Pebble Picker (episode #1425)

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.

The sport of baseball has given us so many words and phrases.

I mean, right off the bat, I can think of several.

Right off the bat, for example, is one.

But even if you’re not a baseball fan, you use baseball language every day, right?

We talk about touching base with somebody or taking a rain check.

Hitting a home run.

Hitting a home run, stepping up to the plate, three strikes and you’re out, pinch hit.

There’s so many of those.

And there are many, many, many, many more in the Dixon Baseball Dictionary.

And every once in a while, I take down this volume by Paul Dixon, which is almost a thousand pages with all this baseball language,

And just peruse it because it’s got some really fascinating stuff in there.

And there are some terms that I think should be part of regular American speech that aren’t, that are in this book.

For example, Grant, do you know what a Linda Ronstadt is?

No.

You might say that that pitch was a real Linda Ronstadt,

And that is a reference to the 1971 song by Linda Ronstadt, Blue Bayou.

Oh, I’m coming back again.

Yeah, exactly, because it blew by you.

Oh!

Isn’t that great?

So I feel like I want to adopt that into my regular everyday speech,

And if somebody says something that just goes right over my head,

I’m going to say, gosh, that was a real Linda Ronstadt.

Maybe you’ll give them something else that goes right over their head.

Right.

Well, my baseball term that I love, I did an entry for this in my old double-tongued dictionary.

It’s to scuffle.

It means to fail or to not play well, to be in a slump.

So if you’re scuffling out there, you’re just not doing well on the baseball field.

Oh, interesting.

And it’s probably related to a term that Merriam-Webster’s dictionary defines as to struggle as by working odd jobs to get by.

So they’re similarly related, but it’s not really common.

And I just love it when baseball is this holding place for these terms that have left the common speech, but still there they are.

Oh, that’s nice. Right there.

The scuffle.

Yeah.

Well, give us your best stuff, 877-929-9673, or email your good stuff to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Cole calling from Thousand Oaks, California.

Hi, Cole. How are you doing?

Very well. How are you guys?

Good enough, good enough.

I had a question.

I work at a restaurant as a server, and we have hummus on the menu.

And sometimes people order more than one plate of hummus, but I don’t know what the plural of hummus is.

Is it hummuses, humai, hummin, like oxen, or is it just hummus?

I just had no idea.

Humai.

So they’re ordering one of the spicy hummus and one of the plain hummus, maybe, so two plates are coming to the table.

Well, it’s called the hummus trio because there’s three kinds of hummus.

But if they order more than one order, do I say hummuses or do I still just say hummus?

Oh, what do you say just automatically?

What first comes to your mouth?

Half the time I bring up I don’t know what the plural hummus is, and the other half of the time I just call it hummus.

And people just say it’s hummus.

Like, oh, that must be the plural of hummus.

It’s just hummus.

So I wasn’t sure if there is an actual plural word for hummus.

You could say hummuses.

English will permit it.

It is morphologically correct, though it sounds awkward,

Because hummus, like some other words, is an amorphous mass noun.

So dirt, mud, muck, swill.

I actually like hummus.

Those are just other nouns.

I was going to say.

But all of these words share with hummus this fact that to make them plural sounds weird.

I have lots of dirts in my yard.

It doesn’t work, you know?

Why are you feeding me these swills?

It doesn’t really work.

So what you would say is kinds of dirt, kinds of swill, kinds of muck, kinds of hummus, or plates of hummus, or servings of hummus.

I’ve got two servings of hummus coming up.

I think I would say hummuses.

Yeah.

I think I’ve seen that in dictionary.

English will permit it, but the native speaker’s ear kind of, it clangs a little bit in the ear.

Yeah, it sounds funny.

It’s kind of like Priuses.

Is it Prii?

Oh, there you go.

That’s Priuses.

That’s Priuses, for sure.

Or Hippopotamus.

Because hummus is not a Latin word, so we would not do a Latin plural on it.

So that’s why I wouldn’t do…

Good point.

Yeah, it’s from Arabic and Turkish.

Yeah, Arabic and Turkish.

That would make sense.

I’m really glad you asked this question, actually, and I’m trying to think back.

I went to a particular potluck dinner where we didn’t decide in advance who was going to bring what,

And there were so many plates of hummus, and I’m trying to think what we said.

I mean, it’s like, why did everybody bring hummus?

Hummus-plosion.

Hum-apocalypse.

Hum-apocalypse.

It was. I can’t remember what I said.

But you’re right. There’s nothing really instinctive there.

I guess I said, what are all these hummuses doing here?

In this classic case of a foreign bar, and we find this again and again,

Either we borrow them incorrectly, like with a panini,

Where we treat it as a singular, even though it’s a plural.

Right. Biscotti.

Biscotti, exactly.

