that one.

And another one, which is to whip or beat the devil around the stump.

Oh, my.

And that just means to avoid your responsibilities and goof off when you should be working.

Well, do these all have a southern origin or are they just all over the place?

Well, southern plus country plus old fashioned.

So there’s a lot of intersection there and overlap, but in general, they’re not exclusive to the South.

The South has hung on to some things that once used to be more general American.

Well, that’s great.

Well, thank you so much.

This is just fun.

I just love your show.

Thank you very much.

Thank you, man.

If we find out anything more about Wet Around the Same Stump or if we hear from other callers about it, we’ll let you know, all right?

Okay.

Take care now.

Thank you so much.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

I was walking through beautiful Balboa Park here in San Diego the other day, and I saw a bench that had a proverb on it, on a little plaque, and I just loved it and wanted to share it.

It goes, the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago.

The next best time is now.

Oh, that’s nice.

Yeah.

Yeah, so much wisdom distilled in a little proverb like that.

Yeah, I’ve heard stories about there are folk tales told about that, about the man who is planting all these trees that will take 100 years to mature, and they’re like, well, why are you planting these?

He’s like, so that someone else may enjoy them.

Right, right.

He’ll never enjoy their shade.

Right.

877-929-9673.

A Way with Words is a show about language seen through family, history, and culture.

Stay tuned for more.

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

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

In his 1958 book, The Once and Future King, T.H. White did a kind of retelling of some of the King Arthur stories.

And there’s a passage from it that really spoke to me.

And it goes like this.

The best thing for being sad is to learn something.

That is the only thing that never fails.

You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies.

You may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins.

You may miss your only love.

You may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds.

There is only one thing for it then, to learn.

Learn why the world wags and what wags it.

That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.

Learning is the thing for you.

That’s beautiful.

Yeah, there’s something so heartening about that.

It’s a reminder to me that there’s always something more to learn.

As much as we learn every week on the show from our listeners and from our research, there’s always more to learn.

And I like it as a replacement for worrying about the things that aren’t going quite right around you because the learning doesn’t have to be interrupted by the body having issues or the relationships kind of going south.

It reminds me of something that I experienced as a kid, less so today, where I realized that it would be a couple hours until dinner, but I was hungry and there was no snacking allowed.

And I realized I could read a book instead and it would fill me up and satisfy me in a way that almost was like food.

And then when dinner came, I was fine.

But I figured out that sometimes when I was tired and couldn’t sleep, the book didn’t put me to sleep, but it made me comfortable and ready to sleep, if that makes sense.

So the learning is very similar to that.

It does.

It fills you up.

It fills you up.

877-929-9673.

words@waywordradio.org.

And we’re on Twitter @wayword.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Good afternoon.

This is Harry from Falls Church, Virginia.

Hi, Harry.

Welcome.

What can we do for you?

Well, I’ve been interested in the word troll.

You know, it’s had various meanings.

And, you know, I initially thought of it as a fishing term.

And then Tolkien and the hobbits turned them into people or mythological figures.

And now in the last year or two, you know, it’s entered the political world.

In fact, recently the Speaker of the House used the word trolling in a sentence describing some of our politicians.

It’s sort of mushy, and I don’t know really how this is happening.

Okay, okay, this is good.

You’ve really hit some nice mile markers on the progress and the interrelationships of the different kind of trolls that we have here.

Let me see if I can add a few more mile markers to kind of this map that you’ve got for a troll.

First, the Tolkieness troll is ancient.

It goes back to at least Old Norse in a variety of different forms, referring to some mythological creature, often ugly, often vaguely magical, often a thing that you didn’t want to encounter.

Think of the trolls in like, is it Billy Goat Gruff where there was a troll under the bridge?

Under the bridge, yes.

So the troll goes way back. But later, and it’s a separate instance of it, and it has nothing to do with the mythological creature, the French came up with a troll meaning to cast about or to kind of scan for something or to slowly look for a thing.

And we borrowed that troll into English, and we use it primarily or did in fishing, where you dangle bait over the side, and your boat slowly goes down the stream or across the lake, and you try to attract fish to the slowly moving bait, and you bring them, and that’s trolling.

