One-Armed Paper Hanger (episode #1518)

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. Grant, you know the term piecemeal, right?

Yeah.

It means piece by piece. You do something piecemeal. Somebody pays you back piecemeal. It’s piece by piece.

A little bit at a time.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so the piece is self-explanatory, but what about the meal?

Oh.

I will tell you because I just found out this week and it made me so excited.

Meal is an old suffix that means by a specified portion or a measure at a time.

And in Middle English, there were lots of different versions of this.

Piecemeal is the one that survived.

But there was also little meal, which meant little by little.

I’m going to do something little meal.

Or penny meal, which is I’m going to pay you penny by penny.

Drop meal, I really love.

There was a reference in a 17th century text that goes, as the cloud dissolves drop meal upon the earth.

Isn’t that beautiful?

So drop meal means?

Drop by drop.

Drop by drop.

How about that?

And does this mean that the meal and piecemeal is related to the meal like sitting down for a meal?

Yeah, yeah.

Again, it’s a space of time.

It’s an occasion of taking food.

Oh, so they have the same etymological origin.

Yeah.

Oh, okay.

Well, you know, the language is really interesting and it has deep histories for us and a lot of things that we’ve never imagined.

If you’ve got questions about something, toss them our way.

We’ll try to answer them and see what we can uncover.

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

And you can talk to us on Twitter @wayword.

Hello. Welcome to A Way with Words.

Hi. My name is Mary Gordon.

That’s my first name. It’s a double first name.

Well, Mary Gordon.

And I’m calling from Austin, Texas.

Well, we’re glad to have you. Welcome to the show.

Hi, Mary Gordon.

Thank you.

What can we do for you?

My precious 13-year-old grandson, and that’s not an oxymoron.

You can be precious and a 13-year-old boy at the same time.

Let’s get that down.

Yes, ma’am.

So his class trip this year from Austin is to Washington, D.C.

Now, my class trip when I grew up in a small Texas town, we went down to Riverside Park and picked pecans.

But they were all packing up to go to Washington.

So he asked his mama before he was leaving, he said,

Mama, I need $75.

And she said, really, what for?

And he said, because we’re going to the mall,

And I want to buy some souvenirs for my family and my friends.

And she just lovingly smiled at him and said, well, $75 is a lot of money.

How about I give you $15?

And so he did.

And at this time, he still did not know what the National Mall was.

He thought it was a shopping center.

Like Barton Creek Mall that’s not too far from our houses.

Well, I just thought this was the cutest thing I had ever heard.

And he, when he found out it was the National Mall, he’s very embarrassed.

So I have been thinking about this word mall over and over.

I want to know basically how mall is used to describe the Mall of America,

Which is, I think, in Minnesota, and the National Mall,

Which is, you know, a grassy lane in D.C.

You have posed one of the best questions we received this week, I think.

In quite a while, yeah.

Why Martha is the Mall of America in Minnesota and the National Mall in D.C.?

Why were they both called malls? They seem very different.

And Martin Creek Mall. Don’t forget our little local mall.

Sure, Martin Creek Mall.

Your mall there. Yeah, the word mall has traveled a very, very long way.

It certainly has.

Yes, it’s actually traveled all the way from London, England,

Because the word mall originally applied to a shady walk that served as a promenade

On the side of St. James Park in London.

And now in London, the mall is this beautiful tree-lined way

That goes between Buckingham Palace and Trafalgar Square.

I’ve been there.

Oh, you have?

I’ve been there. I’ve walked on that mall.

You have? Okay.

But I didn’t know it was called the mall.

Well, yes, it’s called the mall.

And the reason is that the word mall was applied to areas where people played a game called pall mall, P-A-L-L hyphen M-A-L-L.

The cigarettes got its name from the place at St. James Park.

Right, right.

The cigarettes came along much later.

But the game itself came to us from Italy through France.

In Italy, it was called Palla Maglio, and the word Palla means ball, and Maglio means mallet.

And it was kind of a cross between croquet and golf.

And so in this kind of space that was boarded off on either end, they played the game of Pall Mall.

And eventually, that name got applied to spaces like that, where the game was played, and to the big one.

So these alley-like strips of grassy areas that are kind of scenic and outdoorsy, parkish-like.

But it wasn’t until the 50s and 60s that we started in this country to either close off streets so that they were only open to pedestrians.

And then later on, we began to have these centers that were called malls that we think of today as malls.

So as you can see, the word has traveled an awfully long way.

And then it also got applied to the mall in Washington.

We were aspiring to classical architecture and that kind of thing, and it took on a prestigious name.

Well, thanks for finding that out, and if you find any cigarettes named after that.

You know, in Texas, we make every word at least two or three syllables, so we would say, Paul Mall.

Bye.

I quite didn’t understand you at first because you said Paul Mall, but I figured it out now.

Yeah, you know, people are not from Texas.

They just don’t sound right.

They do not to me.

I can tell you that for sure.

Thank you very much.

You give us a call sometime and let us know how things are going, all right?

Okay.

Thank you very much.

Take care now.

Bye.

Bye, Mary Gordon.

Give us a call, 877-929-9673.