Or we borrow them with a malformed pronunciation.

We do this repeatedly to French. Sorry, French people.

And or we decide to throw on an English suffix that doesn’t really work with the foreign root, the Turkish or Arabic root.

Yeah.

So, Cole, did we help you?

What are you going to do?

Yes, you did.

I guess I’ll just say there’s two plates of hummus coming.

That works.

Yeah, two plates.

It’s a little more awkward.

You can say hummuses, too, but just save yourself the conversation of like, all right, I called this radio show and they said I could say hummuses.

And some people would think it’s weird.

And so you’re one of those people who think it’s weird.

Sorry.

But if you do that, mention the show by name, A Way with Words, okay?

Thanks, Cole.

You got it.

Take care.

Thank you very much.

All right.

Thanks.

Bye-bye.

All right.

Bye.

Give us a call, 877-929-9673, email words@waywordradio.org, or drop us a line on Twitter to the handle W-A-Y-W-O-R-D.

I came across a fantastic Spanish idiom the other day,

Arrima el asco a su sardina,

Which means to bring an ember to one’s own sardine, literally.

It’s an idiom that has to do with somebody who’s looking out for himself,

Looking out for number one.

And the reference here is to when laborers used to get together

And cook their sardines on a common fire,

And if you pulled an ember to yourself

And you heated the sardine over that ember,

Then you would be doing this selfish act

That would eventually get rid of the fire.

If everyone does that, then there’s no fire

And the embers aren’t all making heat together.

Exactly.

Looking out for number one.

What I love about it is that it’s stronger

Than looking out for number one

Because it sort of tells you what happens

To the larger community

If everybody is bringing in ember to his own sardine.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha.

This is David in San Antonio, Texas.

David, welcome to the show.

Thank you very much.

Happy to be here.

Gosh, back in the mid-70s, actually, I worked at a restaurant.

Well, we didn’t have computers yet, but we had a cashier.

And whenever she was faced with consternation, she would say,

Well, that just tears the rag off the bush.

And I just love that phrase and have continued to use it throughout my life,

But never heard it again from anyone else.

But it certainly seemed to, I don’t know, somehow say it just right,

But I was always wondering the source of that.

-huh. And David, what did she mean by that exactly?

She just meant that that was like the straw that broke the camel’s back, I think.

And this was in San Antonio?

Actually, this was in Houston, and she was a woman from Louisiana originally.

Okay. Tear the rag off the bush.

Or sometimes take the rag off the bush, or doesn’t that just take the rag?

Yeah, take the rag off the bush.

This is a well-chronicled phrase that shows up in a variety of different dialect and slang dictionaries going back at least a couple hundred years.

It’s an American expression, although there’s a related phrase that pops up in a dialect dictionary in the UK, which is to take the rag off the edge.

But here in this country, it’s very heavily associated with Western ideas of cowboy sort stuff and farm stuff and rural stuff. Definitely not a city term.

And there are a number of different theories about this.

The most common theory, the one with the most weight behind it but still uncertain, is that it has to do with shooting competitions where you might put anything in a bush at a distance, a piece of bark or a branch or even a rag or a piece of cloth, and then that’s what people would try to shoot.

You might tie the rag to a branch and then try to shoot it off.

And so if you take the rag off the bush, you are literally winning the shooting competition.

You walk home with the prize, whatever that might be.

To take the rag off is more common these days. Just off the bush part just doesn’t appear.

And it’s more often take than tear?

Yeah, it’s more often take than tear.

Interesting.

But it’s a couple hundred years.

1810 is the earliest citation in both the Dictionary of American Regional English and the Oxford English Dictionary.

Wow.

Yeah.

Well, thank you, Grant.

I knew I could rely on you to be a font of information.

He’s a font, all right.

Well, thank you very much.

David, it’s good to talk with you.

Thanks for calling.

Thanks, bud.

Thank you.

It’s my pleasure.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Well, have you heard something from your co-worker that has you wondering?

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

We often ask for your workplace jargon, and we heard from Pam Carlin, who lives in St. Cloud, Minnesota. And she’s been regaling me back and forth in email with language from the old days of working in printing.

You know, those scenes in movies when they are printing up the Sunday newspapers and they’re going by really, really fast and the paper is threaded between rollers. Those rolls of papers are called webs. The roll of paper is called the web and these are web presses.

And the webs come in various sizes depending on the size of the publication to be printed. You’re going to have a different size web, whether it’s a newspaper or a magazine, a coupon insert.

So Pam worked in printing and she said one of her first assignments was to go to one of the other offices and ask if they would turn one of these 34-inch webs, that is a big roll of paper, into a 35-inch web by using a paper stretcher.

She got pranked. She got pranked. She got punked the first day on the job, right? It’s like, what the older workers do to harass the newbies, right? Welcome the newbie.