And so we fast forward to the internet. Very early on in the history of the internet is this big social phenomenon. People started doing what we now call trolling, which is saying outrageous things, sometimes that they didn’t believe, in order just to get a rise out of other people, to get their goat, so to speak, or just to bust their chops. And this trolling comes specifically from the fishing kind of trolling, which is you throw something outrageous out there on the internet and see who bites. Maybe it’s going to be a newbie who doesn’t know that you’re a big jokester. Maybe it’s going to be somebody on the other side of the political spectrum who you just know is going to be frothing at the mouth, this thing that you’ve said that you don’t even really believe in. But obviously people know about the mythological trolls. So very soon, people who do trolling, which comes from fishing, were called trolls with the idea that they were ugly, undesirable beasts that were causing all this mayhem and you didn’t really want them around.

How’s that sound?

Wow.

Yeah, right?

Language is weird, man. Language borrows. Words don’t stay themselves. They transform, they modify. And when we have similar words, a lot of times those meanings intersect and we borrow from both streams in order to make a new stream.

Well, that is absolutely fascinating. And I recognize that language is not static, but I didn’t expect this.

Yeah, so the internet trolling where you just say outrageous or dumb things on purpose in order to irritate or aggravate other people dates to at least the early 1990s. A lot of times people will credit the news group Alt Folklore Urban, but I’ve actually found it earlier than it was ever mentioned in that news group and other places in Usenet, in the news groups.

Well, it’s on cable TV with some regularity these days.

Well, it’s mainstream now. I’m not surprised that you heard it on cable news or seen it in the newspaper. It’s utterly mainstream because the internet is mainstream. I mean, we’ve been an internet society for going on 30 years now.

Right.

And as you said, the Speaker of the House used the term.

Right.

It’s striking to me that it goes from the fishing trolling idea, but also incorporates the creepy guy under the bridge, because that’s what I picture when I think of internet trolls. You know, I think of somebody coming out from the dark nether regions.

Well, there’s this interval period there where, and I think this is important, Harry, where the fishing trolling first became figurative and non-fishing related in other ways before it arrived to the internet idea of trolling. So you can see people trolling for dates, like going to the mall and trolling for trouble or trolling for information.

And there’s another kind of correspondence here that people often bring up, which is trolling, T-R-A-W-L, which is another kind of fishing where you throw out a wide net and see what comes in. And so that further kind of pollutes our understanding of the origins of this term. But fortunately, this one has been fairly well-researched. I find some new things every time I look into it because new things are digitized constantly. And we have a pretty firm understanding of where this comes from now.

Well, thank you very much.

Harry, yeah, thanks so much for calling. Appreciate it. Call us again sometime. I love your show. Take care.

Thank you very much. Take care now. Thanks. Bye-bye.

Call us, 877-929-9673. We asked folks to tell us their terms for taking a bath without really taking a bath.

Yeah.

Just sort of.

Like a Navy shower or a GI shower.

Yeah.

Yeah, or just washing your possibles. We got a tweet from someone named True Blue who said, we call it bathing up, not an entire bath, just the important parts.

Also, leaving home without bathing and putting on clean clothes is called putting icing on gingerbread.

Icing on gingerbread.

I like that.

I do too.

Okay.

I’m not quite sure.

Gingerbread’s fine by itself, right?

Yeah, yeah.

But if you’re putting the icing on, you’re putting on your clothes.

Yeah.

Okay.

Talk to us on Twitter, W-A-Y-W-O-R-D.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Yeah, hi, this is Jesse calling from Gainesville, Florida.

Hi, Jesse, welcome.

Thanks.

I grew up in northern Minnesota, and up there, there was this phrase that I heard, and I haven’t heard it anywhere else.

And it was constructed like they would say, oh, for, and then an adjective.

So, for example, they’d say, oh, for cute, or oh, for nice.

Or O for dumb.

Yeah.

And so I was just wondering, like I said, I haven’t heard it anywhere else.

So I was curious where that came from, how widespread it is, and if there’s any other adjectives that are used in that construction.

Oh, I love it.

So it’s O, O-H-O, 4-F-O-R, and then some adjective, usually expressing a judgment of some kind.