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

Grant, do you know the term Tantany or Tantany pig?

Tantany?

I just learned this.

Tantany pig.

It sounds like the mascot from one of those old, corrupt political parties in New York City in the 1800s.

Oh, it kind of does, doesn’t it?

Maybe I’m thinking of Tammany.

Yeah.

Tantany.

Tantany pig.

What’s a Tantany pig?

It’s the runt of the litter.

It’s the littlest one.

How do you spell Tantany?

T-A-N-T-O-N-Y.

What?

Never heard of it.

That’s amazing.

I love it when it’s something that’s completely new to me.

Yes, me too.

And guess who the patron saint of swine herds is and is often shown accompanied by a pig.

Which saint?

Oh, Tancredes or whatever.

Saint Anthony.

Oh.

Yeah, so a Tantany pig is a little pig protected by Saint Anthony.

So it’s a corruption of Saint Anthony?

Yes.

Yes, yes.

That makes a lot of sense.

Like Taudry is from Saint Taudry.

How about that?

Yeah.

Tantany pig.

For the runt.

Yeah, the littlest one.

When I was a kid and we were picking out pets, we always picked the runt for some reason.

We were kind of the family that picks the runts.

There you go.

Yeah, you always pick the tantani.

But the runt of a pig, you know, they’re tiny, but they grew up, when they turned 650 pounds,

You have a different relationship with the animal.

One year later.

877-929-9673.

Hello, welcome to A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Elizabeth, and I’m calling from Burleson, Texas.

Hi, Elizabeth, welcome.

I had a question about grandparent naming.

Growing up, I referred to my grandparents by using their last names, like Grandma and Grandpa Bell or Grandma and Grandpa Vanhoof.

And it wasn’t until I met my husband and got to know his family that I realized other people may not follow the same recipe.

He had one set of grandparents, just Grandma and Grandpa, and then the other set had totally different names of Nana and Papa.

And I was just curious if there was any kind of regional or generational differences in how grandparents kind of get their names or how they choose their names, perhaps.

Yeah, I’m not aware of a whole lot of regional differences.

I know I grew up calling my grandparents Granddaddy Porch and Granddaddy Barnette.

And that tends to be more southern than a lot of the other ones.

The Granddaddy.

Yeah, Granddaddy.

But they’re pretty well distributed throughout the country. In terms of doing a last name, though, I’m not aware of a specific way that that occurs.

Yeah. When you use that, when you talk to them directly, what do you say or what does he say? You’re obviously not going to address someone by grandpa, whatever their last name is, are you?

Oh, I totally did.

You did? None of my grandparents are here anymore, but I mean, we would call them up. Hi, Grandpa Bell. Hi. And that was how we addressed them.

And actually speaking to my father-in-law, he was raised that way also with the understanding that if you used any other name than a last name, it was kind of a sign of disrespect in his family.

It wasn’t really explained to me that way as a child, but that was kind of the formula we used.

And I just didn’t know if there’s any tendency in certain maybe regions or other populations where it seems like some grandparents are named based on what the child can pronounce as opposed to what’s expected for them to call the grandparents.

Right. A lot of times the kids come up with the name, right?

There are some trends. Martha had said there’s not a lot of regionality, but there is a tiny bit.

And it’s a little far from your question, but I think it’s worth sharing.

For example, in the south, Big Mama is more common there than anywhere else.

It’s not the most common, but it’s common enough.

Mama is a very southern one, especially Tennessee, Kentucky, Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi.

Mama as well.

Gram is far more common in northern New York and New England and a little bit around the Great Lakes.

And then Nana and Grammy, more common in the northeast, kind of generally spread all around the northeast.

All in all, if you look in the Dictionary of American Regional English, which asked people, what do you call your grandparents? They came up with at least 100 terms for the grandmother and at least 100 for the grandfather.

There is a lot of diversity about what we call our grandparents in this country.

That’s really interesting. I just didn’t know if there was any trends, but I guess the trend is there is no trend.

One thing that you said, Martha, do you think that there’s some of that Southern politeness there and the idea that you’re going to use the last name with the title?

That’s what I was thinking.

It’s more of a title than a familiar term, right? More of a sign of respect.

I also wonder if it reflects families that lived more closely together so that you’re distinguishing between this particular grandfather and the other one because you all live in the same town.

Okay. Well, thank you all very much.

I’m curious if maybe other people had other things, but if you have more than 100 terms for each family figure, then that’s a lot to go from.

Well, you know, we will hear about that from our listeners. People like this question.

Because people love talking about this one for sure.

And you know, Elizabeth, we may have to do a survey just to really kind of organize this and get some location data to go with these terms to see if we can figure out a little more clearly what is happening with these.

We’ll see.

All right?

Great.

Thank you.

Thank you for your call.

We really appreciate it.

Bye-bye.

Well, what do you call your grandparents and how did it come about?

We really do want to know.

Send us your emails to words@waywordradio.org or tell us on the telephone 877-929-9673.

More about what we say and why we say it.

Stay tuned.

Thank you.

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 guy, John Chaneski.

Hi, John.

Hi, Grant.

Hi, Martha.