Yeah, yeah.

Everybody gets jumped into the gang one way or the other.

Yeah, yeah.

Send them off for a can of striped paint.

So anyway, she got sent off for a paper stretcher. And now she thinks that’s hilarious.

But another word from those days before desktop publishing is the word stripper. That’s the person who prepared film images and copy for the printing plates.

And Pam writes, I was a stripper and met my husband at work. He was also a stripper.

So when people would ask Pam where she and her husband met, they would say, well, we were strippers. We were both strippers.

I was in the newspaper business at the tail end of the print era like that.

Yeah.

When the presses were still a thing.

Yeah.

Giant, giant presses as long as a city block.

Yeah.

Thundering, right?

Wonderful smells.

And you’d never leave there without your clothes getting ink on them or staying somehow or cut somehow.

Were you a stripper?

No, but I knew the strippers.

Yeah.

They were nice guys. All union. Come in there and they were fast, super fast. They could put your film where it needed to be in no time at all.

We love hearing your workplace jargon. You can send it to us at words at waywordradio.org. And we have a very active group on Facebook.

Do they talk funny out your way? Well, we’d like to hear from you about it. Stay with us as The Way With Words continues.

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 joining us now from New York City is John Chaneski, our quiz guy.

Hey, John.

Hey, Martha.

Hey, Grant.

How you doing, buddy?

Things are beautiful here in New York.

So I’ve been walking around, and while I walked around, I came up with this quiz for you guys.

Great.

Here it is. You know, not one book on Amazon.com with more than a handful of reviews has five stars. Everything is hated by someone. Here are a few excerpts from actual one-star reviews of classic novels on Amazon. See if you can guess the book. Are you ready?

Yep.

Sure.

I did not find a point to this book at all.

Yes, it’s kind of cool about the time travel, but more than anything, I had a hard time following it cohesively.

One paragraph, Billy is at war in 1945, and the next he’s at his daughter’s wedding being abducted by aliens.

I can appreciate a weird book as much as the next guy, but I don’t see what all the hype is about with this book.

Wow.

Sounds like a Vonnegut book to me.

That’s right.

I need a little more specific than that. You know, the fun of getting a book. I love the fun of getting a book.

The one guy.

Not, oh.

They made it into a movie.

Yes, yes they did.

It has a number in the title.

Slaughterhouse.

What was it, Chris?

Slaughterhouse-Five.

Slaughterhouse-Five.

Slaughterhouse-Five is correct.

Yes, way to go.

My impression is that it is a farce written for the pleasure of young women, with just enough politics and class distinctions to make it notable to critics, but represents nothing significant in terms of historical importance.

Oh, my gosh.

That could be so many things.

Pride and Prejudice.

Yeah, it’s Pride and Prejudice.

Way to go.

That’s it.

The first one that comes to mind.

Which Austin novel should I mention?

Yeah.

That’s it.

All right.

How about this one?

He’s a 16-year-old with the lifestyle of a 26-year-old, thinking and behaving like an immature 12-year-old.

Yeah, he makes the occasional intelligent comment, but the book doesn’t even have a plot, okay?

Right.

Catcher in the Rye?

Catcher in the Rye is right, yes.

This book was not a page-turner for me. The story just dragged on and on about nonsense.

I guess if you were interested in crazy people, this is the book for you.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest?

Yes, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

I’m glad you got that one because just the clue crazy people isn’t quite enough.

No, that’s good. Good catch.

I’m a science fiction reader and very much enjoy them. This book was a very poorly written Vonnegut wannabe.

I am not sure what the plot was. The attempt at humor was flat.

I will not go on and on. Just was not a good book in any way for me.

Is it one of the Douglas Adams books?

Yes, it is.

Is it the first one, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy?

Yes, it is.

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

This person just did not get it.

I didn’t want to go on. The humor was flat.

Wow, yeah, they missed it, didn’t they?

Yeah.

Could not even get halfway through the book. Hawthorne had A Way with Words, but his story making is terrible.

Mark Twain wrote that review, right?

No. I just included it because it said A Way with Words in it, of course.

That’s great.

So I’m guessing the Scarlet Letter?

Yes, it is the Scarlet Letter.

Very good.

Finally, I was told this was about fishing. It’s not, because a whale is a mammal.

That was got to be fake.

Oh, that’s an actual review.

That’s fantastic.

Moby Dick.

Yes, it’s Moby Dick.

Thanks, John. Really appreciate the quiz this week.

Thanks, Grant.

Thanks, Martha.

Talk to you next time.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Well, you know, we like to goof around here. If you’d like to goof around with us, give us a call.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

And you can find us on Twitter under the handle Wayword, W-A-Y-W-O-R-D.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Darla Collins.

