Pardon Our French

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Learn more at nu.edu. You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. A couple of friends of mine were very excited recently when they

Scored tickets to the World Cup in South Africa.

Sweet!

And it turns out that they’re from South Africa themselves, so we’ve been talking about some

Of the language they’ll hear when they go back, and my friends have convinced me that

South African English is really lekar.

Do you know that word?

Excuse me?

They’re all drunk?

No, it means really great.

It means really cool.

L-E-K-K-E-R, with that sort of trill at the end, lekar.

And, you know, South African slang is this incredibly rich mixture of Afrikaans, which was developed from the Dutch, and indigenous languages like Zulu and English.

And, you know, if you’re following the World Cup, then you know that the word diski, D-I-S-K-I in South African slang, doesn’t have anything to do with Frisbees.

It means a soccer ball.

Very good.

So it’s about football in general, or what we call soccer.

Right, right.

And, Grant, diski is also the name of a dance craze that’s sweeping South Africa right now.

It mimics the movements of soccer players.

It’s sort of this South African version of the Macarena.

It looks like a whole lot of fun and great exercise.

Oh, that’s fantastic.

You know, I’m looking here at an article from The Guardian, the British newspaper.

They had a great list of slang for people who were going to South Africa for the World Cup.

But, you know, one leapt out at me, the word Ubuntu.

Oh, yeah, that’s a great word.

And now they define this as the Southern African philosophy with the central tenet that a person is a person because of other people.

No man is an island.

But, you know, I know Ubuntu because it’s the name of a Linux distribution.

Wait, it’s software?

Yeah, Linux is an operating system for PCs.

And I have a computer at home that has a Linux distribution on it,

Jaunty Jackalope or something like that, and it’s called Ubuntu.

That’s the name that the people gave it because of this idea that everyone is working together to make this free software.

Oh, it’s free.

Okay.

Yeah.

Okay, so they really haven’t overly commercialized it.

So it’s U-B-U-N-T-U, and I think some people have used this for businesses.

That’s cool.

Yeah, well, no, fine.

Anyway, if you’d like to talk about South African slang or any other kind of slang or language in general,

Call us, 1-877-929-9673.

Or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Rachel from San Diego.

Hi, Rachel. Welcome to the program.

Thank you.

Hi, Rachel.

What can we do for you?

Well, I have a question for you guys.

I am taking a French class at the moment,

And once you notice something, you seem to see it everywhere.

And so I began to notice the phrase, pardon my French, that we use when we cuss in English here in the States.

And I was wondering, why do we use this phrase?

Very interesting.

So you’re hearing people curse a blue streak and then they sort of back up, right?

They put it in reverse and say, oh, pardon my French.

Yes, or even with anything, you know, you hear it on TV or in movies,

Or even someone might say it when they’ve even done not necessarily cussing

But said something negative or misgay.

So I thought that was interesting.

And I asked my French teacher because I’m taking a French 101 class,

And her first thing she said very nicely was,

You know, it’s kind of offensive because I think American people

Cuss a lot more than the French do.

Oh, you think?

Well, no.

Wait a minute.

Ask her what French actors say to each other right before they go on stage.

Oh, is there like a saying that is a…

Yeah.

I mean, we say break a leg.

They say, well, I would have to tell you and then say pardon my French.

Yeah, they basically say get stuffed, right?

Well, no.

You know, after she did say it offends her sometimes, she did say she thought possibly it could be derived from the idea that at one point American society was more puritanical or more straight-laced and French society was seen as more progressive.

And so Americans might have used that phrase when, you know, saying something risque to kind of show that the French were more to that level or more risque.

Yes, I think we definitely have a reputation in Europe of being much more puritanical.

True or not, but we do have the reputation.

But I want to go back to her claim that the French curse less than the Americans.

I think that’s a load of bollocks, actually.

Pardon his French.

Pardon my French.

Pardon his British.

Pardon my British.

I got to say, because maybe it was the crowd I was hanging with in France.

It was artists and actors and musicians and the like.

But when I lived in France, their language was rougher than mine.

I felt like a kindergarten teacher, you know, the way I was speaking.

The French can hold their own when it comes to cursing.

Anyway, your question, though, was about pardon my French.

So somebody says something, a curse word or a swear word or something insulting,

And they say, oh, well, pardon my French.

And it’s a way of kind of getting out of the moment, right?

Kind of escaping the responsibility for the thing they’ve said.

Yeah, just saying, oopsie.

Yeah, exactly.

Excuse me.

I’m thinking that it probably has to do with the conflicted relationship that the English have had with the French over the centuries.

You know, for centuries, they’ve hated each other at one level or another.

And yet we also, English speakers, are sort of wistful, I think, about the French language.

You know, we borrow so many words from French.

Joie de vivre and that kind of thing.

And people used to apologize for using French sometimes when they would use something normal like that.

They would say, pardon my French.

But people were often, especially during Victorian times, they were reaching for those fancy French words that sound impressive, I think.

But at the same time, there are a lot of terms in English that are negative involving the French.

Like, do you know what a French letter is?

No.

Do you, Grant?

I think so, but go ahead and tell me.

He’s pretending that he doesn’t know that a French letter is a condom.

Oh, yes, of course.