Hey, John.

Hey.

It occurred to me the other day that even famous rappers have to have someone who makes sure that their computers work and their local area networks and all that stuff are all set up.

So that would mean that someone somewhere can say that he works in IT for TI.

Oh, boy.

Dig it? Got it?

Got it.

Let’s explore these swapped initialisms some more.

I’ll give you a sentence with two blanks.

For example, my TV is so good, you can see the beads of sweat on some of those American League players’ foreheads when they get up to bat.

So thanks to blank, I can see how stressed the blank is.

Oh, thanks to HD, I can see how stressed the DH is.

Yes, very good.

High definition. Designated hitter.

Very good.

Now, these are all pairs of letters, by the way.

Okay?

Okay.

There you go.

I was going to put my two cents in on a long, involved thread about letter carriers, but then I realized that the blank works at the blank.

The OP.

Hit the PO.

Original poster works at the post office.

The original poster works at the post office, yeah.

My cousin works security on an army post, but only works from noon to midnight.

He’s the blank blank.

He is the, oh, it’s just slip.

PM MP?

Yeah, there we go.

Yes, he’s the PM MP, post-meridium military police.

When he was overseas, my cousin’s company captain invited him to visit his family in California.

So last week he toured Anaheim, Laguna Beach, and San Clemente in the blank with his blank.

He was in the OC with his CO.

That’s right.

Orange County commanding officer.

Right.

Good.

Me, well, I work at a hospital that caters to the needs of retired soldiers myself.

Oh, I’m not a doctor.

If there’s a conference or a meeting, I set up the microphones and projection screens.

I do blank for the blank.

I do AV for the VA.

That’s me.

Audio visual for the Veterans Administration.

Very good.

Now, if you get a job at a certain not-for-profit news agency, maybe they’ll announce your new hire over the blank blank system.

AP and PA.

Yes, the Associated Press Public Address System.

Now, researching a report in our nation’s capital, I wrote to the Washington Visitors Bureau, and they sent me a blank with a video about blank.

A CD about DC.

Yeah, that’s right.

After listing my litany of symptoms on a Facebook posting, another cousin of mine who’s a blank said I should blank him.

MD should DM him.

That’s right.

The medical doctor, well, should direct message him.

That’s right.

Finally, my high school gym teacher was a buddy musician.

I’ll never forget how he made us sit and listen to his latest blank during blank.

I was going to say P-E-L-P.

Yeah, his E-P.

Oh, his E-P.

P-E-P during P-E.

That’s right.

Well, you guys did okay.

I’ve been KO’d by your skills.

That’s awesome.

Well done, John.

Thanks, guys.

Thanks, John. We’ll talk to you next week. This show is about words and language and goofing off and wordplay, and we love your jokes and your riddles. Keep them coming. You can send anything you want to know about language or everything you want to tell us to words@waywordradio.org, or give us your thoughts on the phone, 877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Orion. I’m calling from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Welcome, Orion. What can we do for you?

I’ve had a question ever since I was a kid.

I grew up in rural West Virginia, and I grew up on a road called Lick Run Road.

And whenever I’ve traveled outside of West Virginia and outside of the area, people think it’s a pretty silly name.

But all the roads around me had names similar to this.

We had Mud Lick, Turkey Lick, different last names like Sanders Run Road.

I’ve been told that licks were named because of salt licks in the area and runs were named because that was the name of the creek or the creek that ran alongside where that road is now.

But I’ve also heard that lick might also just be another name for a creek.

And I wonder if you guys have any insights.

Yeah, we can offer some insight.

It’s interesting that you’re from West Virginia because if you map out the words lick and run in place names, you find that West Virginia has big doses of both.

Lots of places that use lick and run in their names.

As a matter of fact, all throughout the North Appalachia, east to the Pacific coast, you’ll find a lot of uses of run in names.

And a little south to that, probably mostly mid to North Appalachia, you’ll find a lot of use of lick.

And lick is a place where animals would come to lick salt, naturally occurring salt.

As a matter of fact, there’s a really interesting citation.

There was a guy by the name of James Hall who wrote a book called Letters from the West that he published in London.

He was an American, but he was writing about the American experience.

And he talks about these licks because it was kind of a thing that the Europeans weren’t really aware of.

He says some of those places have been licked for centuries until vast cavities have been formed.

So they’re literally licking the ground.

But a lot of times you’ll find that sometimes the the water is saline and so the animals will drink that and then get the salt that the body requires.

So in any case, so that’s what a lick is now a run is sometimes a creek or a small water course but often a run is a deer path.

It is literally the place that the animals might run in between the where they shelter for the evening where they get their food and where they they get their water or they get their salt.

And so you will often find lick and run in places where there is a high density or has traditionally been a high density of deer.

As a matter of fact, if you look up deer density maps and such things exist,

Even now, hundreds of years after many of these places were named, you will still find.

There are a lot of deer in the places where lick and run appear in place names.

That sounds exactly like where I grew up.

Run is the name of a small watercourse isn’t as common as run is the name of a path. As a matter.

In fact, you will find there are a variety of different uses of run.