I’m calling from Memphis, Tennessee.

Hi, Darla.

How are you doing?

Hi, I’m great.

How are you?

Excellent.

Thanks for calling.

What can we help you with?

I called about a phrase that I’ve heard all my life, and it wasn’t until recently that I wondered where it came from, and it’s the phrase, to boot.

And it’s always been used in the context of also or as well as in like, oh, he got a raise, but he got a bonus to boot.

And I always wondered about that here recently.

Ever since I started listening to the way it was, I was kind of looking for things.

And this one, I don’t know if it’s two words, if it’s one word, where it came from, what’s this boot all about.

Yeah, it doesn’t have anything to do with footwear.

Were you thinking it might have to do with the kind of boot you wear on your foot?

I have no idea.

I wasn’t really sure what to think of it.

I actually used to think that that it had to do with a little extra kick.

Oh, I was always thinking like boots come in pairs.

That was kind of vaguely.

You don’t just have one boot, you’ve got another boot.

Oh, oh, interesting. But neither one of those has anything to do with this expression, Darla.

It’s interesting, though, right? Because this one’s got deep roots.

It’s got very deep roots, all the way back to Old English and beyond.

The Old English word, Darla, boat, B-O-T, meant advantage or remedy or a good thing.

It’s actually linguistically related to the English words better and best.

And so if you’re throwing in something to boot, you’re throwing in something that’s an extra advantage or you’re throwing something into the bargain.

Oh, wow.

Does that make sense?

Yeah.

Yeah.

It’s something usually positive thrown in, but sometimes not so.

So we might call this one idiomatic residue, right?

Because all the other forms of boot in this way have disappeared or transformed into words like better and best.

And we don’t use that particular boot in any other way except in this one phrase.

So it’s spelled B-O-T?

No, no.

It used to be spelled B-O-T with a long O, but now it’s B-O-O-T.

So it’s two words, T-O and then B-O-O-T.

Yeah, it’s an odd one.

Yeah, but you might say like Grant is a handsome guy and smart to boot.

Well, thank you.

That was just an interesting phrase I’d always heard.

I always wondered about that.

-huh.

Well, we’re happy to help you, Darla.

All right.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

All right.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673 is the number to call to talk about language or send us your questions in email.

That address is words@waywordradio.org.

In 1918, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote a Supreme Court decision that had a beautiful description of language.

He wrote, a word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged.

It is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and the time in which it is used.

Wonderful.

Isn’t that great?

It’s so true, right?

It’s about context.

Words don’t exist by themselves.

Yes.

They always have company.

Yes, I thought that was really cool to come across in a Supreme Court decision.

Mm—

877-929-9673 is the number to call to talk about language or send us an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Laura, and I had a question.

Hey, Laura, where are you calling from?

I’m calling from San Diego.

Okay, great.

Welcome to the show.

Thank you.

With more and more people identifying as transgender, what’s the future of the pronoun?

I mean, if the binary he and she doesn’t fit everybody, how does language adapt to that?

That’s a great question.

Why is this on your mind?

Well, my son is transgender.

My older son is 21.

And I had a conversation with him about it.

And he said there’s a movement where they’re pushing for use of a separate pronoun, like Z or Zer.

It’s like a neutral pronoun that would include everybody, regardless of where they fall on the gender spectrum.

So we talked about that, and he said, well, that’s what should happen.

And I said, well, it’s very hard to just put a pronoun into the language.

I was telling him how when I was younger, the term Miz was introduced, and people kind of fought back against that.

And then now it’s kind of a standard thing.

But we were talking about what is the evolution and how does that happen?

You know, do you just have to start introducing it and then it becomes, you know, codified or what?

Yeah.

So that was how we started talking about it.

That’s pretty much the only way.

So this is a pronoun for people who are in between the binary, typical binary genders, right?

Right.

Right.

Yes.

And there’s a big spectrum.

You know, there are people who identify all different ways on that spectrum.

So, you know, the he and she binary doesn’t really fit them.

And it’s difficult to know unless you ask the person, you know, which they prefer, which I guess, you know, he was saying that you can do that.

And I said, well, yeah, that’s true, but it’s really kind of awkward when you meet a person to say, so do you prefer he or she?

You know, I don’t know.

I just thought it was a really interesting question.

Yeah, you kind of wait for the gentle correction.

You hope that if you get it wrong that they’re forgiving, right?

Yeah, I guess so, yeah.

But I just thought it was a really fascinating idea and question about language.

It really is.

And I can remember when Ms. was introduced and it was just thought of as this radical thing.

Well, there’s still pushback.

There’s still pushback against Ms.

Sure, there’s still some.

Is there really?

Yeah, absolutely.

There’s some, but, I mean, you see it now on forums and you often have that option.

