On the Shoe Phone (episode #1371)

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

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

We got an email from a listener named Susan who wrote,

While climbing up my family tree, I found the given name hate-evil.

What would one call that kind of name?

I’m assuming they were Puritans.

And Grant, it turns out that there were indeed Puritans who went by the first name hate-evil.

It’s just like it sounds, a combination of hate and evil.

And there is a term for this kind of name.

It’s called a hortatory name.

Hortatory.

Hortatory.

It’s from the Latin for encourage or urge.

And these hortatory names were given to children as a way of exhorting them to live up to that quality.

So, for example, there were little Puritan babies with these names, these hyphenated names like be courteous, search the scriptures, sorry for sin, and fight the good fight of faith.

That is far beyond patience, hope, charity, and so forth, right?

Isn’t it?

And those were the exceptions.

I mean, most of them in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, for example, the vast majority of them had names like Sarah and Elizabeth and Mary and John and Joseph.

But then you had the occasional abstinence, comfort, deliverance, increase and humiliation.

That’s a humble name, right?

Increase Mather. We all know increase, right?

Yeah, right. It’s kind of odd, isn’t it? And the list goes on and on. There was at least one child named Wrestling.

Wait, like arm wrestling?

I’m thinking it’s wrestling between good and evil.

Very good, yes.

Wrestling with big questions.

And then another one named Thanks.

Can you imagine?

Thanks grows up in your city.

I’m sitting here going, what are the nicknames to these people?

Hate Evil?

Do they just call her Haiti?

Yeah.

Or Hattie?

Something like that?

Or Hey Thanks.

Would you hand me that?

Thanks.

Thanks.

Oh, my.

I bet they went by their middle names, every one of them.

A friend of mine here in San Diego recently had a brand new beautiful baby girl,

And he named her, well, her middle name is Peligro,

The Spanish word for danger.

So her middle name is literally danger.

Whoa.

And I was thinking that was odd.

Well, sometimes they were middle names.

Sometimes they had big, huge middle names,

Like if Christ had not died for thee, thou hast been damned.

That’s a middle name.

Yeah, he became an economist, I think.

Seriously.

We’d love to hear about the historical names in your family.

What did they used to call your great, great, greats?

Just do tell us, 877-929-9673,

Or email us, words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Howdy, Grant.

Hi, Martha.

This is Jacob Williamson from Austin, Texas.

Hi, Jacob.

Hi, Jacob.

Welcome to the show.

Thank you.

How can we help?

Well, there is a type of joke or maybe a joke structure that seems to have been making the rounds lately on radio ads.

It might be a perception bias, but the joke might go something like,

What’s the difference between a lawyer and a wolf?

One’s a ravenous predator that preys on the sick and the weak and the old and the dying, and the other’s a wolf.

So if you’re doing it as an ad, and I’ll try to do the voice,

What’s it like driving the new Sunday Omega 4 versus the other top-selling car?

One is a 3.6-liter V6-speed transmission, 360-degree moving object detection system,

And built-in waffle iron sandwich grill, and the other is just a car.

So what I’m wondering is, what I learned from my English degree is that in rhetoric,

There’s a word for everything, every turn of sentence structure or argument type.

So I’m wondering if there’s a word for this sort of bait-and-switch joke.

Well, the term I was going to use was bait-and-switch joke, actually.

Oh, what? That’s easy.

I don’t know that there’s anything more technical than that.

I mean, it’s sort of Grant, a version of a paraphrosdokian.

Are you familiar with that one, Jacob?

You mentioned it recently, but I don’t quite remember it.

Yeah, it comes from Greek words that mean contrary to expectations.

And it’s lines like, I wonder why the baseball was getting bigger, and then it hit me.

Or Einstein developed a theory about space, and it was about time, too.

Which is, you know, oh, good, we got Grant on that one.

Well, hello. Hi, I’m here.

Yeah. So I would say it’s a version of a paraprostoken, but bait and switch is the only term I’ve ever really seen for that.

And at a higher level, like a lot of jokes, what happens is at the very end of the joke, you are forced to reinterpret what you’ve just heard.

So it’s called a forced reinterpretation.

Forced reinterpretation.

Yeah, and so many kinds of humor and comedy fall into that.

And when you take joke writing classes, and they exist, or humor classes, if you’re a public speaker or a comedian or a script writer, they’ll talk to you about this, trying to find that pacing so that you force that reinterpretation at the right moment when your audience is best primed to laugh at what they’ve just come to understand.

Right, and the short, short story works like that, too.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

It’s a variety of paraprostokian, that’s what I would say.

But you’re right, rhetorical terms exist for just about everything, don’t they?

Yeah, there’s always a wonderful Latinate word for just that turn of phrase.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, maybe some attorney listening knows this and will call us.

I just want more attorney jokes.

Okay, what’s the difference between a mosquito and a lawyer?

One is a blood-sucking parasite and the other is an insect.

I mean, you know, a little of that goes a long way, I think.

Yeah, it’s true.

Okay, well, thank you.

I appreciate it.

Sure, thanks, Jacob.

Okay, sure thing.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Grant, I have one more example of a bait-and-switch joke.

How about this one?

You’ll appreciate it.