Even now in Missouri, where I grew up, run is used for these really terrible housing developments where they bulldoze the land and tear down all the trees and they’ll call it deer run.

And there are no deer left and there’s no run left.

But the memory of what was there is still in the name of the place.

Right. I love it when they call it the woods of St. Thomas or something.

There are no woods.

Yeah, we have a bit of that in the gentrification of the rural areas around where I grew up, too, where it’s now being developed in that same way.

And they’ve kind of tried to reclaim a little bit of those names.

And where I grew up in Kentucky, we had Big Bone Lick State Park.

Big Bone Lick State Park, yeah.

Yeah, because it’s a lick, but they found big bones from prehistoric animals.

So the lick is really about animals and their need for salt and finding it naturally in the environment.

Yeah, I just wonder, I didn’t realize how prolific that was because I had heard a lot about salt licks as well.

And I know, too, when I did like watershed research around where I was from, I was surprised that a lot of those little creeks, they all had names.

I mean, you have to.

And a lot of those names coincided with the roads that ran like along the same path as well.

Yeah.

And I think that’s where I got my confusion from.

Place names contain history, don’t they?

Yeah.

I’m really glad I’m going to hold on to that a little closer to my heart now.

That’s nice.

Outstanding.

Orion, thank you so much for your call.

We really appreciate it.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

I’m a big fan of the show.

All right, thanks.

Take care now.

Thanks, Orion.

All right, bye.

Bye-bye.

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

Speaking of words misheard, we heard from Brooke Whitaker, who left us a voicemail, in which she said, forever and ever, I would say grand assault. I thought you would take things with a grand assault. And about five years ago, I realized it was grain of salt. And that makes a whole lot more sense. I’m a 42-year-old woman and pretty social, so I had used grand assault in many conversations over the years. So it was a pretty humbling experience.

Oh, to think about all those times that you said it and nobody gently corrected you, like took you aside and said, hon, it’s a grain of salt.

I have a friend who just told me that for years she’s been saying from the gecko.

Oh, yeah, that’s a common one.

Yeah.

Instead of from the get-go.

Yes.

She never knew what the lizard was about, but she would always say, yeah, from the gecko.

By the way, we talk about egg corns on the show pretty often, I think, in the fabulous egg corn database.

That’s E-G-G-C-O-R-N.

Google that, and there’s a bazillion of them.

Like in a feeble position.

Instead of a feeble position.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Jocelyn calling from Richmond, Virginia.

Hi, Jocelyn. Welcome.

What’s up? What can we do for you?

Thank you.

I was calling in about busier than a one-armed paper hanger.

Busier than a one-armed paper hanger.

Where did you run across that?

Well, my lovely mother, who just had a birthday at the end of December,

She has said it since I was a child.

And it means very busy, right?

It means, obviously, yeah, very busy.

But I have always wondered what the heck inspired her to say that,

Where did she get it?

She doesn’t really say, but…

Well, the interesting thing is,

The first use that we know of a phrase that is just about exactly the same

Is by the short story writer O. Henry,

If you remember, he wrote The Gift of the Magi, which most people know.

In one of his 1908 stories, he writes the phrase as,

As busy as a one-armed man with the nettle rash pasting on wallpaper.

And the nettle rash, if you’ve ever gotten rash from nettles,

It is something to behold.

And a lot of the early uses of this term talk about a paper hanger with hives, with the itch, with the crabs, you know, body lice, or the seven-year itch.

So a lot of them, it’s not just that they’ve got one arm, and it’s not just that they’re doing a two-arm task.

It’s also that they’re trying to itch in unspeakable places.

They’re scratching away.

Yeah, they’re trying to scratch in unspeakable places.

That’s so crazy.

Which would be pretty busy.

It would be very busy. And now there are a ton of these in English. Obviously, everyone knows busy is a beaver or busy is a bee. Those are really common. A really common one is busier than a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest. Because how are you going to do that, right? You got to have a heck of a vertical leap with one leg to pull that one off.

And some of the older ones are kind of a mystery to the modern mind, at least to mine.

Busier than flies in a tar pit or a bee in a tar bucket.

You ever heard those, Jocelyn?

No, because I can’t imagine bees would enjoy tar.

Yeah, I don’t know what it is.

I think they might think it’s water, and so they get stuck trying to get water.

Oh, and then they’re really busy.

Yeah, they’re trying to escape.

Busier than a bee on a buzzsaw.

I like that one for the sound of it.

That’s nice, right?

Martha and I talked about busier than a cranberry merchant on the show a while back, and that’s just about those weeks before Thanksgiving when they’ve got to get all those cranberries shipped to the people who are expecting to go with their turkey.

I also like busier than a one-eyed cat watching three mice holes.

How about this one?

Busier than a pickpocket in a nudist camp, which I don’t think you’re busy at all.

Actually, a few of these are the opposite.

They mean that you’re not busy.

There’s some busy as a hen with one chick, meaning that you’re fussy over little things and not really busy at all, or busy as a puppy, meaning you’re not really doing anything and you have no responsibilities at all, or as busy as a hibernating bear, right?

So a few of them flip it.

They’re about being not busy at all rather than being very busy.