Yeah, and if you take French leave, it means you leave a party without thanking the host.

And the French have a reciprocal phrase like that that means to take English leave.

But I don’t think that they say pardon my English when they curse.

But to pardon my French, if you go back to the earliest usage that you can find in the 1850s and 60s,

You’ll often find that somebody has said something mildly offensive.

And then they say pardon my French, and they say it in such a way with other kinds of phraseology

That allows the hearer to go ahead and ignore the offensive thing that they said.

It’s kind of a way of saying, excuse me,

And so that all parties can agree that even though an offensive thing was said,

Let’s not dwell upon it and move on to the next thing.

So you’re pretending as if the thing you said is incomprehensible in another language.

And even in some of the earliest uses, I find it actually is in French.

There’s an example from a book called Two Lives or To Seem and To Be by Maria Jane McIntosh from 1853.

And in it, one of the people says, the American ladies are charming, very charming.

Pardon my French.

I could not be so bold to say it in English.

In other words, she said that the American ladies are prudes in French in order to kind of disguise the insult that she was giving.

And so even though somebody might later say something actually in English, they still say pardon my French as a way of kind of disguising the fact that it was offensive, allowing you to believe that you misunderstood.

That’s what I did wonder, is if it actually at some point was used with French language,

Which would make much more sense than to just say something in English and then say pardon my French.

Right.

At that point I thought, why not pardon my Italian or Russian or I don’t know.

Exactly. Right, right.

And I’m not aware of anything, say, for example, in Spanish that’s, you know, pardon my Portuguese or something.

I think it says specifically English-French.

Okay.

Cool, cool.

Wow. Well, thank you very much for answering my question.

Mais oui, mademoiselle.

Well, thank you. Merci.

Yeah.

Au revoir.

Au revoir.

We’ll enjoy.

Well, thank you.

Thanks.

Bye-bye.

Is there an idiomatic expression in English that’s always got you a bit befuddled?

Give us a call.

We’ll help you tease out the meanings and origins.

1-877-929-9673.

Or put it in email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi.

This is Mark in Dallas.

Hello, Mark in Dallas.

How are you?

I’m good, thanks.

I have a friend who grew up on a farm in North Dakota, and except for a period when he lived here in Texas, he’s lived in North Dakota his whole life.

In fact, he recently moved back there to live on the family farm he inherited, which is just a few miles from the Canadian border.

So we were talking on the phone, catching up, and I was asking about things on the farm.

I’m a city dweller. I’ve never lived on a farm myself.

And he happened to mention that he had recently walked into his kitchen, and there in the middle of the room was a moose.

And I think that’s kind of amazing.

What was he doing? Was it watching TV?

Having a beer?

No, he said there was a moose.

A moose?

Yeah, I think, well, okay, I’m a city dweller, I don’t know, but it’s very rural there, and it’s so close to Canada.

I figure, you know, I must be crawling with moose.

Yeah, he might legitimately really have a moose.

They’re gigantic animals, but maybe he’s got a big kitchen.

Yeah.

I mean, one or two is bound to get into someone’s home.

Right.

Yeah, yeah.

They’re like vermin up there, right?

Got a doggy door and a small moose.

He’s got a moose door.

He lets them right in.

So I said, well, what did you do?

What in the world did you do about this?

And he said, well, I took a broom and I tracked it in the corner,

And then I took a paper sack and I scooted it into the sack,

And then I took it outside.

And I said, oh, it was a mouse.

He said, yes, that’s what I said.

There was a moose in my hoose.

A moose in my hoose.

Yeah, that’s funny.

A moose in my hoose.

That’s funny.

So he lives close enough to Canada

That he’s got a bit of that Canadian vowel sound then.

Is that what we’re gathering here?

Is that what it is?

Because he’s of Scandinavian descent,

And I wondered if it had anything to do with that ancestry.

It’s possible, but it sounds more like the traditional Canadian way of pronouncing the owl sound.

There are three different ways that that sound is pronounced throughout Canada,

And it’s not consistent, and there isn’t really one grand, great, overarching Canadian accent,

But they are known for this particular feature.

You’ve heard people make fun of the Canadian pronunciation of about and claim that they say aboot,

But it’s more like a boat.

And it sounds like close to what your friend was doing.

Again, there are three different pronunciations of that vowel in Canada.

Charles Boberg, I forget what university he is, but he’s well known as a Canadian dialect researcher,

Has written at length on this and has done surveys and studies across the country.

And you do find that that accent does tend to appear on the other side of the border between the two countries.

The border is not this impenetrable wall where dialect and accent features can’t cross.

There’s some overlap there.

So it could have been imported.

Yeah, it could have been imported.

But it’s really interesting stuff to get into these vowel sounds

When you start to map them and realize that you share this language feature

With a whole group of people that you’ve never met

And you don’t otherwise necessarily feel any affinity to.

Wow, fascinating.

It’s called Canadian raising.

And the raising refers to what happens to the vowel sounds in the mouth.

So mouse could easily sound a bit like moose.

Because the back of the mouth is…

You do, yeah, I won’t go too far into the actual physical,

What happens to the tongue and the lips and so forth,

But there’s some raising there, as they call it.

Actually, you can graph it.

There’s a graph that sociolinguistics use that shows the little dot moves up

When it changes from mouse to moose.