There are two novels that could change a bookish 14-year-old’s life,

The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged.

One is a childish fantasy that often engenders lifelong obsessions with its unbelievable heroes,

Leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood,

Unable to deal with the real world.

The other, of course, involves orcs.

Okay.

Some people will find that funny.

I’ll buy that.

877-929-9673.

Email us, words@waywordradio.org.

And our Twitter handle is W-A-Y-W-O-R-D.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Amanda Winger from Richmond, Virginia.

Hello, Amanda.

Hi, Amanda.

How are you doing?

Hi, I’m doing great.

I’m such a fan of your show.

Oh, yay.

Welcome.

Glad to have you here.

How can we help you?

Well, I am the executive director of the Conductors Guild, which is an international organization for music conductors.

Cool.

And, yeah, we have an issue that just will not go to rest.

So I’m hoping that you can help us.

Okay.

All right, we’ll try.

So our name, the Conductors Guild,

We need to know whether there should be an apostrophe at the end

Or a conductor S or no apostrophe at all.

When we were founded, there was an apostrophe after the S,

But somewhere along the way it dropped out,

And we still have board meetings about it.

I mean, we dedicate some time in our board meetings,

So we kind of need to put this to bed.

How long has this been discussed?

Well, not long, but, I mean, it just won’t die.

When we think we’ve come to the decision, no apostrophe, you know,

I’ll get an email from somebody, but here’s why we should have an apostrophe.

And what do they say?

I’m curious about their apostrophe philosophy.

Well, the last one, I think someone quoted the elements of style or something,

That it should be apostrophe S.

I don’t know.

But we run across, also, you know, we’ll go to hotels for events,

And nine times out of ten it’s,

Welcome, Conductor, Apostrophe S, Guild.

And so we all cringe.

I don’t know.

So would you say the majority of your members are apostrophe free?

Yes, I think so.

Okay.

And are you allowed to say what you are?

I’m apostrophe free as well.

I would agree with you on this one.

Me too.

And my feelings about it have changed.

I used to like how it looked to have an apostrophe there.

But, you know, there’s just so much room for confusion.

Should it go between the R and the S?

Should it go on the end?

I think for simplicity and clarity, just don’t have it at all.

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

I really wish in school, Amanda, that they had taught us about the kind of adjective properties of nouns.

Nouns can lend their characteristics to other nouns.

And this is something that for some reason people have confusion with.

When they become adults. So it should be taught in the schools. That’s what’s happening here.

If you want a version of this name that kind of solves the whole problem, you would call yourself Guild of Conductors. And there’s no apostrophe called for at all there. And what we can see when we phrase it that way is there’s no possession taking place here. The Guild is not the property of the conductors. Actually, what’s happening is the conductors are providing the characteristic of the Guild. They are more or less describing the Guild as being about conductors or related to conductors or somehow affiliated with conductors.

But there’s no ownership there.

And as this argument continues and you have more and more board meetings, because I know this isn’t the final word, just let us know what the progress is like.

Yeah, send us the minutes.

Sure. Well, I’m hoping to close the case on this one.

Okay. Take it care. Thanks for calling.

Thank you. Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

You know when you’re really kissed, I mean, good and well, and your toes kind of do that thing where they curl up?

They curl, toe curling.

I saw a term for that this week.

Oh?

It’s called a foot pop.

Foot pop?

The foot pop, yeah.

The kiss is so good.

Your foot does that little thing.

I thought a foot pop was cold toes in the middle of the night.

Oh, that’s popsicle toes.

I’m sorry.

Popsicle toes.

If you’ve heard any new words, give us a call, 877-929-9673, or email us, words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi.

Hi.

Hi, who’s this?

This is Aviar Garcia, and also I’m Flavio Schwartz.

Oh, two guys.

Two people on the line.

And you’re calling from where?

At La Hoya.

All right, here we go.

Well, what’s on your mind, gentlemen?

We’ve been talking about the way that I speak.

So Flavio is from Italy.

And, you know, I’m from Texas.

And he’s noticed that I tend to use the word use often.

Hello.

Yeah.

And he actually came with a list of various things that I’ve said.

And I was wondering, like, if, you know, this is a dialect thing or if, you know, this is just me using lazy English.

Are you saying use?

Use, like use guys or use, like, use something?

So he would use, for instance, he could use a glass of wine, so food, for instance, like ice cream, a glass of wine, coffee.

But also he could use a shower.

He could use a ride.

He could use a nap.

He could use basically everything.

Oh, okay.

And so I was wondering whether this is just like being lazy and used the word used for everything.

And, yeah, or this is like proper English.

Since I’m learning English, yeah, I wanted to know this.

Flavio, Javi uses it exactly like many other English speakers do.

The word use has a lot of meanings, but one of them is to put into service or to employ.

So technically he’s correct.

I could use a glass of wine means he could put a glass of wine into service to relax himself.

Right?

I could use a nap.

He’s going to employ a nap to restore his energy.

It seems kind of informal, though, doesn’t it?

I could really use a nap.

No way for us to know whether or not you are overusing it, Javi.

I mean, is there something that comes out every other line?

Yeah, or are you saying I could utilize a glass of wine?

That would be wrong.

Unless you use the glass of wine to clean something.