Right.

The ones I’ve heard are cute, nice, dumb, stupid, maybe gross.

Yeah.

Oh, for gross.

Yeah, those are all familiar to me.

And it is very Minnesota.

And occasionally you’ll find people saying it in Utah and some other places.

But it is widely known, almost to the point of being what I call a chamber of commerce expression,

Where people from Minnesota know that they say it, so they kind of say it because they say it.

You know, it’s kind of a reinforcement of the habit and the thing that they’ve got that differentiates them from other people.

There’s a stress on the O, right?

It’s not O for cute.

It’s O for cute.

Something like that. Yeah, yeah, and I’ve only ever heard it with the O at the beginning.

Right, right. Although we do have other constructions without the O that use for

Followed by an adjective, where you might say it for real, or for good, or for sure.

So we have similar constructions that do other things. Those tend to be adverbial,

Whereas the O for good is an emphatic, or the O for cute, where you’re expressing with an

Interjection your opinion on this matter.

And often it’s self-referential, right?

It’s either a compliment of whatever you’re saying

Or you’re talking a lot about yourself,

At least in the uses I’ve seen.

No?

Well, the way I remember it,

And this is when I was a little kid,

So I might have a foggy memory,

But I remember it being like,

Oh, you’d see a baby,

You’d say, oh, if her cute.

Oh, gotcha, there you go.

And it almost seems like the four

Was taking place of maybe the word how,

Like, you know, oh, how cute.

Right.

It’s very similar to that.

It’s idiomatic in Minnesota, so it seems normal, and it’s not idiomatic outside of Minnesota, more or less.

It seems strange to us.

And so idiomatic expressions have this quirk about them where when they’re not part of our natural sociolect or idiolect, then they’re just foreign and strange.

But if you grew up with it, it probably seems normal.

One of the books that I read suggests that it’s largely a feminine usage.

Does that ring any bells with you?

Does it seem like something women are more likely to say than men?

Yes.

Yes, definitely.

Oh, okay.

I hear my grandma, and I hear my cousin, and maybe my mom.

But yeah, now that you say that, I don’t remember a lot of men saying that.

So there have been some suggestions that it comes from one of the languages that were spoken by the people who settled in Minnesota.

So German or Scandinavian language.

I have not been able to run that down and to prove that beyond a doubt.

But it is a suggestion.

It’s what’s called a calc, C-A-L-C-U-E, where this particular construction exists in another language.

And then they simply mapped the English words to the syntax of the other language in order to get the O for cute or the O for adjective expression.

Another thing I can throw in here, which I haven’t seen published in any of my reference works, is that we have evidence of it at least back to the 1920s.

Okay.

So it’s got a long history here.

We’re talking nearly 100 years at least, and it’s probably older than that.

So it’s nothing new.

And it’s still being used, I assume?

Yeah, yeah.

Oh, it’s widespread.

It’s super common.

You’ll find it in online discussions and social media posts and people just kind of unremarkably and unironically using it as an everyday expression.

I like it.

I might adopt that.

Oh, for nice.

Oh, for fun.

Oh, for fun.

This has been fun.

Thank you so much for calling.

Jesse, thanks, bud.

Thank you for answering my question. I appreciate it.

Bye-bye.

All right. Bye-bye.

Is there a word you’ve been wondering about?

Call us, 877-929-9673, or send it to us an email.

That address is words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Amy Larson. I’m calling from Ishpeming, Michigan.

Amy, what’s on your mind in terms of language?

I have a family word, and I want to know if it’s a real word or if it’s a word that we made up.

Okay.

The word is grinsleys.

Grinsleys.

What’s it mean?

Grinsleys.

Is it like a very small bear?

A small smiling bear.

Yeah, right.

What is it?

Grinsleys are what’s in the bottom of your cup.

Say you’re drinking maybe a cup of coffee, and you get to the bottom, and there’s grinsleys in it, so you don’t drink the last swallow.

Oh, gotcha.

Oh, little grinsleys.

Like the leavings or the little residue.

Yeah.

And this just sort of spontaneously generated within your family, you think?

Well, I don’t know because my mom has always used that word.

My grandparents used that word.