Well, that’s a big change.

I’m a rodent.

Well, wait a minute.

I wasn’t visiting Bullwinkle.

Yeah, really.

Yeah, it can be gigantic.

Yeah, but they’re both mammals and four-legged, so…

Yeah, so it’s not too far a leap.

Well, thank you very much.

It’s our pleasure, Mark. Thank you for calling.

You bet. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Give us a call, 1-877-929-9673,

Or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Tune up your brain and stay tuned.

Word Puzzles next here on A Way with Words.

You’re listening to A Way with Words.

I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett, and we’re joined once more by our quiz guy, Greg Pleska.

Hello, Greg.

Good afternoon, evening, and morning, Martha and Grant.

Wow, 24-7, Greg.

Well, you know, we are an international program, so.

That’s right.

We’ve got people in Kiribati.

Kiribati listening intently right now.

You got something puzzling there for us?

I do, actually.

Do you remember our old friend, William Snakespear?

Oh, yes.

Yeah, he’s the guy who wrote a whole bunch of plays with titles that are just one letter different from the titles of plays by William Shakespeare.

Right.

Well, it’s time for us to look at some of the ten films that were nominated for this year’s Snakespeare Oxcar Awards.

These are awards that are just like the more familiar Oscars, but with one letter different.

All right, well, let’s try it.

What I’ll do is I’ll give you the description of a film that’s been nominated.

And to find the answer, you take the name of one of the 2010 Best Picture Oscar nominated films and you change one letter to a different letter to get the Snakespeare Oxcar nominee.

All right. Here’s your first description.

A Marine suffering from partial paralysis uses advanced technology to enter the body of Mickey Rooney and ends up fighting a battle with Artie Shaw and Frank Sinatra for the love of an actress they all married.

Oh, no.

Do I have to put on my 3D glasses for this one?

Mm—

That would be, yeah.

All right.

So Avatar?

So Avatar, you’re going to change one letter to get the answer.

There’s an actress who married three times, in fact.

That’s one of the 3D glasses, and she married these three men.

Ava War.

Ava War is what we’re looking for.

That’s terrible.

I think I broke a rib on that one.

That’s a compliment, Greg.

Ava War.

Oh, no.

Ouch, ouch, ouch.

Avatar to Ava War.

Okay.

There you go.

I’m feeling it now.

Yeah, you just needed to get rolling to figure out how it works.

Oh, okay.

Here’s another one.

George Clooney plays a corporate downsizer who avoids close personal relationships by

Spending his time climbing evergreen trees.

Up in the fur?

Up in the fur, exactly.

Change one letter and up in the air, you get up in the fur.

You sure do.

Another one of my favorites from this year’s Oxcar Contenders.

Sandra Bullock stars as an interior designer who adopts a homeless young man and supports him in his aspiration to be a great hair colorist.

The blonde side.

The blonde side.

Correct.

Change the I and blind of the blind side.

You get the blonde side.

Okay.

All right, you’re on a roll now.

Yeah.

An alien spaceship stalls over Johannesburg,

And the local baseball team is no longer able to pay attention to their game.

Oh.

Distract nine?

Distract nine, exactly.

Instead of district nine.

Okay.

Instead of district nine.

Oh, very nice.

But if they could all see very clearly, they would be the distinct nine.

Oh, very good.

It doesn’t work.

It doesn’t actually work.

It doesn’t quite work, but it’s good.

It’s good.

I’ll do that next time.

We’ll just mix the letters around a little more.

This is actually Gabourey Sidibe’s second film, in which we learn about everything she did in the first one.

Previous.

Previous.

Based on the novel by Sapphire.

Right.

You have to say the whole title, right?

You have to say the whole title based on the novel, Push by Sapphire.

You know, it gave me too many letters to change.

I’m just going to go with previous.

Previous.

That’s great.

Nice.

I like it because I got it.

Yeah, that’s good.

They’re always better when you get them.

Right.

In this movie, a young schoolgirl begins a romantic relationship with a man twice her age,

Seduced by his worldliness as well as his expertise with wood chopping tools.

What?

I did not see that one.

Whatever it was.

So what would it be for, Grant, what would it be for education?

Well, what’s the whole title of the movie?

I thought it was An Education.

It is.

An Education.

Oh, Axe Education?

Axe Education.

Oh, very good. Axe Education.

It’s a sequel to the Saw franchise, actually.

All right.

It’s awful.

And this war thriller follows the exploits of an American bomb squad sent to Iraq to remove explosive devices from large Mongolian tents.

The yurt locker.

The yurt locker.

Oh, no. That’s terrible.

It’s pretty bad.

Not the hurt locker, but the yurt locker.

Of course.

Man, I never would have thought you could get all these things out.

I need a doctor.

Are we done?

Can you put us out of our misery?

Thanks, Greg.

If you’d like to talk about weird words or grammar or slang,

Or you just want to try to stump us,

Give us a call, 1-877-929-9673.

Or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Good morning.

My name is Amy Logan, and I’m calling from beautiful San Diego, California.

Well, hello, Amy Logan in beautiful San Diego, California.

What can we do for you, Amy?

I am calling because I have my boss is a chiropractor, and she’s from Canada.