Wow, okay.

By the way, I want to leave you with one last busier than, because I know people are thinking of it, and I’m going to use the polite radio version of it. It’s busier than a cat in a litter box. There’s an impolite version of that. Busier than a cat burying his business in the litter box, I guess.

Oh, I’ve heard a version of it that has to do with a cat on a marble floor, you know, trying to cover it up and having trouble. So there are lots of different versions of this, Jocelyn.

Anyway, yeah, so your version, busier than a one-armed paper hanger, goes back to, as far as we know, to O. Henry, the short story writer in 1908.

Oh, my God, that’s great. My mom’s a librarian historian, so she will love that. Thank you so much for your call. We really appreciate it.

Oh, thank you so much. I had a great time. Take care.

Thanks, Jocelyn. Thanks. Bye.

Bye-bye. Bye.

Call us with your language question, 877-929-9673, or send it to us in email. That address is words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, how are you?

This is Paul McDowell from South Bend, Indiana.

Hi, Paul.

We’re great. How are you doing?

I’m so excited to be talking to the two of you. And then when I looked in my thesaurus for a word that was better than excited, everything seemed to have sexual connotations, and that’s not appropriate for the context.

We’ll have to take that conversation offline.

Yeah, we’re excited, too. We’ll take excited. We’re glad to have you, Paul.

Yeah, you sound like a word nerd yourself.

I am a word nerd myself, yes.

So I taught French for 25 years at a nearby institution in South Bend. And I’ve been wondering about this for the longest time.

Now, I should make clear that I am not a big fan of cats. But I’ve noticed that not just in French, but in English as well, cats kind of get a bad rap when it comes to language.

And the expression that triggered this thought in my mind, I was teaching a conversational French course at Notre Dame, and there’s an expression in French that’s the equivalent of I’ve got other fish to fry.

The French expression in the infinitive is avoir d’autres chefs, which means I’ve got other cats to whip. And I just wondered, you know, why would you whip a cat?

And then I started thinking more and more about some of the other idioms in French that are violent with cats. And it’s not so violent, but, you know, we say I’ve got a frog in my throat, but the French say, avoir un chat dans la gorge. They’ve got a cat in their throat.

Now, of course, in English we do say more than one way to skin a cat. That sounds a little bit aggressive. And we also say there’s not enough room to swing a cat, which also sounds physically aggressive, or to let the cat out of the bag, or curiosity killed the cat.

So what is it with cats? I just don’t get it.

Well, and it’s interesting that you mentioned having other fish to fry because there’s also an Italian expression that means that, but that literally translates as have other cats to skin.

To skin?

Yeah, isn’t that interesting in Italian?

But all these phrases reflect a time when we didn’t have the same attitude towards cats as we have today. And, in fact, there are references in the literature to cat fur being used for women’s clothing, to line women’s clothing back in the day.

And I’m looking at a Cincinnati newspaper from 1836 that talks about more than one way to skin a cat, as a butcher would say.

As a butcher would say.

Yeah, which is kind of a creepy thought.

Well, and I would hope that, I mean, it would never occur to me to go to a butcher to buy cats, but I understand that, you know, that’s probably a cultural thing.

So I don’t know if you would have the answer off the top of your head, but, I mean, obviously the two most popular domestic animals in this country, and in France, last time I checked, are cats and dogs.

So are there as many violent expressions with dogs?

I haven’t really taken the time to look that up.

There are quite a few.

Yeah.

Sure.

Hi there.

Sticking around until the last dog is hung and that sort of thing.

Right.

Or more ways of killing a dog than choking him with pudding.

Oh, my gosh.

I’ve never heard that one.

Yeah, the English language is a record of our sorry treatment of animal or of different attitudes from the attitudes we have today, for sure.

Because now they’re family members, at least cats and dogs are, and then they maybe were more resources to be exploited.

Or working animals that you fed and kept up because they did a job for you of, you know, herding animals or killing the rats and that sort of thing.

Okay, so an agricultural aspect to this as well.

We have to face our history. And the way that we do that is just by accepting that we weren’t as good as we wanted to be and that we’re trying to be better as a people, right?

We have to accept that we have been savage and mean and evil and corrupt and that EGOS is now trying to push the society forward, and our treatment of animals is part of that.

And learn from our mistakes, yes.

I can’t possibly tell you how excited I am and how happy I am, how ecstatic I am to talk with you and to get some answers to these questions that I’ve been mulling over for years.

Well, Paul, you’re the cat’s pajamas, obviously.

You’re the cat’s meow.

We’re waiting for the right moment.

Thank you, Paul.

Well, thank you so much. We’ll look forward to your future calls.

All righty.

Bye-bye now.

Thanks, Paul.

Yeah, just to head it off, the expression more than one way to skin a cat is not the acrobatic term. We know this with 100% certainty, so I just want to stop that email you were thinking of writing.

But otherwise, we’ll take your calls at 877-929-9673.

Or send your questions or comments or thoughts about language to us at words@waywordradio.org.

Or talk to us on Twitter @wayword.

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.

This year, the state of Ohio will join several others in requiring that elementary school students learn cursive handwriting in addition to simple printing.

And this was met with a lot of applause from some parents and educators.

And others said that it was a terrible idea.

There have been blistering essays online saying that in an age of keyboards and texting, why are we wasting time teaching kids to write cursive?

And the proponents are saying, well, it’s a great discipline for the children. It helps you understand what you’re writing about.

And I’m kind of on the fence about it.

But people are saying, oh, it’s a lost art.

But I’ve been reading my parents’ love letters. My parents, my dad died 15 years ago.

But he gave me a big stack of the love letters that he and my mother shared.

Oh, wow.

And it’s astonishing. I find when I read them that the handwriting itself is a kind of voice because the handwriting of my mother sounds like her.

It’s almost like a seventh sense or something.

I have exactly the same feeling. My father recently died and we were going through his stuff when I was there with my mother.

And I was surprised how much just seeing his handwriting made me realize that nobody would ever write that way again.

Those letters and that shape and that way with that slant and that type of pressure on the ink and how utterly recognizable it is, like his face.

His handwriting is as easy to know as the look on his face.

Right, right. It’s intimate and it’s really defining.

I don’t know that the advantages of cursive writing, though, are much beyond hanging on to something that was important.

I don’t know that it’s still important.

I certainly recognize the validity of the debate, and many of the points made in favor of teaching cursive are very solid.

Right.

But I’m not 100% sure that we aren’t just being nostalgic for a different way of communicating that isn’t really important anymore.

Yeah, yeah, that’s the same thing that I’m struggling with.

Is it this dying art form?

You know, people argue, well, you should be able to read the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

But didn’t we all read that in print rather than in the script?

One of the things that I find when I read these arguments in favor of teaching cursive in schools is that many of them are still true if we simply talk about sending letters.

So a lot of what they’re talking about is a different way of communicating that wasn’t text messages and chat and email.

For example, if you look at the archives of famous people from the 1920s and 1930s and look at their letters, there is something wonderful about the telegram and the typewritten letter.

None of it’s handwritten except maybe the signature, and yet it still feels like an artifact of history because we don’t do that either.

We don’t send typewritten letters to people, to friends and to family and to coworkers and colleagues.

It’s mostly email at this point, right?

Right.

Well, if you’re going to get a sympathy note in the mail, you want that to be in the person’s handwriting, right?

You do.

It’s a kind of voice.

That’s what I keep coming back to.

I had a similar thing about a lost voice.

And when I mentioned my mother earlier, I met my stepmother.

My birth mother died just a couple weeks after my brother and I were born.

And one of my aunts gave me a letter recently, and it was written by my birth mother.

And it was written a couple weeks before my brother and I were born.

In her handwriting, it was a card to another aunt.

And in it, she mentions the babies.

And she mentioned me and my brother before we were born.

It is the first mention of me anywhere on the planet, as far as I know, in print.

And it was in a handwriting that was a stranger to me,

And handwriting that I didn’t know.

And so if I couldn’t read that, and it was very clear handwriting, clearly she learned in school.

She had followed her lessons well and written it according to the way that she was taught.

But if I couldn’t have read that, what a loss that would have been.

What a thing would have missed, what a hole I would have.

Right, right.

Well, I know there are a lot of strong arguments on both sides of this question, and we’d love to hear from you about them.

Give us a call if you have thoughts about teaching cursive in schools, 877-929-9673,

Or email words@waywordradio.org.

Or if you can fit them into Twitter, try hitting us up @wayword.

I had a light bulb moment this week when I realized that the word yen is Chinese rather than Japanese.

I was thinking that if you have a yen for something, it’s like the monetary unit in Japan, but it’s not.

They’re separate words.

Yeah, they’re completely separate words.

The word yen, like a sharp desire or a hunger, comes from an old Chinese word meaning craving.

Okay, and how did it come into English?

Was there a particular connection there?

Yes. The original sense of yin in English was the craving of a drug addict for his drug, originally opium.

Opium. So we’re talking about that particular period in history.

Gotcha.

Yeah. 1876.

Hit us up on Twitter @wayword.

Hello. You have A Way with Words.

Hi. My name is Vivian. I’m calling from Indianapolis, Indiana.

Welcome, Vivian. What can we do for you?

I had a question. Why is the abbreviation for the word number, which is spelled N-U-M-B-E-R-N-O, if the letter O isn’t anywhere in the original word?

Oh, so you’re thinking maybe it should be N-U instead of N-O as an abbreviation, huh?

Right? I mean, like, probably.

It’s part of a set of abbreviations we have that are basically older than English, or at least modern English.

It goes back to the Latin form of the word number.

One form of it was numero, very much like in Spanish and Italian today, N-U-M-E-R-O.

And Latin scribes abbreviated a lot of their writing,

And the way that they abbreviated that word was N-O with a little mark,

Or maybe the raised O with a line above it to indicate that the word had been shortened.

And so that’s it.

And so we’ve just kept that Latin abbreviation through the millennia.

Oh, wow, that’s so cool.

Yeah, and there’s a few others like that.

Pound is a classic example of that.

The weight LB for pound.

Yeah, yeah.

And the original Latin word is numerous,

But that particular case,

The ablative case,

Means in or with.

Yeah.

We don’t really have cases in English in that way,

So it’s kind of lost on us, but yeah.

Oh, cool.

Thank you for telling me.

Yeah, that’s pretty much it.

Thanks for calling.

Really appreciate it.

Thanks.

Take care.

Bye.

Send your questions,

No question too small or too brief,

To words@waywordradio.org

Or call us 877-929-9673.

A few weeks ago, I talked about this wonderful essay by Alexander Chee in the Morning News about studying with the writer Annie Dillard.

And there was a quotation I meant to include that I loved so much.

He would turn his papers in to this master writer and she would grade them and mark them all up.

And he put it this way.

Getting pages back from her was like getting to the dance floor and seeing your favorite black shirt under the nightclub’s black light.

All the hair and dust that was always there but invisible to you, now visible.

Oh, that’s perfect. Absolutely.

It’s true, though, right?

You feel that you’re suave and cool.

It reminds me of going to the beach and you feel like you’ve got perfect coverage for your sunscreen.

Only when you get back and you realize, like, there’s this whole big patch under your chin and part of one arm and you’ve got burns in the strangest of ways.

That’s right. This son is a harsh editor.

Yeah, it is indeed. 877-929-9673 or talk to us on Twitter @wayword.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hey, Martha.

Hey, who’s this?

This is Steve Pable in Nino, Wisconsin.

Hi, Steve. What’s going on?

Well, I was wondering about a seemingly strange phenomenon a number of weeks back.

I had run across a rather obscure phrase that I had heard before, to suss out.

And it seems to me I heard it on the 1A with Joshua Johnson.

That’s it.

And anyhow, I heard the expression, okay, I don’t know what that means.

But then I saw it, I think, in an article not long after and then heard it on the radio again,

When you saw it in the space of maybe three weeks.

And I thought, that’s just bizarre.

How does something I have not heard for years and years and years suddenly crop up in the space of a few weeks?

And I thought, was it somehow somebody decided it was time to resurrect that phrase again?

Or I’m not sure what was going on there.

And I didn’t know if that was just me noticing, but I have not seen it since, that I recall.

And I had not encountered it for years before that.

Well, there are a couple things at play here.

One is, it’s interesting, most people do what you do.

They suspect that the world around them has done something clever and it’s not them.

Yeah, right.

And usually it isn’t the world that did something clever.

It’s usually our brains did something clever to our consciousness.

And I think that’s what’s happened to you.

There are a lot of names for this, but it is sometimes known as the blue car syndrome,

Where you buy or you see a blue car of a particular kind and then you start to notice it everywhere.

It’s also called the Bader-Meinhof phenomenon.

There’s a story about someone who had never heard of the Bader-Meinhof gang.

He’s a terrorist.

And then they started seeing the name everywhere.

But it’s more commonly known in linguistics as the frequency illusion, which is an expression coined by the linguist Arnold Zwicky.

And he kind of explains this, and I’m going to abbreviate this, but there’s two parts to what happens in our brains when we have the frequency illusion.

One is we have selective attention, which means in our given day, we don’t notice very much that’s going on around us.

Most of us are not hyper aware.

We’re focused on the things that we need to be focused on and the things that we have to do.

But when we do notice something and believe it to be important or somehow it seems significant to us, often just because it’s new, then we become consciously aware.

We’re cued.

We’re primed, as they say in linguistics.

We’re primed to be even more aware of it.

So on top of that, the fact that we’re now even more aware of a thing that seems to be important because it’s new, we have confirmation bias, which means that every time we see that thing again, we begin to feel that it’s significant.

And this is kind of tied into the way that many of us believe that coincidences are somehow important, even though they’re just coincidences.

They’re just chance, luck, and they don’t have a larger significance to anything spiritual or anything at all in the world.

So there’s a kind of another term here from psychology.

There’s a kind of synchronicity happening here in that we’re drawing a conclusion about the repeated appearance of a thing.

We’re assigning it an importance it probably does not have.

It’s not a deep state thing or anything.

No, it’s nothing like that.

Now, terms do have a vogue.

Many of us do read the same authors and we read the same journalists.

And so if a journalist in the New York Times whose story is read by 700,000 people uses a particular word or phrase that is unusual, it is possible that some of those readers will then begin to use it.

But generally what’s happening here is our brains are tricking us into thinking that something is newly important when it is not newly important.

Yeah, well, very, very interesting.

I suspect it could be something along those lines, but yeah, I’ll be keeping an eye out for it and see if it was just merely coincidence.

All right, cool.

So, well, what a pleasure to talk to you both and enjoy your show so much, obviously.

And, yeah, glad you bring so much passion to it.

Steve, thank you so much.

Thank you.

That means a lot.

Take care now.

You bet.

Take care.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye now.

877-929-9673.

Grant, you remember a few weeks ago when we were in Dallas doing a show and we had the Q&A part where somebody was talking about the term commode?

Oh, yes.

And the origin of that and how commode was a kind of cabinet and then you put your chamber pot in there and then later that became applied to the commode in bathrooms, particularly in the south.

The seat itself.

Yes.

Yes.

And somebody there mentioned that commode is also something you wear on your head.

We both had that same reaction, but I looked into it, and indeed, a commode was the headdress worn in the 17th and 18th centuries by women at the court.

Ooh, wow.

Yeah, and it was like a wire structure that supported ribbons and hair and all this.

It was commodious.

Well, it was convenient.

Yeah.

It’s the idea of convenience.

It’s something that you could put on your head really quickly.

That’s funny because a bathroom can also be a convenience.

Indeed.

Indeed.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Melinda Benzel.

I’m calling from Indianapolis, Indiana.

Hey, Melinda, welcome.

What’s up?

I have a little word game that my grandmother used to play with me,

And I haven’t really met anybody else who has played this game with their kids or anything.

So here’s how the game goes.

So I’m going to say, I’m a brass lock, and you guys are going to say, I’m a brass key after that.

Okay?

Okay.

So I say, I’m a brass lock.

I’m a brass key.

I’m a silver lock.

I’m a silver key.

I’m a gold lock.

I’m a gold lock.

I’m a gold key.

Oh, gold key.

I’m a monk lock.

I’m not a monkey.

I’m a monkey.

Tricky, tricky.

So that’s just, that’s one of the word games she used to play with me.

And I know I Googled it a while back and I couldn’t find anything about it.

So I’m wondering if you guys had heard of it.

As a matter of fact, we have.

This shows up in collections of folklore going back at least to the 1880s.

You’ll find it in collections of games that kids play or tricks that kids play on each other.

And it’s a particular kind of, it’s not quite a riddle,

But it’s where you get the victim to kind of incriminate themselves

Or to say the bad thing about themselves.

And there’s a whole slew of these.

So what they are, they’re usually a little circular

Where you get somebody to say a thing that they didn’t expect to say.

So you kind of get them in a habit.

So Pete and repeat were sitting on a fence.

Pete fell off.

Who was left?

Repeat.

Repeat.

And then I say the whole thing again, and you’re like, oh, don’t stop doing it.

Another one that I learned is what color is a red stoplight?

Red.

Red.

What color is a green stoplight?

Green.

What do you put in the toaster?

Oh.

Most people say toast.

Oh.

There’s better versions of that than what I could remember.

But there’s a ton of these where you get somebody to say the unexpected.

And I think there is a, Martha, you had a term for this.

Yeah, insidious ruse.

Ooh, insidious ruse.

Ooh, I like that.

Yeah, folklorist.

I have another one.

Oh, yes, hear it.

Bring it.

Now, you have to repeat this.

It’s a very ancient saying.

So just repeat after me.

Okay.

You say, owa.

Owa.

Tagu.

Tagu.

Siam.

Siam.

And then you say it a little faster.

Oatagoo Siam.

Oatagoo Siam.

Oatagoo Siam.

That’s beautiful.

And you’re supposed to like bow at the end.

It’s a magical old saying.

That’s very good.

There’s a ton of these.

We’ll have to share some more on the website.

So your version where you tried to say that we were monkeys goes back at least to the 1880s, and it’s probably older than that.

Here, I’ve got another one for you.

You know, they did a survey, and they found out what smart people eat for breakfast.

Do you know what it was?

What?

I didn’t think you would know.

That’s good.

Yeah, there’s a whole bunch of these.

Melinda, why do I have a feeling we’re going to hear a lot more of these in our email?

I think we will.

And we’ll share them all.

Yeah, you’re going to have a flood of them, I’m sure.

Yeah.

Thank you so much for your call.

This is real fun.

Oh, yeah.

Thanks for talking to me.

All right.

Call us again sometime, all right?

Okay.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Thanks.

We will put these little games that you can trick your friends and your kids with and your parents with on our website.

And if you’ve got some more, send them along to words@waywordradio.org or try them out on Twitter @wayword.

Grant, I have a word I know you need if you don’t have it already.

Okay.

Aglu.

A-G-L-U.

Do you know this word?

No.

Aglu reminds me of aglet.

It’s not related to aglet.

No.

What is it?

No.

It’s a breathing hole made in the ice for a seal.

Ooh.

Isn’t that nice?

What language does that come from?

From Inuit.

Inuit.

Yeah.

And now it’s in English.

Yeah.

For the whole breathing hole made by seals.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay, cool.

You know, they stick their little heads up.

You can spell it A-G-L-U or A-G-L-O-O, but that seems like it would come in handy in Scrabble.

Maybe crossword puzzlers already know this term.

Probably, yeah.

Diehard crossworders surely know it.

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

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

You can send us a message, subscribe to the podcast, get the newsletter, or catch up on hundreds of past episodes at waywordradio.org.

Our toll-free line is always open in the U.S. and Canada, 877-929-9673.

Or send us your thoughts to words@waywordradio.org.

A Way with Words is an independent production of Wayword, Inc., a nonprofit supported by listeners and organizations who are changing the way the world talks about language.

We’re coming to you from the Recording Arts Center at Studio West in San Diego, California.

Thanks for listening. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. Until next time, goodbye.

Bye.

Thank you.