I use it.

My children use it.

And like people that we knew during my childhood, they knew what Grinsleys were.

Is that right?

But since now that I’ve been here in Ishpeming, I’ve used it a few times and people are like, what’s a grinsley?

I’m like, grinsleys, you know, grinsleys, it’s a crap at the bottom of your cup.

I got to tell you, I’ve never heard it, Amy.

I don’t know it.

Grinsleys are unknown in Ishpeming.

Well, they’re unknown in my house in San Diego, too.

Yeah.

Oh, my goodness.

See, and I was wondering, like, if maybe we have Danish and German with a little bit of Irish for our family background.

I thought maybe it was something from there that was translated incorrectly.

I don’t think it’s German. I don’t know about the other languages there.

So how would you spell it if you had to write it down?

Well, we have debated about this for years.

If it’s a Grinsleys, if there’s more than one, it would be G-R-I-N-S-L-I-E-S.

Okay, just like it sounds then.

Yeah, Grinsleys.

You know, the only thing I can think of is it reminds me of a call that we had years ago from a woman who said in her family they called the little things in your pockets, you know, after you’ve emptied your pockets.

Maybe there’s a little lint or just kind of crumbs or something.

They called those greebles, and it sounds like sort of the same thing.

Well, I can see that, although I think that we would just call those pocket grinsleys, to be honest.

Of course.

I love that.

There are lots of words for this kind of thing, but I don’t know of anything along the lines of grinsleys.

No, so if you have a little alcohol left over in a bottle, it’s a heel tap.

Do you know that one?

I don’t.

Or a leftover in a glass.

There’s a cool word out of Yorkshire in the 1800s.

The leftovers of a feast or the leavings of a feast are called the scrunchings, which I really like.

That’s pretty cool, yeah.

Yeah, and that reminds me of an old word that I learned in college, orts.

Oh, yeah.

Do you know this? O-R-T-S.

You see it sometimes in crossword puzzles.

But I learned it because I lived in a cooperative house on campus where we had 30 people and every person was supposed to cook one meal for 30 people each month.

And so we ate really, really well because everybody wanted to show off for the whole dorm.

And the last day of the month, on the 31st, we would have orts, which is an old, old, old term for whatever is left over.

Well, you know, one I’ve seen for the leftovers in a teacup is tea grout, G-R-O-U-T.

I have actually heard of that.

You have? Okay.

But I’ve never, you know, like I said, where I grew up, you know, other people knew the word.

Maybe they knew it because they knew us.

But whatever’s in the bottom of your cup is Grinsley’s, especially like when it’s the milk and the cookies.

You never drink that last part.

You give that part to the dog.

Well, I got to say, we have many, many people listening to the show.

And there’s a good chance that if Grinsleys exist outside of your family, somebody else is going to call us or email us and tell us all about it.

All right?

Well, that’d be great.

Thank you.

And when we hear more, if we hear more, we will put it out to the world.

That would be fantastic.

Thank you.

Have a great day.

Thank you.

Take care now.

Thanks, Amy.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

So if you know Grinsleys, referring to the leftovers or the tiny little bits left over in a teacup or coffee cup or the…

There should be a word for that, right?

The crumbs may be in the bottom of the bread basket when the bread is all gone.

If you use Grinsley’s for that or something else, give us a call, 877-929-9673, or send in an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Want more A Way with Words?

Listen to years of past episodes at waywordradio.org, or find the show in any podcast app or on iTunes.

Our toll-free line is always open, so leave us a message at 877-929-9673, and we’ll take a listen.

We’d love to get your messages at words@waywordradio.org or hit us up on Twitter @wayword and look for us on Facebook.

This program would not be possible without you.

Grant and I are out to change the way we listen and think about language, and you’re making it happen.

Thanks also to senior producer Stefanie Levine, director and editor Tim Felten, director Colin Tedeschi, and production assistant Emma Kelman in San Diego.

In New York, we thank quiz guide John Chaneski and that master of keeping it real, Paul Ruist at Argo Studios.

A Way with Words is an independent production of Wayword, Inc.

From the Recording Arts Center at Studio West in San Diego, I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

So long.

Bye-bye.