And we often have, let’s say, pleasant battles about words.

And recently we had one, and I just had to call you guys to see if I was right.

And I want to know, is it supposedly or supposedly?

Because I say supposedly, and she says supposedly, and she says she’s right.

You say S-U-P-P-O-S-A-B-L-Y.

Correct.

And she says S-U-P-P-O-S-E-D-L-Y.

Correct.

Okay, and can you use it in a sentence for us, Amy?

I supposedly am going to go to the grocery store.

Supposedly.

Meaning that you have the intention to go, you’re planning on going, but now it’s somewhat in doubt.

Right.

Your boss says supposedly you’re going to the store?

Yes.

So I wasn’t sure if it was like a tomato-tomato thing.

You could say it interchangeably or if it’s like saying congratulations or congratulations.

Do you know what I’m saying?

I’m just not sure if it’s the way that we’ve changed it around.

Yeah.

Is there a pronunciation thing going on, or is there really a nuance of difference between those two words?

Well, we’re kind of pausing here a second, Amy, because we really like you,

And we think you’re amazing, and you’re funny, and it’s already one of the best calls ever.

But.

Oh, thank you.

But.

But I’m wrong.

You’re wrong.

I felt the buildup right there.

I felt it coming.

Yeah.

It’s what they call a rose.

You hand somebody a flower, but it’s got thorns.

I love it.

So it’s not interchangeably is really what you’re telling me.

No, it’s not.

There’s only one right answer here.

It is supposedly with a D.

Yeah.

Now, there is a word supposedly, but it has a slightly different meaning.

Because if you just take off the adverbial ending there, you get supposed versus supposable, right?

OK. And supposed is more definite. It’s the it’s the thing that everybody assumes is going to happen.

You know, Adam Lambert is supposed to win American Idol.

Got it. But if you say it’s supposable that he’ll win American Idol, then it’s like it’s possible.

Well, it’s one. It’s that one could suppose if it’s supposed to be one could suppose.

Right. But if it’s supposed it, it means it’s already been supposed.

It’s already been assumed.

It’s already been supposed.

And so, strictly speaking, the word you want if you’re saying, what was it, I’m supposedly going to go to the store?

Mm—

Well, I don’t know.

No, no, no.

This is clear-cut.

It’s supposedly.

I mean, there’s no room for ambiguity on this one.

-oh.

No, no.

I hear she’s on my side.

Let’s go back to that.

Don’t make me come out of there.

But I guess it depends on how certain you are that you’re going to go to the store.

But most people, if you look at the large body of written English, like billions of words, people almost never write supposedly when it is used correctly.

That is true.

They almost always meant supposedly and they got it wrong.

Right.

If you’re saying I’m supposedly going to go to the store, it’s like maybe I’ll go to the store, maybe I’ll go to the zoo.

Because to legitimately call something supposable and to say that it is supposedly true, you need to be talking on a philosophical level and having this meta discussion about things that could be supposed.

Right, right. It’s almost theoretical.

We don’t do that.

I mean, unless you’re hanging out with Bertrand Russell in a French cafe, you’re just not doing that.

Which I will do very soon. I promise.

Oh, okay.

Supposably.

Well, I’m at work, so it looks like I’m going to have to walk back out into the office with my tail between my legs and confess I’m wrong.

Well, go out the back door and just bring everyone lunch, and then it’ll all be okay, right?

Go down to the taco truck, get some burritos and everything.

That is such a good plan.

You guys are awesome.

Thank you so much.

You guys are so awesome.

Oh, you are too.

You’re fun to talk to, Amy.

It was a good call, even if we had to deliver bad news.

Well, I appreciate it.

You could always keep it to yourself, right?

Maybe your boss doesn’t listen to our show.

Unfortunately, I’m on the air right now, so that’s why I’m keeping it to myself.

Okay.

Well, bye-bye.

Bye, guys.

Have a great day.

Take care.

Good luck.

Bye-bye.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Oh, man.

The grammar walk of shame.

Do you have a dispute about language?

Do you need an arbitrator?

Give us a call, 1-877-929-9673, or lay out the sorry tale in email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, hi.

Hi, who’s this?

This is Everett Allen.

Where are you calling from, Everett?

I’m calling from Crescent City, California.

Oh, welcome to the program.

Oh, good to be here.

What do you have on your mind?

Well, I had a question.

The question actually has evolved over a year.

It has to do with the term round-heeled woman.

Okay.

And the way it came about my

My

Significant other or spousal equivalent as i call her

Asked me a question

Because there was a

Person who came to her work site who was a temporary worker

Who after she’d been there for a while someone put on a locker

They a

Note saying wreck called her a round-heeled woman

Nobody there seemed to know what that meant

And so my

Friend called me and asked me if i knew what it meant i said no i don’t know

What it means. The woman left it there for the whole time she worked there, which was

A few months, and amazingly enough, none of the women there who are smart-looded women

Knew anything about what that meant at that point in time. Then this past February, a

Play showed up in San Francisco called A Round-heeled Woman, and so my friend asked me again if

I knew anything about it. By that time, we had determined that there may be a particular

Connotation to that word.

What she said was that it was supposedly, quote,

A woman with loose morals,

Or someone who goes from horizontal to vertical very easily.