But I remember at that moment when I first heard about it thinking, yes, finally, a word for the way I want to identify myself.

And so I completely relate to that idea of wanting to have, because language is so powerful, right?

And it’s powerful to find a word that names what you want to be described as.

So I totally relate to that.

And the transgender community has come up with a bunch of suggestions that the ones you mentioned, Z and Zer, are the most common at this point.

But it’s been going on for decades, and none of them are really stuck very well.

Right. I think those are so basic to our language.

You know, he and she, that it’s very hard to, I mean, Ms. is kind of different because that’s not your gender identity.

It’s more your attachment to another person.

So I think it’s a little bit less, you know, to the heart of your essence, if you know what I mean.

Right. It’s about your marital status.

And it’s a title that refers to half the population or a portion of half the population.

Whereas with people who are transgender, that’s a much smaller sample.

Yeah. Well, I have, you know, I think he and she also have definite baggage, you know, that come with them.

We have ideas in our culture about what that means, you know, what a he is, what a she is.

And, you know, I write books, too, and I wrote a book called Out, and I used parallel and perpendicular instead of gay and straight for that same reason.

Because, you know, gay and straight have such freight and baggage with them.

Absolutely.

I think anything with gender and sexuality in our culture, especially in America, has that problem.

I just read that Sweden actually just, I don’t know if they passed a law or what they did, but they codified a gender-neutral pronoun.

Yeah, hen, right? H-E-N?

Yeah, hen, right, exactly. Yeah.

Yeah, I thought that was really interesting.

They made it, you know, part of the established government language.

Well, they can do that because they have that language body in Sweden that we don’t have for the English language.

Right.

Well, yeah, we don’t all have a homogenous language and everybody’s different, so it would be tough.

You know, English has tackled this problem before transgender was a thing that we were all talking about in the form of the epicene pronoun.

And this is a pronoun that has no gender attached to it.

And more than 100 have been proposed back as far as the 1800s.

Wow.

And none of them have really stuck.

And many of them, they didn’t stick because they’re hard to say or hard to spell.

Some of them didn’t stick because they were pushed by people who had other agendas, and so they had their own new baggage with them.

Some of them didn’t stick because the culture wasn’t ready for this.

And you just think how long it’s taken us to not go on to the metric system.

There’s a lot of things that we stick with just because we’ve always done them this way.

Although, of course, they is becoming more commonly used.

It’s hard, though, because they as a gender-neutral pronoun works when you don’t know the gender of the other person or when you know that it’s both genders.

And it doesn’t work very well when you are talking to a person or referring to somebody who is present.

What do they want?

Martha, if you’re sitting there next to somebody whose gender I don’t know and I say, are they ready to order, it doesn’t really work.

Well, it’s a plural pronoun, too.

Yeah.

I mean, we’ve always been, as a former English teacher, whenever I hear someone use it that way, I just kind of cringe and go, the plural.

It’s universal.

That fight is over, though.

It totally, Laura, that fight is over.

It’s universal.

It’s done.

But it doesn’t work when you actually know the person in question.

Right.

It’s awkward.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I have no answer.

I just went, I just sent a question.

That was all.

I don’t know.

I don’t know how to fix it.

I know it’s an issue, though.

And definitely as more and more people identify that way.

And it becomes more acceptable, you know, I think it’s going to come up more and more.

Right, right. I think we’re still working that out.

And I think what applies to the situation is what I often say when I’m giving talks on diversity, which is that we’re all works in progress. Nobody’s perfect.

We’re all going to make mistakes. We’re all going to say things that offend the other person.

But the point is to start listening, right?

Right, and communicating.

Yes, listening and communicating and listening to understand rather than listening to respond.

Transgender people have a lot to tell other people.

Yes.

And they have very specific stories that haven’t been told a lot.

Right.

Because they’ve been hiding for a lot of the time that they’ve been, in our culture at least.

Yeah.

And I really think there needs to be more conversation.

And I look at, like, you know, if I’m, if people call me Mrs. frequently because I’m married, but I go by Ms.

Because I didn’t change my name.

So that’s confusing to people, but I don’t get upset about it.

I don’t say, oh, you know, I’m mad that you think I’m a missus.

I just say, oh, I go by miss, you know, and I just, that’s how I do it.

So I think that eventually that’s where we’ll go with this.

I think people who are transgender will just say, oh, you know what?

I don’t prefer she, I prefer he, or I prefer Z or Z, or just use my name or whatever.

But it’s hard to keep that straight with a lot of people, I think.

And particularly because you encounter so many new people in your life, it’s constantly something you’re always going to have to say for your whole life.

My son, who is eight, has long hair.

And because he’s eight, he hasn’t had puberty yet.

And so he looks like a girl sometimes.

And he frequently gets referred to as she or her.

And he has learned just to say, it’s he.

I’m a boy.

And that’s it.

And not take it as a personal insult.

No, he doesn’t take it as an insult.

We just all move on and maybe laugh a little bit or make it like, oh, that’s four times today.

That’s what you have to do, I think.

Because you can’t just push culture on people.

Exactly.

Yeah, I’m wondering about your son’s experience.

Well, he’s had a very interesting experience.

He’s 21 now, and he’s just going to graduate from college in May at Pace University in New York.

His name’s Austin.

And he came out in the eighth grade as gay.

And we were absolutely cool with that.

And he was, you know, that’s how he identified for most of high school.

And then when he went to college, more and more he started to identify as transgender.

And so, you know, we’ve had several conversations about that and talked about, well, so what does that mean exactly in terms of, like, who you date or what you’re called?

Or, you know, and we just kind of got to the point where I just say Austin.

You know, I don’t specify what gender he is.

And really it doesn’t matter because he’s Austin.

And, you know, he’s fantastic the way he is.

And I don’t really care.

He doesn’t care.

He’s very open about it.

And he’s okay with he.

Yeah.

I mean, he doesn’t like it, but he also doesn’t, I don’t think he has settled on what he would like to be called either.

You know, really?

I don’t know if he has.

I mean, for a while he was really pushing Z and Zer, but then I think that it’s awkward and people have a problem with understanding what you mean when you say it, because most people don’t know what that is unless they’re in the community or they know someone in the community.

If you just say it to a random person in, you know, a state where that’s not talked about like it is here, they’d be like, what are you talking about? What is that? I don’t know what that is.

It’s always difficult on the frontier.

We may reach the point 30 years down the road where we’ve forgotten that people like your son were fighting this battle.

Right.

Because everybody’s using the new phone now.

Well, Laura, you’ve raised some really great questions, and I hope we get a lot more voices on this topic because it’s really fascinating.

I hope so, too. I think it is, too.

I think it’s really interesting.

Thank you so much for sharing your story and your son’s story.

Absolutely. And great love to my son, too.

He’s a fantastic kid.

Yay.

Hi, Austin.

Hi there.

Hi, Austin.

Okay.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

I’ll take care.

Thanks so much for talking about it.

Sure.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

I feel like we could have done another hour with Laura talking about the subject of pronouns.

Oh, I know.

I know.

Yeah.

I would love to hear, as I said, I would love to hear more voices on this.

There’s an awkwardness there on all parts, from all parties, when you have this encounter where you’re not sure how they want to be referred to.

Right.

Well, I think, again, that’s a good opportunity for dialogue and conversation.

But it’s hard to ask as well.

Well, from what I’ve read and the few transgender people I know, they appreciate asking if you’re asking in a way where you’re listening to understand.

Right.

And not just to make a comment.

Also online, you can watch the entire video of a documentary called Laverne Cox Presents the T-Word.

It’s with Laverne Cox from Orange is the New Black, and it’s really an excellent introduction to all these kinds of issues.

I highly recommend it.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

Start the conversation on Facebook or Twitter.

More conversation about what we say and why we say it.

Stay tuned.

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

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

Synesthesia is a condition in which one type of stimulation evokes the sensation of another.

Like, for example, somebody might hear a trumpet and always see the color scarlet when they see it.

You’ve heard about this.

There are not that many people who have synesthesia, maybe 3% of the population.

But there’s also a subgroup of that called grapheme synesthesia.

And this is where people associate written symbols like letters or numbers with a particular color.

And there’s been some interesting research on this recently by researchers at NYU and Baylor College of Medicine.

They surveyed more than 6,500 synesthetes, people with that condition, and they found that a striking number of them associate at least 10 letters of the alphabet with the very same colors.

Oh, that’s interesting.

Now, how weird is that?

Why do they do that?

I’m glad you asked.

Because the colors begin with a letter?

No. Good guess. But they found, I’ll give you another clue, they found that all of the people in that group happened to be born in 1967 or later.

And what they finally figured out, their hypothesis is…

Sesame Street.

Close. Their hypothesis has to do with the fact that in 1971, Fisher-Price started producing its magnetic alphabet letters,

You know, that you put on the fridge and the kids rearrange them.

And they found that one participant actually associated 25 letters of the alphabet to the very same colors in that set.

Wow.

Yeah.

So it doesn’t mean that that caused their synesthesia.

Right.

But it may suggest that in some cases that people who have that condition are more influenced by their environment than you might think.

And the reason I wanted to talk with you about it is because I was thinking about whether there

Were anything like that in my past that I associated like a word that I saw when I was

Little in a book or something the one thing I can think of is the numeral five I think five has

Always felt like my number and I think it’s because that was the age where I really started

Getting a sense of myself I felt like five was my number and started school and got more

Responsibility maybe. Yeah, and I was differentiating myself from other people. And so five is just

Far and away my favorite number. Do you have anything like that? A word or a letter? I don’t

Have any kind of association, but this conforms to what we know in the dictionary business, which is

There’s a lot of baggage attached to language that is never recorded in print. One of the examples I

Use when I do public speaking is all the different terms we have for the derriere. We understand as

Native speakers that one word, say, but, is a little more polite than, say, ass, right? We know

That ass is crasser than but. And it’s not something that you’ll ever find recorded in any

Mainstream reference work at all. But we teach this to each other and we learn it from our

Environment. We find also there’s baggage associated with the placement of a word on a page.

A lot of times if you ask people how they re-found a particular passage in a book, you said,

Go find this passage, they’ll say, well, I remembered it was on the right-hand side of

The spread in the upper right-hand corner. And that helped me eliminate all the pages on the

Left side. You’re cutting your workload in half, and then you’re cutting in half again because it’s

In the upper right quadrant. So it’s funny because this plugs so well into the content of the show.

A lot of what we discuss on the show, if we’re going to look at it in a metanarrative way,

Is about the things that we pass from person to person, but never really get chronicles.

They’re not taught in classes necessarily, usually.

And the cultural things that move from person to person, it’s the meme, basically, prior to the Internet meme.

It’s the facts and things and feelings that move along that aren’t just about dates and names.

Yeah, that’s fascinating.

And you really do absorb them.

I mean, you don’t even have a consciousness of being aware.

I mean, I don’t remember that kind of thing.

Yeah, I think it was Terry Pratchett, the science fiction writer who recently passed away, who called it white knowledge.

These are the things that we all know and don’t know how we know.

And so these are related.

So you know that the letter M is purple in your mind, but you don’t know how you know it.

You’ve forgotten how you’re past that tip.

Fascinating.

Cool stuff, right?

Yes.

We know there’s stuff in your mind that you’ve got questions about.

You’re not quite sure how you know it.

Where did you learn it?

What does it mean?

Why do you say it?

This is the place we want to help you sort it out.

877-929-9673.

Send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Talk to us on Twitter under the handle Wayword, W-A-Y-W-O-R-D,

And join the thousands of people on our Facebook group where we have a really lively community of folks just like you.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Chris calling from Vermont.

Hey, Chris, welcome.

What can we help you with?

Well, I’ve been listening to your show for a little while, and I’d ask a question.

And it has to do with something, it was a phrase my grandmother used to say all the time

When my brothers and I were growing up.

And she passed away a long time ago, so there’s no hope of finding out what this phrase is.

But anytime we went to her house and we’d leave, she would always say, I’ll see you in a wet wash.

To this day, my brothers and I will use the expression to each other, just kind of half-joking,

But we really don’t know what it means or where it came from.

Oh, that’s cool.

So I was hoping you might be able to help.

And Chris, when she said it, did she say it in any particular way, like joking or menacing?

No, she was a pretty innocent and sweet old lady.

That’s how I remember her.

So she didn’t seem to be a joking thing, more innocent, just you and a wet wash.

Do you know what a wet wash is?

I don’t.

Okay.

They don’t really have them anymore.

There was a time about 100 years ago, early 1900s,

Where you could send all your laundry out to be washed,

And they would put it in a centrifuge or press out all the water,

And they would give it back to you wet and not actually dry and folded.

And that was a wet wash because it took some of the worst parts of washing laundry out of the house.

And sometimes they would do this big thing where you’d put all of your family’s laundry in one net bag

And it was all washed together and sent back to you that way.

And it must have seemed like such a luxury, such an innovation, you know,

Sort of like washers and dryers in the 1950s or polyester coming along,

You know, where women didn’t have to do so many household chores.

It must have been…

Sure, yeah.

So it took the…

Interesting.

Because if you remember the ringers and all the stuff that you would have had to do without that kind of wash.

Mm—

And this was before big industrial dryers were a thing.

And then you would just take the laundry out and you’d hang it up around the house, you know, in your lines or in the courtyard or alley or what have you.

Okay.

But the question is what she meant by see you in a wet wash.

Did she literally mean see you in the actual machinery?

Or did she mean to see you down at the place where the washing was done?

Because there was a point at which this was a luxury item.

And if you were well-to-do, you had your maid perhaps send the laundry out for a wet wash.

Oh, I was thinking it might be in the sack of wet wash itself.

You know, that she’ll be carried back along with the wet clothes or something.

You know, I’m coming back just like your wet wash comes back.

I don’t know.

Yeah, I don’t know.

See you in the wet wash.

Yeah.

I’ve done a little bit of noodling around here.

I don’t see you in a wet wash as any kind of catchphrase at any point in American history.

If it was, it does not appear in any kind of digital search that I can do.

But if you want to see pictures of a wet wash, there’s a great site called oldandinteresting.com.

And if you go to that, it’s got photos of the Omaha wet wash laundry and some other cool stuff.

Oh, fantastic. I’ll have to do that.

I’ll share this with my brothers. They’ll be interested to know, too.

Yeah, well, Chris, thanks for sharing memories of your grandmother with us.

Not a problem. It was a pleasure.

Thanks, Chris. Bye-bye.

Thank you for helping me out.

Sure.

See you in the wet wash.

Take care.

All right. Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

And find us on Twitter under the handle Wayword, W-A-Y-W-O-R-D.

Remember when we were talking about things that are said to children to comfort them by making them laugh if they fall down in skin and knee?

You might say, oh, it’ll be better before you’re married or watch out.

That’s going to turn into a pig’s foot by morning.

And it just it takes their mind off the injury.

Well, that prompted Nancy Davis to write.

She lives outside of Chicago and she shared this childhood memory.

She said, if I had an injury that drew a small amount of blood, my mother would say, quick, get a spoon.

She said it was very distracting.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hey, Martha and Grant.

This is Nathan calling from Portland, Oregon.

Hi, Nathan.

I’ve been listening via podcast.

And the question I have for you today is about the word podcasting.

As podcasts have become more and more popular,

And I actually have friends now that listen to podcasts,

I hear them using the word podcasting, but when they say it, it’s evident that they’re talking about listening to podcasts.

But as I understand the word in the way I use it, podcasting is when you are producing a show and creating a podcast.

So I’ve noticed a bit of a change there, and I was wondering what your thoughts were on that.

What I’m hearing here conforms to what I’ve experienced as well, where there’s a transitive usage where you podcast a show or you podcast an episode means that you downloaded it so you could listen to it.

And the intransitive usage I podcasted today meant that you recorded an episode or recorded a show.

Does that sound right?

Yeah, I guess that does.

Yeah. And, you know, early on, I remember when podcasting was brand new, when David Weiner was doing his stuff and Adam Curry was involved and all these people working on the behind-the-scenes technical specifications for this stuff, the same conversation came up.

And at the time, the main device that everyone was excited about was the iPod, that’s the podcasting name.

And Apple used to get really upset about people using Pod in a variety of different contexts.

Well, they’ve since abandoned this, and with the mess that iTunes is, the term is kind of launched.

You do podcasting on Android, you do podcasting on Windows, you do podcasting on everything else.

But we were using for a while podcatching, C-A-T-C-H-I-N-G, podcatching as the name for what you do when you download the episodes to listen to later.

Do you know that one?

Yeah. Yes, I have heard the word podcatching.

But the problem with it is it sounds too much like casting, right?

There’s not enough differentiation there to keep them separate.

Yeah, it is very similar.

And I know the big podcast host, Leo Laporte, over at the Twit Network, tried to get people to use netcast to get rid of that pod term.

Yeah, in 2006, because he didn’t like Apple’s kind of strong advocacy for their brand.

He didn’t like the way that they were going after the little guys with these legal letters saying you can’t use that term.

When it was pretty clear that pod was already set loose as a way to form new words.

Isn’t this interesting? I feel like we’re talking about ancient history.

But it was 10 years ago.

The early 2000s.

Yeah, it was like 9 or 10 years ago.

And I think maybe that’s why I’m a little bit sensitive to hearing it used as the passive form,

Is because even back, I think, 2006, I started my own podcast.

And so when I hear someone say, oh, I was podcasting today, I get excited.

I’m like, oh, well, what kind of mic do you use?

What’s your show about?

And then I hear, oh, no, I was just listening to NPR.

Okay.

Yeah, you were wanting to talk shop.

And this is the way that the verb to podcast is going.

And the listeners, fortunately, outnumber the broadcasters at this point.

And so I think the broadcasters, the people recording the podcast,

Should just kind of sigh a little bit and move on and just accept that this new verb,

This new meaning of the verb is the way it’s going to catch on.

It’s a podcast to show the transitive form is going to be the one that will prevail.

It’s pretty clear.

Well, I appreciate you pointing out the difference in the transitive and the intransitive.

Yeah, it’s a hard one to see every time, and it’s not 100% consistent, but that’s mostly the difference between the two.

Nathan, thanks so much for giving us a call today about this, all right?

Well, thanks for your input.

Take care now.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

And you can find our podcast anywhere you can find any podcast.

Grant, our alphabet has 26 letters, right?

But every time I try to recite it, I only come up with 25.

I can’t remember why.

That’s terrible.

I’m going to take that home to my son.

I knew it. I knew it. I can’t remember why.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Barbara Lukin in Gillette, Wyoming.

Hi, