One Stone, Two Mangos, and Lots of Correspondence

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

And I’m Martha Barnette. And I think I have found a great answer to a question that was raised in an earlier episode. You may remember Amanda in Tucson, Arizona, who wanted an alternative to kill two birds with one stone.

Right, I remember that. Yeah, and we got a lot of feedback on that. People who said they had better ideas and people who said, why change it at all?

Right, right. And she was lobbying for feed two birds with one seed, which I like. But I think we actually got an even better one. This came from Shuba Ayer, who grew up in India. And she says, in our mother tongue, we have an equivalent benign version.

And she points out among speakers of the Tamil language, there’s a commonly used phrase for the same idea. And it’s Urukhalil Irandumangai, which translates as one stone, two mangoes.

And the idea there is that you throw a stone at a mango tree and two mangoes drop to the ground.

Oh, wonderful. That’s exactly the spirit of it, isn’t it?

Yes. The idea of accomplishing two things with one effort.

Yes, so I really appreciated getting that.

And then we heard from Cynthia Cox-Gerard, who’s a pastor in Midland, Georgia. And she wasn’t talking about that phrase specifically, but she pointed out that a parishioner told her about a more delicate way to tell somebody to get off the pot.

And the phrase that this person used was, paint or get off the ladder.

Definitely more polite, the kind of thing that you can say around your pastor.

Yes. Yes. Cynthia says the light bulb that inevitably goes off in the listener’s head when they hear this for the first time is fun to behold.

Right. Because a ladder kind of prevents more than one person doing the job at the time if it’s up on top of the ladder.

True. And one more email that I wanted to share is from Matt Welter, who lives in Wisconsin.

And responding to our conversation with 11-year-old Josiah, who was looking for a term to describe a road that’s largely free of traffic.

You remember that call, Grant?

Yeah.

Well, Matt writes, in Green Bay, we have a term for that.

The game has started.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah. It’s weird sometimes when you’re driving down the streets in San Diego and you don’t know that there’s something happening at Petco Park.

The Padres are playing.

They’re like, where is everyone? This store should be packed right now.

And you’re like, oh, yeah, they’re watching the game.

Right. Why didn’t the emergency warning go off on my phone?

What do they know that I don’t know?

Let me check the websites of the newspapers.

We’re always on the lookout for new ways to say old things or old ways to say new things.

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