Or from vertical to horizontal.

Or the other way, yeah.

And then we found out that there was a book written,

And the play was based on the book,

And Sharon Gless was starring in the play.

Oh, really?

And the play was having its premiere there in San Francisco.

This past February.

So a round-hid woman is, as far as you know,

A woman of loose morals.

Well, that was the way it was described to me.

I mean, I sort of know that now.

-huh.

Yeah, and so what happened in the workplace?

Did they take down the sign?

No, the woman was there for about four months.

She left it on her locker.

Okay.

And she didn’t care what it meant.

Wow.

But the rest of the staff was curious as to

Who put it up there,

And why did they put it on her locker?

Was she a boxer?

No.

No, okay.

Okay, well that rules out one possibility, doesn’t it?

Yeah, I thought maybe she knew and didn’t take offense because she was thinking of another meaning of round heel.

-huh.

Yeah, because you’re right.

I mean, a round-heeled person is somebody whose heels are so rounded that they rock back really easily.

They are literally a pushover.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oh my goodness.

Somebody that a bearer of Y chromosomes would love to hook up with, huh?

Right, right.

An easy woman, a woman of easy virtue, who with the slightest provocation is willing to go horizontal.

And there’s a famous expression from a slang dictionary from 1796 where they talk about a woman named a thorough, good-natured wench.

The term is thorough, good-natured wench.

And it’s defined as one who being asked to sit down will lie down.

That is a round-heeled woman.

Timber!

That is a term from a long time ago.

Yeah, a willing wench.

Well, round-heeled is a newer version of it.

It dates from about the 1920s, and it’s used in boxing as well to refer to a boxer who goes down really easily.

Yeah, it’s a round-heeled or glass-jawed.

That’s right, yeah.

Well, I feel enlightened.

Oh, well, glad to do the lightning.

Well, I appreciate that.

Thanks for calling, Everett.

It’s been a pleasure. Thank you.

Good talking with you. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Well, whether you’re glass-jawed or round-heeled, give us a call, 1-877-929-9673, or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Here’s an easy riddle, Martha.

Okay, good, an easy one.

I hesitate to say easy because you never know.

Because I never know the answer.

What do a race car and a kayak have in common?

A race car and a kayak have in common, they can go forwards and backwards.

Yeah, they’re both palindromes. Perfect. Nice job.

Yeah, thank you.

Send your riddles to words@waywordradio.org or call us 1-877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Claire from Seattle, Washington.

Hello, Claire. Welcome.

Thank you.

What would you like to talk about?

Well, I’m calling about the movie The Hurt Locker.

Oh, yeah. Nice film.

Yeah, it was great. And I was wondering about the title. When it came out last summer, and I just saw it recently, but it was getting a lot of great reviews.

And the first few times I heard the phrase, it sort of sounded like the emphasis was, it sounded like a locker had been injured, which doesn’t make sense, of course.

But it sort of sounded like you might say the hurt puppy or something like that.

I thought it was the hurt person in junior high when I first heard it.

You know, a sad adolescent.

Yeah, so I was curious to see, and so before I went to see the movie, I looked it up,

And actually the word hurt, it’s more of a noun.

It seems to be a metaphor for a place of great suffering.

So you’re in a world of hurt, and you’re in the hurt locker.

So I’m wondering, you know, where that started and how long it’s been around.

I haven’t heard it in other movies or literature, so.

Yeah, there’s a lot of good work done on this.

The Historical Dictionary of America in Slang by Dr. John Leiter

Has a couple of really great entries about hurt

With some of the varieties of expressions that use this,

Including a world of hurt or in the hurt bag or in the hurt seat

Or, of course, in the hurt locker.

And my colleague Ben Zimmer, who is the new language columnist for the New York Times,

Wrote an article on the Visual Thesaurus website in March

Where he talked about the hurt locker,

And he found a slightly earlier use of it from 1966 and another from 1967.

And so we find from these articles that it was at least as early as Vietnam,

Where soldiers and journalists covering the war were talking about this place of just intense emotional pain.

And it’s not necessarily about the violence done to the body so much that it’s the body that is done to your well-being or done to your mind.

The emotional pain.

Yeah, so you had it exactly right.

And it’s even, especially if it’s deliberate or the pain has something to do with an orchestrated attack upon you or your troops or your men.

So is it sort of limited then, the use to the military?

I guess I kind of also thought of as something that you might find in sports if you had a bad training session or something.

Yeah, you could.

I think most of the uses are about war.

Most of them are in the coverage of war.

So if not by soldiers and people in the military or associated with the military,

Then by the journalists who are covering those people and the things that they do.

Yeah, and the phrase was also used in a very powerful poem back in 2004.

I don’t know if you’ve seen that one by Brian Turner.

We should link to it on the website because it’s a really wrenching poem.

It’s very short but very powerful.

And it ends with open the hurt locker and see what there is of knives and teeth.

Open the hurt locker and learn how rough men come hunting for souls.

It’s really powerful.

Like the movie.

That is very powerful.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So I guess it would be too much if I told my kids they had to clean their room or they’d be in the hurt locker.

No.

You know, my grandfather, he used World of Hurt.

He’s like, boy, I will put the hurt on you or I’ll put the World of Hurt on you.