If you’re appropriating it for another use.

Maybe I do utilize use a little too much.

Try to diversify my lexicon a little bit.

So it might not be lazy, but it might just be a faddish word for you personally, right?

A faddish kind of syntax.

Yeah, a habit.

A habit.

Yeah.

You might be the happiest callers we’ve ever had, though.

Well, gentlemen, thank you so much for your call.

If you’ve got any other disputes, give us a ring sometime.

We’ll sort it out, all right?

Okay, let’s do it again.

Yeah.

Okay, take care.

Bye-bye.

All right.

All right.

La Jolla sounds like a fun place.

Yeah, let’s go.

I’m going to use a trip to La Jolla.

Well, we like selling all sorts of disputes.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

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

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

And joining us now is our quiz guy, Greg Pliska.

Hello, Greg.

Hello, Martha.

Hello, Grant.

Hi, buddy.

What’s up?

What do you have for us?

I have another puzzle today, and it consists entirely of spoonerisms.

That’s where you shift the initial sounds on a pair of words.

You’re familiar with those, right?

Sure.

So I will give you definitions for both the original phrase and the spoonerized phrase, and then you guess the phrases.

So, for example, here are two definitions.

The first is a stream of information in 140 character increments.

And the second is a better tailored suit jacket material.

Tweet and tweed.

But you need more than that, right?

Yeah, you think about a two-word phrase for the stream of information that comes in 100 character increments.

Twitter feed?

Mm—

And?

Witter, something, tweed.

Swap the first sounds of those two words.

Oh, fitter tweed.

Fitter tweed.

Oh.

Better tailored suit jacket material is fitter tweed.

Oh, this is going to be a workout.

Okay.

Also, I should tell you that the first of the phrases will always be familiar or commonplace.

The second will usually be quite fanciful.

Are you ready?

And terribly clever.

Yes, I’m ready.

The typical freelancer’s wage metric and two mantas going out for dinner and a movie.

So hourly rate.

No, daily rate and Ray-ly.

You’re so close.

Yeah, make it.

Hourly.

Daily rate.

Day rate.

Day rate.

Yeah, day rate and Ray-date.

There we go.

Day rate and a Ray-date, which is two mantas going out for dinner and a movie.

Very good.

All right.

How about, this is an item often seen in certain beer commercials, and the other is legislation to stop cows from ruminating.

A can.

A can.

Is it a beer can?

It’s a specific brand.

Bud can?

A bud can.

A bud can and a cud band.

A cud band.

A cud band.

That’s right.

Going to stop those cows from ruminating.

All right.

While we’re on agriculture, let’s try this one.

A California agricultural area that runs roughly from Redding all the way to Bakersfield.

And an attack on the abdomen.

A central valley.

And eventual Sally.

Exactly.

Gosh.

A royal dance dessert offering often seen at Christmas time and a guy who takes bets on a Coast Guard boat.

So something cutter and butter?

Yep. Yep. The dessert is a butter…

It starts with a cookie. Yes. Butter cookie. And cutter bookie.

And cutter bookie.

The guy who takes bats on a Coast Guard boat.

Here’s one from Pop Music.

A street in a Beatles song and the discomfort caused by comedian Bruce.

So Abbey Road?

No?

A different street in a different Beatles song.

Penny Lane and Lenny Payne?

Exactly.

The discomfort caused by Lenny Bruce.

Back to the world of delicious things to eat.

Hamburger meat.

And a sad book, perhaps.

Ground beef.

Mm—

And a bound grief.

Exactly.

Bound grief.

Good.

Here’s your last one, a little California one.

This is a 2011 film and 2003 book about the Oakland A’s innovative general manager, Billy Bean.

And it’s a place where rabbits go to shop.

So it’s Moneyball and Bunnymall.

Exactly.

I would like to go to a bunny mall.

I definitely want to go to a bunny mall.

Is it a place where rabbits shop or where you go to buy rabbits?

I just hope they don’t mind being petted.

You know what’s a crowded bunny mall.

You can squeeze right in there with all those furry little beasts.

They’re popping up all over the place.

Where are my ears?

They’re multiplying.

Thanks Greg for the quiz.

It’s a pleasure.

Greg that was amazing.

See you at the bunny mall.

Take care buddy.

Bye.

If you want to talk about language, this is the place. Call us, 877-929-9673.

Send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

And you can find us on Facebook and Twitter.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi.

Hi, who’s this?

This is Murray.

Hi, Murray. Where are you calling from?

I’m calling from Ontario, Canada, near Ottawa.

Okay, very good. What can we do for you?

Well, I’ve got a question about a phrase that’s commonly used in police circles here.

In Ontario, when one of us wants the other to contact by cell phone, the common phrase is contact me on my shoe phone or contact me on my shoe.

And my question is, I suspect this may come from Maxwell Smart, and have you ever heard of this phrase before?

Well, only from the television show Maxwell Smart, for me anyway.

That’s the kind of goofy spy show, right? He’s like the hapless spy who, despite his mistakes, constantly catches the bad guy.

Right. And most of the folks that use the phrase now, I’m older than a lot of them. Most of the guys and officers have never seen this sitcom.

It’s an old 60s sitcom, isn’t it?

Yeah, yeah. 1965.

But wasn’t there a Steve Carell movie based on it?

Oh, yeah. Maybe they’ve seen that.

Is that a common phrase?

It’s come up, I think I saw it in a Tom Clancy novel years ago, and it was in military circles, and I think they meant it was a phone that you kept on your person kind of surreptitiously.

Like you might have a cell phone literally in your boot or you might have it tucked in a pocket so that you can make these calls to high command without kind of going through channels.

You can kind of just skip the procedures.

Yeah, that would make sense too.

This one is not nearly as… The phrase we use is simply to call me on the cell phone. There’s nothing more elaborate than that.

Yeah, but it makes perfect… If someone said to me, oh yeah, I’m going to call them on my shoe phone, it’d take me a second, I might giggle, but then I think I would get it.

Oh, sure.

But you guys say, call me on my shoe?

Yes, call me on my shoe phone, call me on my shoe, especially if we’re contacting cruisers car-to-car or something, and you have to get off the air for a more lengthy or private conversation.

Well, we should. Go ahead and explain for our younger listeners who haven’t seen the movie or the television show what we’re talking about.

Well, in the 1960s, there was a spoof on the Cold War spies and sort of east versus west. And the spy hero or anti-hero was Maxwell Smart, and he had a number of technical items at his disposal, one of which long before cell phones were invented was basically a cell phone, small phones that would fit in the heel of his shoe or in a pen or in other places.

And it was rather comical to see him reach into a shoe or pocket or whatever and come up with a phone.

Well, what I was remembering, he had a heel that came off the shoe, and there was a rotary dial underneath, and he would hold the sole of the shoe up to his face like a handset.

Yes, and I recall another one of the shows where he was on the shoe phone, and he got a call on his pen phone, and he had to put the shoe phone on hold. He told me, I have to put you on hold because I have to take my pen.

Perfect, perfect.

So that’s great. So the police force up there in Ottawa used this?

Well, in Ontario, at least in more than just the city, there’s other services as well.

You know what? We’ve got to hear from our other, I guess we have other listeners who are in the police forces around the country.

My father was a cop for years and years, and I don’t remember him ever using that. But it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist now.

They may not have had cell phones back in the day.

Well, they didn’t. Yeah, when he was a cop, they mostly didn’t. That’s true.

But my question is, it’s said without any sense of irony or any reference to the show. People just say, call me on my shoe, and it’s just a normal way to say it.

And then you just move on?

And then you just move on.

Wow.

Is there a sense of humor about it?

That’s my question, yeah.

Well, yes, it’s sort of a lighthearted in-joke, right, or an in-phrase.

So maybe your CO wouldn’t say it at a press briefing.

No, no, no. This wouldn’t be a public usage of the phrase, just amongst ourselves.

Oh, I love this. I got to say, Murray, if you come up with any more of this language that you think we should know, you should send us an email.

We’ll get you back on the show, all right?

I’ll do that.

Because this is good stuff.

Okay, nice talking to you.

Thank you for calling.

Thanks a lot.

Really appreciate it.

Take care now.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

You can call us on the SHU, 877-929-9673, or email us, words@waywordradio.org.

Here’s a little language discovery for you.

Okay.

Well, this is old news, but it’s new to me.

Okay.

You ever heard the term knuckle buster?

Knuckle buster?

No.

These are the old cha-chunk credit card machines.

They’re called knuckle busters.

Oh, of course.

Yeah, because if you use them incorrectly, you, like, scrape your knuckles across the surface.

I know that very well.

Terrible devices.

Yeah.

The ones with the carbons on them, right?

Yeah, yeah.

Knuckle buster.

Do people still use those?

Occasionally, if their little square reader’s not working.

Okay.

You know, those little devices you plug into your phone.

Yeah, thank goodness for those.

Yeah.

If you’ve got a question about language, 877-929-9673.

Email us, words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Patty from Plano.

Great to have you on the show, Patty. What’s on your mind?

Well, I was talking to my brother, and we had kind of a moment of, where did this come from?

And we recalled when we were small kids, there was this little line that my grandmother used to shout up the attic steps to us.

And we stayed at her house, and she wanted us all to hush and go to sleep.

And we wondered where this rhyme came from.

Here’s the rhyme.

It was something like,

Order in the court, the monkey wants to speak.

The first one to speak was a monkey for a week.

Order in the court, the monkey wants to speak.

The first one to speak was a monkey for a week?

Yeah, is a monkey for a week, right.

So you’re at Grandma’s house, up in the attic, doing shenanigans instead of going to sleep,

And she shouts this up the stairs at you.

Pretty much, yeah.

And then there would be, you know, an awful lot of giggling and holding your voice

And not saying anything, and then, of course, the major accusations of who was the monkey.

Right, right, because nobody wanted to be the monkey.

Yeah, but somebody inevitably was.

Always.

Well, I never heard that one, but, yeah, oh, I remember.

My father tended to shout things that were much more, how shall I say, blue up the stairs at us.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

Well, not, you know.

And do they work?

Never.

Yeah, right.

I mean, that’s the thing, right?

She gives you an ultimatum like that, or he does.

How long did it work, Patty?

Oh, you know, in kid time, probably 30 seconds.

Yeah, right.

Which felt like forever.

Yeah, pretty much.

So, order in the court.

The monkey wants to speak.

The first one to speak was a monkey for a week.

This is a great piece of children’s folklore, and it’s got a good history.

We know that it dates to at least the 1950s in the U.S., in England, in Scotland.

And it shows up again and again in some respected literature.

You can find it in a 1953 book written by Saul Bellow.

And also, it shows up in a really interesting recording made of a man known as Babe Kaplan,

Or Israel Kaplan was his first real given name, but they called him Babe.

And it was published in 1961, and it’s called When I Was a Boy in Brooklyn.

And the whole thing is just filled with profane jargon and language and rhymes from the schoolyard.

Just total kid stuff that he was remembering from when he was a boy in New York City in the 20s and the 30s.

But what’s really interesting is how many versions we find of this popping up.

Here’s one. This is a longer one.

Silence in the courtroom. The monkey wants to speak.

Whoever speaks now is the monkey for a week.

The monkey is in the courtroom eating a bowl of beans while Martha is on the toilet sinking submarines.

Now wait a minute.

Well, you can put any name where Martha is there.

But the version you found was with Martha?

Well, no, I added the Martha.

Sinking submarines.

I don’t want to know what that means.

There’s a ton of these.

Did you all use that one, Patty?

Not that far.

Not that far.

No, nobody accused anyone of submarines.

But it pops up again and again.

And some of the earliest mentions of it make me think that it’s a lot older than the 1950s.

Because the only line that appears is, the monkey wants to speak.

And it’s said in this kind of suggestive, hinted, referential way as if everyone present in this particular work knows the whole larger explanation, the whole larger rhyme, and that they just need to say the one line in order to make you think of the whole rhyme.

So I wouldn’t be surprised to find with a lot of digging that goes back to the early 1900s or even earlier.

Yeah, it reminds me of last one there’s the rotten egg.

You know, I mean, you just don’t want to be that person, right?

The rotten egg or the monkey.

Patty, so there’s a long history to this, but thank you for sharing this.

Most of us probably haven’t heard that before.

Well, thank you.

I appreciate it.

We were just a little curious.

Of course we knew you would have the answer.

We try.

Thanks, Patty.

Thank you very much.

Bye-bye.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

We love those family stories about language.

Let us know yours, 877-929-9673.

I learned something interesting the other day about poet Marianne Moore.

Did you know that she was once asked by people at the Ford Company to help name a new car?

Did she?

Well, she tried.

She tried to come up with some names for this new car that was coming out in 1955.

And she thought about it for a while, and here are the inspirational names for the new Ford car.

They included Resilient Bullet, Ford Silver Sword, Varsity Stroke, Pastelogram, and my favorite, Utopian Turtle Top.

Okay.

What did they end up using?

Edsel.

Oh.

I had no idea, but apparently this is in…

It helps to have good source material.

Yes.

Maybe she just wasn’t inspired by the machine.

I think Utopian Turtle Top, I would buy one of those in a second.

You wouldn’t?

I might rent one.

There’s no marketing department alive that will let that name stand.

I’ve heard worse.

What about Probe?

Oh, okay.

Who wants to be rear-ended by one of those?

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, Grant.

Hello, Martha.

This is Pete.

I’m calling from Bloomington, Indiana.

Hi, Pete.

Welcome.

I work at a food co-op.

This is a college town, and so the food co-op’s a pretty big deal here.

We have our share, or maybe more than our share, of skinny jeans and hipsters.

And we also have the Stocks and Locks group, the Birkenstocks and Dreadlocks.

And so we were just chatting one day about the increase in the number of vegans that we serve at our food co-op and elsewhere around town.

And it occurred to me that I’ve worked here for 30 years, and I don’t remember vegan being a word around much when I started here.

And so that just got me to wondering if I feel like vegetarian is a word that’s existed for a long time.

But I don’t know if that’s true about the word vegan.

And then also I’m curious why it isn’t vegan or vegen with a soft G because that’s what’s in vegetarian.

You’re right. Yeah, vegetarian has been around a lot longer than vegan, and we know exactly where vegan comes from.

It goes back to 1944.

Really?

Yeah, there was a guy named Donald Watson who was the founder of the UK Vegan Society.

And he wrote a newsletter back in the day called The Vegan News.

And he suggested that that word be created by using the beginning of the word vegetarian and the end of the word vegetarian.

And he was interviewed about that term later on because there are different pronunciations of it.

And he insisted that the correct pronunciation was vegan.

Oh, really?

Not vegan or vegan or vegan, although you hear people saying those from time to time.

And I think a couple of those end up in dictionaries.

I’ve heard vegan used now and then.

Yeah, I’ve heard it used a lot, actually.

Are you a vegan yourself?

No, I’m not.

I see.

Okay.

All right.

I’m certainly into natural food.

That’s our focus here, but under the heading of natural foods, we try to specialize in anything anybody wants from us.

So there it is.

Very good.

Well, thanks so much for calling.

Well, thank you.

I love the show, and I appreciate your assistance on this subject.

Sure thing.

Thanks, Pete.

Bye-bye.

If you’ve got a question about the history of a word, we can try to help.

If you’ve got a question about how to say it, we can help with that, too.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org, and find us on Facebook and Twitter.

Technology of course gives us a lot of new words here’s one that’s new to me maybe new to you.

Morphe do you know this morphe how do you spell that m-o-r-p-h-e-e morphe no i don’t know that.

These are mobile devices that change they can be a game player or they can be your phone or they can plug into the dashboard of your car.

They’re flexible, twistable. They can do all different kinds of things and take different shapes.

And so they’re kind of like universal electronic devices that interface with your world.

Very interesting. Yeah, Morphe.

You can hear that in the name. They morph.

They change. Yeah, so it’s a noun. Yeah.

Morphe. 877-929-9673.

More of your questions and stories about language. 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.

A recent poll found that 82% of Americans believe that women should have social, political, and economic equality.

But only 20% of those same respondents said that they’d actually call themselves a feminist.

So what’s going on here? It turns out that some feminists, in fact, are now wondering if it’s time to ditch the label feminist.

And that really surprised me, but there’s an arresting essay on this topic online by Abigail Rine.

And she’s a professor at George Fox University in Oregon, and she has two advanced degrees in feminist studies.

But even she is increasingly ambivalent about the word.

She says that if you call yourself a feminist, a lot of people get immediately defensive.

And then you spend half the conversation trying to put them at ease and saying some of my best friends are men.

You know, I married one, whatever.

And so much so that this term feminist actually gets in the way of the information that she’s trying to impart.

And so she talks about how feminism has a branding problem.

And she asked the question, why are we hell bent on salvaging the label?

We talk on the show all the time about language changing and words evolving.

And this feels like an instance where a word might be evolving right under our feet.

And indeed, if you’re talking to other feminists, there’s no problem with saying it.

But it seems to me that increasingly feminists, many feminists are having to do some kind of code switching.

It’s a loaded term then you’re saying now, right?

People assume that you’re an evil man hater if you say feminist.

Well, I think that’s an interesting question.

What are people assuming if you say that?

Why did they immediately have to go on the defensive?

Exactly.

Yeah.

I mean, when I was coming of age, I thought that that was a great word for describing problems that were coming to light, that people were beginning to talk about.

So it was a little more neutral then.

Yeah.

And I think that people have co-opted the term, commentators have used it to box it in and make it mean one small thing.

So does the author of the piece suggest alternatives?

She just suggests not even using the term.

Oh, I see.

And it’s interesting.

There’s another term that’s starting to float around, at least in the academic world.

It’s kiriarchy, K-Y-R-I, archy.

And it comes from a Greek word that means Lord or master, like kiri-la-son, you know, Lord have mercy.

And some people are beginning to use the word curiarchy as opposed to patriarchy.

They’re saying that the analysis of patriarchy is too narrow, that there are all kinds of oppression, and that curiarchy reflects the fact that there are more things to be fought against than just gender discrimination.

There’s racial discrimination and other kinds. And they’re all interwoven.

Yeah, yeah.

And for example, part of it has to do with the fact that feminism got so identified with white women, as opposed to women of color as well.

And so kiriarchy is a term that people are starting to use, just starting to use.

It was coined by an academic, so we’ll see where it goes.

But to reflect the fact that there are all different kinds of oppression, and if you’re a white heterosexual woman, then you’re in a position of privilege as opposed to certain other people.

Right.

You know.

Wow.

Wow.

That’s quite an unpacking there.

Heavy duty stuff, right?

Yeah, heavy duty stuff.

We’re going to link to that article.

There are a number of conversations already underway on our Facebook page and our Facebook group about this article.

Yeah.

And we’d love to hear what you have to say about it as well.

Yeah, I’m torn.

What’s the author’s name?

Her name is Abigail Ryan.

And I have to say I’m really torn about this because I happen to like the term a lot.

But she makes some very good points there.

So look for that on our website.

You can reach us if you’ve got questions or comments about this or anything at all related to language at 877-929-9673.

Or email us, words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Eric from Eau Claire, Wisconsin.

Hi, Eric. Welcome.

How are you doing?

Good.

How can we help you?

We’re doing well. How can we help you?

I’ve got a question for you.

When I was a kid, I enjoyed a delicious frozen treat that I called Sure Burt.

And I went to my neighbor’s house, who’s like my grandpa, and he corrected me and said, no, no, it’s Sure Bit.

There’s no second R at the end.

And he showed me the label, and he was right.

I changed how I pronounced it, and I try to correct people when I hear it’s wrong, when they say it differently.

The debate has kind of escalated amongst my spouse and then my coworkers.

I was just curious to know if you guys could clarify why there are two different ways to say this word, and then how much more right I am than they are.

Yeah, I was going to say, tell us a little bit more about that debate.

You’re millions more, right?

Oh, I don’t know.

Perfect.

Call over.

So, yeah, you know, I try to correct my wife, and she rolls her eyes, and finally I decided to poll my coworkers and say, so how do you say this?

And one would say, oh, sure, Bert.

And, you know, it kind of escalated.

I found out I was the only one, maybe one or two others, who actually said it sure bit.

Oh, really?

Interesting.

Yeah, even though the label clearly says sure bit.

You’re right.

You’re absolutely right, though.

It should be sure bit, or if you just want to avoid the argument, just call it sorbet and be done with it.

Or sorbet.

I could do that, but then I’d have to change my ways.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I did that as a kid as well.

It was sure bit for me.

I didn’t know any better until I had a similar experience.

And we said, oh, look, that’s weird.

We all say sherbert, but it’s not spelled that way.

I was like, oh.

Well, yeah, I looked at a package once and said, mom, it’s spelled wrong on the package.

It’s got an R in there.

I mean, it doesn’t have an R.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Is this kind of related to the wash word?

A little bit, yeah.

It’s a form of intrusive R.

It doesn’t follow the exact same kind of behavior as the other intrusive R’s.

This is when you put an R sound where one isn’t called for according to standard pronunciation or the spelling.

It is really widespread, though.

The Sherbert pronunciation is so widespread that some places have, as you might expect, you know, where I’m going with this, have just given up and go ahead and spell it with that second R, even though it’s not required.

But the traditional spelling and pronunciation do not have that second R.

Sure.

Now, I work in a pretty precise field, and so is there any way you can quantify how much more right I am?

What is your field?

I’m a mechanical engineer, and we make more.

You are right by 4 million pounds per square inch.

Yep.

Perfect.

That’s just an estimate, though.

Just an estimate.

Give or take 10%, right?

It might be different when we actually get the parts.

Right, exactly.

But you’re good to go there.

Although I just want to make a tiny little note.

You probably should avoid correcting people unless they ask you to.

Yeah, okay.

But you can tell them.

Everyone that you’ve broached this subject with before, you can tell them that you’re right.

Yeah.

Okay.

They owe you.

Okay.

Thanks, Aaron.

I’ll escalate it to match their intensity.

Okay.

Yeah, there we go.

Thank you very much.

Very good.

Bye.

Thanks a lot for calling.

Bye-bye.

If you have a dispute in your workplace about a word, you can call us at 877-929-9673.

When the great lexicographer Noah Webster decided to establish some new changes to English spelling in the Americas, one of the changes he wanted to make was to take these words that are in English from Greek origins, where we have a C-H pronounced with a K, and just go ahead and replace them in spelling with a K.

So a word like chorus would have been spelled K-O-R-U-S.

Oh, really?

Or the word character might have been spelled K-A-R-A-C-T-E-R.

Of course, this is one of those places where his spelling reform didn’t work at all.

But it’s interesting to go back through his notes and see that he had a very vast plan for changing the American English.

So if all of his changes had succeeded, our English would probably look as different from British English as, say, Haitian Creole does from French.

It’s really interesting.

That is fascinating stuff.

But very few of the changes he wanted to make actually lasted in American English.

Yeah, just a few.

Just a few.

I wonder why.

Because we’re stubborn.

And also, at the time he was wanting to make these changes, a lot of what we were reading was British.

Right, right, right.

And spelling reform tends to be a bust anyway, right?

It almost always fails because the kind of people who lead it tend to be pompous and misguided.

Yeah, yeah. Although Teddy Roosevelt tried, too.

Pompous. Maybe not misguided, but definitely pompous.

877-929-9673. Email words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, Martha. Grant. This is Rolf Gidlow from Stratton, Vermont.

Hi, Rolf.

What’s up?

Hi. I was calling because recently I’ve heard the word reticent used when I really think it should be reluctant.

And it happened often enough that I got to wondering if they’ve actually become, if those two words have actually become synonymous.

I don’t see them as being related at all, but I think it was a radio reporter or something saying that so-and-so was reticent to say anything, and clearly I would have used reluctant.

I know that words sometimes, their meaning shift, and I was wondering if this might be one of those cases.

There has been a little bit of shift, but tell us, in your own words, what you think the difference is between reluctant and reticent.

Well, I see reticent more as a characteristic.

Someone who’s maybe a little averse to speaking, who just doesn’t say much, or maybe a little taciturn, whereas reluctant is just not wanting to say something because either you don’t want to hurt somebody’s feelings or else if there’s something going on that you don’t want to conjecture, you don’t want to offer information that may not be correct.

So I see reticent as a characteristic and reluctant as something that’s more an unwillingness to being cautious about speaking.

That could be used.

The pragmatics of both of these words aren’t completely clear.

Probably more simply put, we might say that if you are reluctant, you can be reluctant to do anything.

So you can be reluctant to go jogging or reluctant to go to dinner with your in-laws or what have you.

But if you’re reticent, it really only applies to one thing.

You are reluctant to speak.

And whatever your motivations are for being reluctant, we don’t really know because it’s not contained within the meaning of the word.

But you’re reluctant to speak and therefore you’re reticent.

So the problem that you’re hearing, I’m pretty sure because we’ve all seen it and this is very common.

People say, he was reticent to go to the store to buy more milk, or he was reticent to stand up in court and speak up for himself.

You’re like, well, the first one is incorrect.

The second one is probably correct.

So reticent is just about speaking.

Yeah, and interestingly enough, I mean, you mentioned the word taciturn, and both reticent and taciturn come from the same Latin root, which means to be silent.

It’s like tacit.

Yeah.

So there’s a connection there and a good way to remember it.

And I like having the distinction.

Yeah.

To me, they mean very distinctly different things.

All right, well, thanks, Rolf, for the call.

I hope that helps.

You’re right.

Thank you very much.

We’re spot on.

Thanks, sir.

Bye-bye.

Okay.

Bye-bye.

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

Here’s a writing term I didn’t know, a plot bunny.

A plot bunny?

Do you know what a plot bunny is?

Oh, no.

All right, so you’re writing something, let’s say a piece of fiction.

Yeah.

And you get this wild idea when you’re driving around doing errands or you’re doing your daily business.

You’re not at the table writing, right?

Yeah, yeah.

And you just can’t stop thinking about your plot bunny.

And you have to write the plot bunny.

The plot bunny is the thing that you just can’t stop thinking about.

You must put on paper.

Plot bunny.

We’d love to hear words that you’ve just discovered.

877-929-9673.

Email us, words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Lori from North Carolina.

Hi, Lori, where in North Carolina are you?

Well, I’m standing in Jacksonville, North Carolina, but I live in Swansboro.

Okay.

I have lived here in North Carolina for about seven years now.

And there are a group of people who live in Carteret County.

They’re what we call down east, over towards Harker’s Island and out that way.

And my husband worked with many people like this, and they would use a word that was called pure-teamomic.

And I always thought the word meant something like, I don’t know, confused or angry, or it was just something different.

And, you know, I’m one of those Yankees that moved down here, and I, you know, where in the world would this word come from?

And do I have the use proper, I guess, what I’m asking?

So when would you hear this term?

Like a situation.

A situation.

Well, if somebody’s telling a story, and, you know, maybe somebody cut them off in traffic, you know, I was purity mom-it.

Okay, right.

Because somebody cut them off.

I mean, the funny part of it is if you go out into Moorhead City or over into Beaufort, you can even find T-shirts and coffee mugs with this word on there.

Mm—

With mom-micked, huh?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, you’re right.

It’s definitely a negative term that can mean anything from all messed up to harassed or bothered or teased or even beaten up.

And you hear it all over the South, but particularly in eastern North Carolina, you hear that sense of it having to do with harassing or bothering.

A cat might momock a mouse before it actually kills it, that kind of thing.

Okay.

And it goes back to an old word that actually means to tear into pieces, M-A-M-M-O-C-K, momock.

And, in fact, Shakespeare used it that way in one of his plays.

Yeah.

I should know that.

I’m an English teacher.

Very good.

Very good.

Well, go look at Corolianus because that play uses that sense of the word.

Mamak meaning to tear into pieces.

Okay.

Can you spell that again?

Well, the way that you probably see it on the coffee mugs or the T-shirts or whatever is M-O-M-M-I-C-K-E-D, right?

Does that sound right?

Yeah.

But in the historical sense, it’s M-A-M-M-O-C-K, right?

Mamak.

Yes, correct.

That’s how she agrees.

There’s the verb and the nouns.

The noun just means pieces or shreds.

Okay.

So you might have a bunch of mamak just be like residue or debris from something.

Kind of like your brain when you’re confused.

Exactly.

But the first part of that expression, pure T moment, what’s the pure T?

Pure and T, I don’t know.

Like the letter T? Is that the way they’re spelling it?

Yeah.

That’s a fun one, too.

The pure T is a version of pure D.

And if you’re a good conservative Southerner, you might say pure D instead of pure damned.

That’s what that means.

Oh, okay.

Very interesting.

So we’re trying not to cuss.

Exactly.

So purity basically is completely or totally.

Yes.

Yes, just pure, damn, messed up.

Okay.

Great.

Awesome.

All right, well, thanks for calling, Lori.

We really appreciate the question.

Thanks.

Bye-bye.

Looking in the historical record, we can find that MAMIC does pop up all over North America, but for some reason it’s become associated with just the Carolinas, right?

It’s kind of what we call a chamber of commerce word.

They’re rather proud that they have it, right?

Right, sort of like UFTA up in the…

Yeah. So when you want to find out, you know, when you start to talk about what a real local is, that’s one of the first things that they bring up is language like pure tea moment.

Yeah. I like it.

If you’ve got language that you think makes you a local, we would love to know what it is. 877-929-9673. Email words@waywordradio.org.

We had a lot of late cold weather this year, which spawned a term that I’d never seen before.

Okay.

People were talking about it being February 90th.

Because it’s like a February lasted for two more months.

Right, right. I like that.

February 90th. That’s a very cold spring.

Yeah. You could extend that in the summer, right?

Right, right.

July 90th.

July 90th.

Global warm-eth.

Global warm-eth. Nice.

Email us words@waywordradio.org.

Things have come to a pretty fast.

That’s the end of this week’s show.

For more A Way with Words, including hundreds of episodes, a blog, a newsletter, a dictionary, mobile apps, and conversations with other listeners, go to waywordradio.org.

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Just as we do, they believe in lifelong learning, better human communication, and the value of a thing well said or well written.

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

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. So long.

Bye-bye.

Neither, neither. Let’s call the whole thing off.

You like potato and I like potato. You like tomato and I like tomato. Potato, potato, tomato, tomato. Let’s call the whole thing off.

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

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