And so maybe that’s a better one to stick to.

Yeah, absolutely.

The world of hurt.

Maybe their great-grandkids will use it that way.

But for right now, I think it’s a little too close to home.

Well, now, I mean, that’s a great title then for that movie.

Yeah, it’s fantastic, right?

Yeah.

Well, thank you.

Thanks for bringing it up.

Take care.

All right, bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

1-877-929-9673.

Or put it in email to words@waywordradio.org.

Words, words, and more words coming up next on A Way With…

Well, you know.

You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

Does having a big vocabulary really help you get ahead in life?

And I’m not talking about just being able to speak and write well and write with ease.

I mean having a big vocabulary in the sense of knowing really obscure words for specific things.

Like knowing that the word catalate means to lick dishes or that brochety means having crooked teeth.

Does using words like that really help you get ahead in life or does it just brand you as a weird or downright insufferable person?

Oh, I know what you’ve been reading.

The dictionary, of course.

Exactly.

But you’ve also been reading the article by Ammon Shea in the New York Times magazine where he talked about vocabulary size.

You’re right.

You’re right.

Does vocabulary size matter?

It’s a really good question.

He points out, rightfully so, that the earliest dictionaries were often released for people who wanted to make themselves sound smarter.

They weren’t necessarily about defining all of the language, but so much as they were giving you the language that would present well in the drawing room or in the salons of the day or that sort of thing.

And he also says that most famous quotations that you can think of don’t rely on polysyllabic Latinisms.

He says, Winston Churchill’s oft-repeated statement about how he had nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat would have elicited nothing but puzzlement had he replaced that quartet of short nouns with the synonyms vermal, moiling, delacremation, and sadorification.

So the question is, are you a size queen, right, when it comes to vocabulary?

Well, I am, but—

I’m not. No. The thing is, there’s something to be said here for the simple word works best.

On the other hand, I love the fact that English is so rich with synonyms.

It’s one of the benefits of the language is that the subtle differences between these words means that you can sometimes get so precise that you couldn’t say it any other way.

Exactly, Grant. I agree with that.

I mean, it’s sort of like coming across something that Shakespeare says or even a comedian, you know, when they spot something and call attention to it.

Hey, did you ever notice how this or that happens?

There’s something about coming across a word that tells you that somebody noticed something and they just made you notice it too.

I mean, like the word groak he mentions in the article, G-R-O-A-K, which means to stare silently at someone while they eat, perhaps in the hope of being given some food.

I mean, my dogs groak all the time.

As soon as you see the definition of that word, you know that moment, you know that feeling.

And there’s something kind of thrilling about knowing that somebody’s been there before you.

That’s true.

And I think the strange words that we know sometimes have their own message because they are strange.

If I choose to use the word absquatulate instead of to scram or to flee,

Then you know that I’m speaking in a different register of English

And that there’s some other extra information being carried there.

Right, right.

So I love them all.

Of course, dropping them into conversation is another matter entirely.

I don’t think you necessarily have to do that.

Do you have an opinion? Does vocabulary matter? Do you need more words? Will 15,000 do, or 75,000, or 150,000?

Let us know. words@waywordradio.org or 1-877-929-9673.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Good afternoon.

Hi, who’s this?

This is Sharon Samoska calling from Connecticut.

Well, hello, Sharon from Connecticut. How are you?

I’m good. Well, I’ve been a medical transcriptionist for many, many years.

And we continually encounter the following problem.

The surgeon tells us the patient was brought to the operating room,

And I quote, L-A-I-D laid supine on the operating room table.

We’ve got a lot of conflicts among us.

I’m an English major.

My feeling is if the patient lays themselves down, you don’t use L-A-I-D.

It’s L-A-Y.

If the surgeon lays the patient down as if the patient were an inanimate object,

Then you must go, I assume, with the L.A.I.D.

The old school used to say anything that was alive was always the lie, lay, lane,

And anything that was not alive was lay, laid, laid.

Please help us, because we’re having a big fight about this.

Happy to, happy to.

Well, you’re right.

Okay.

That English major was worth it.

Woo-hoo!

I never heard it explained as animate and inanimate, but that’s kind of interesting.

Okay, so the sentence in question here again is what, Sharon?

The patient was brought to the operating room and laid supine on the operating room table.

Okay, the patient was brought to the operating room and laid supine on the operating room table.

Okay, so the point is that there are two different things going on in this sentence, right?

There are two different verbs.

The patient was brought into the operating room.

And then the question is, what happened next?

Correct.

Right?

And if you put a was after that and, then that would make everything clear, right?

So was laid, right.

The patient was brought and was laid.

And then suddenly there’s some clarity.

That works.

Yeah.

If the surgeon does the laying down of the patient as an inanimate object.

However, if I’m the patient and I’m on the stretcher and the surgeon tells me, move over onto the OR table, then the patient’s moving themselves.

So the patient is actually, then the patient is laying on the operating room table.

Well, no, the patient is lying on the operating table.

Okay, yeah, right.

Yeah, yeah.

And let’s hope the patient isn’t inanimate.

That doesn’t speak very well for the doctor.

No, but if they’re under anesthetic, right?

Sometimes you are, but many times when your stretcher is rolled into the operating room,

You are not, you’re very conscious.

You’re not under anesthesia yet.

So you get up and put yourself on the operating room table?

Correct.

You scoot over when they tell you to scoot over from table to table.

And my feeling is if you’re doing the scooting, then you’re doing the lying,

Or if you’re going to make it past tense because he’s dictating this in the past tense,

The patient was brought to the hour and the patient lay, lie, lay, right, lay, lay, on the operating room table.

Sharon, I see what you’re saying, though.

I mean, there is a confusion there if you don’t have the word was before laid.

Correct.

I think that’s where they could be a little bit more clear because technically they could be right

That the patient was brought to the operating room and understood was laid.

Right.

So they’ve got an omitted was there.

Yeah.

Really, just putting it back in there solves the problem and wash your hands of it and move on to the next bad sentence.

Yeah.

Well, they have a lot of those sometimes.

We have some who are very great grammarians and we have others who are not.

-huh.

The sharper ones are the grammarians, right?

Yeah, some people are good with a prefix and a suffix and some people are just better with an appendix.

Exactly.

Or a knife.

Well, Sharon, keep up the good work.

Well, thank you very much and I appreciate the call.

Sure, go back and tell them stat.

I will.

I will tell them I was right all along.

Right on, sister.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

If you and your coworkers have a dispute about grammar, call us.

We’ll dispute it on the air, 1-877-929-9673,

Or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Grant, a while back on the show, we were talking about how pet names sometimes take a while to take shape.

I was talking about how my partner and I have a malty poo.

And we went through several names before we finally settled on one that seemed to work.

We got several emails about this.

And Susan from Olympia, Washington, wrote to tell us that she had a cat who was first named Orange Juice, but he ended up being named Lanny.

Now, you want to know the concatenation here, to use a big word?

How did you get that far?

She had a cat named Orange Juice, and then it went to Juice, and then it went to Foose, and then it went to Puse, and then Pusillanimous, then Lanny Mouse, and then finally Lanny.

That’s fantastic.

I love that.

That’s great.

Well, talk to us about your favorite words and names.

Call us 1-877-929-9673 or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Beth from Bernie, Texas, near San Antonio.

Hello, Beth.

I’m curious about the term newbie.

It used to mean a novice or a beginner because my last name is newbie,

And I get teased about it fairly frequently.

So I just wonder where it came from.

I believe it was first used in the military, and now it’s more like in the tech world.

Mm—

Mm—

Yeah, that’s right.

So if you’re a newbie, you’re a greenhorn, right?

Right.

A beginner.

And is it N-E-W-B-Y?

My last name, yeah.

I believe it’s a fairly commonplace name in England.

Yeah, is it Scots or something?

I don’t know.

Yeah, part Scots, yeah.

Yeah, Newby does originally start in the military,

Probably first appeared commonly during the Vietnam War,

And it starts to show up in newspapers and books and the like

At the late 60s and early 70s.

Wow, that’s not bad.

Yeah, it’s a standard abbreviation for, or standard kind of shorthand way for new person.

So you’re a newbie.

These days, of course, most of the people who are online are too young.

Many of the people who are online think it’s an online gaming term, but it’s much older than that.

Online, it tends to be abbreviated to noob and spelled N-0-0-B or N-O-O-B.

So Beth, I’m curious, when you introduce yourself and you say, I’m Beth Newbie, what do people say to you?

Oh, they just kind of joke, and they said, well, are you one?

Which is kind of curious, because I’m a nurse, and you probably don’t want your nurse to be a newbie.

You don’t want your nurse to be a newbie? Oh, my gosh.

Have you ever thought of just pronouncing it differently, saying new-bye?

No, no, I never thought of that.

Or no-y-be.

No-y-be, yeah. And do you laugh? Are you tired of the jokes at this point?

No, I usually laugh. I try to keep a good theme about it.

It’s sort of like going up to a tall person and saying, you’re tall.

You know, I mean, I know.

Have you thought about playing basketball?

Have you thought about playing basketball?

Yeah, exactly.

So, yeah, we just wondered if you’re tired of the jokes or.

Yeah, because there’s something about that first impulse that people have to say the really obvious thing.

And a lot of us, I do this sometimes, you can’t choke it back, right?

You know it’s the thing that everyone says.

Absolutely everyone.

Your name is Newby.

That means greenhorn.

That’s funny.

You know you should not say it, but you do anyway.

Why can’t we refrain?

It’s just giving in to the obvious, I guess.

What’s the weather like up there?

All that stuff.

Well, Beth, I say keep up the good work.

And, you know, I mean, give the patients a laugh.

I think you should hang on to that name.

I love it.

I want to be a newbie at something every point in my life.

You know what you should say is, yes, and today’s my first day.

Where do I put the needle?

There you go.

There you go.

I like that.

Oh, there you go.

That’s good.

I’ll try that out.

Yeah, definitely.

Insert a little Grant humor in there.

I think that’ll work.

All right.

Well, I hope we’ve helped a little bit.

Yes.

Fun talking with you.

Very interesting.

Thank you.

Take care.

Go forth and nurse with pride.

Thank you, Beth.

Yeah.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

I don’t think she had your sarcastic sense of humor, Grant.

No, she got it.

She just understood it.

It wasn’t funny.

No, I love it.

I love it.

And I love the idea of being a newbie at every point in your life.

You know, I’ve taken up new things like juggling and rowing and learning other languages.

I think it keeps you young.

Well, who makes fun of your name?

Give us a call and we’ll help you work it out.

We’ll make you feel a little bit better about it.

1-877-929-9673, or send your questions about slang to words@waywordradio.org.

Howdy, you got A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Jennifer from Carlsbad.

Hi, Jennifer.

Hi, Jennifer. What’s up?

Now, I am kind of an Anglophile, as it were.

I love to read old English books, old English history, you know, written as fiction or even nonfiction.

And in my travels through the books, I have come across people using the term for facial hair for a man, mustaches in the plural.

And I’ve read it several times.

I’ve never actually heard anyone using it when they speak.

But I happen to use the term myself when speaking to a friend.

And, of course, she was an English teacher and immediately told me that that is not the proper usage.

That it is only to be used in the singular, and never in any time was it used in the plural.

And I said, I swear I have read this, used this way.

Granted, it’s been used in, you know, olden days, as it were, but I thought I had seen it.

So I thought the only thing I can do is call Martha and Grant and see what the truth is.

And whose mustache or mustaches were you talking about?

I don’t remember.

No?

No.

In my days, I have sung madrigals, English madrigals.

And so she was somebody who sang madrigals with me.

So it may even have come up that possibly we were at some kind of function that was a Renaissance function,

And I happened to say, oh, they used to call it mustaches.

And she was like, oh, no, oh, no.

And so I thought, well, either I’m losing my mind or I misunderstood or she’s wrong.

Wow.

One of those three options, huh?

Yes.

Those are our choices.

We’re all three together.

So you have to save me here.

We will.

We will.

We can help.

Oh, good, good.

Yes, yes, absolutely.

It is much more British to say mustaches, plural.

You usually see it singular, right?

And another difference is, I don’t know if you noticed this, but in Britain, it’s much more common to spell it M-O-U.

Right, right.

Rather than the way we spell it here, which is M-U-S.

And is it, when it is two, is it pronounced differently?

Like mustache?

Is there an emphasis on a different syllable?

As far as I know, it’s the same, isn’t it?

Here we usually say mustache, right?

What do we say?

Yeah, we say mustache.

And there they might say mustache.

Yeah, it’s much more common to hear mustache with the emphasis on the second syllable.

And usually I had read it when they were, oddly enough, it seemed like when they were complimenting or speaking.

He was inordinately proud of his mustaches or something.

It always seemed, yeah, and you always had your picture in the mind of this giant waxed kind of monstrosity on someone’s face.

Right, right.

It’s a very grand thing.

But then they, so do they no longer use it in Britain anymore either?

It’s very rare and it’s kind of affected.

It does occasionally pop up in historical novels that people are writing when they’re trying to get the language of a different era.

But most people still say mustaches.

Actually, or stash or porn stash or whatever you want to call it.

Porn stash.

What was that last one?

I didn’t miss that.

A porn stash is the long kind of creepy looking mustache that looks like it might be on a porn star.

I wouldn’t know.

We wouldn’t know.

Me neither.

It’s only from my reading.

Is that what Brad Pitt is wearing now?

I don’t know.

Oh, man.

But no, you’re right.

You do see it in the older novels.

I’m looking at a reference here from 1902.

He twirled one mustache and then the other before he spoke again.

There you go.

So unless he’s got one on another part of his body.

-oh, don’t get Grant started on that.

So you can sleep better at night now, right?

Oh, good, good.

This is probably going to get me possibly lunch.

We’ll see.

Oh, yeah?

I’ll push it, yeah.

Oh, that’s not bad.

That’s not bad.

That’s not bad.

Great.

All right, well.

Thank you so much.

Our pleasure.

Okay, take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Call us with your disputes, your battles, your questions, and we’ll just make a mess of it for you.

No, we’ll solve it, we’ll resolve it, and you’ll get lunch.

Not from us.

1-877-929-9673 or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Grant, I have another pet name for you that evolved over time.

This one is from Peter in Homer, Alaska.

He writes,

We currently have a dog who’s a pit bull, blue heeler mix that our son rescued from inadequate owners,

Originally called Dumpster, under one of which he was born.

Not a name we wanted to perpetuate.

This dog is a sweetheart, but man, is he a handful, constantly requiring reprimands and reminders.

We named him after the 19th U.S. President.

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.

I don’t know. Who’s the 19th? Tyler.

No, Rutherford Behave.

So his name is Rutherford?

Rutherford behave.

I love it.

Fantastic.

That’s great.

Well, if you want to talk about language, give us a call, 1-877-929-9673,

Or send those emails to words@waywordradio.org.

That’s our show for this week.

Support for A Way with Words comes from National University.

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If you didn’t get on the air today, you can leave us a message any old time.

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Stefanie Levine is our senior producer.

Our technical director and editor is Tim Felten.

We’ve had production help this week from Josette Herdell and Jennifer Powell.

From Studio West in San Diego, I’m Martha Barnette.

And from sunny San Francisco, I’m Grant Barrett.

Thanks to Howard Gelman for engineering our show from the studios of KQED Radio.

Cheers.

Toodaloo!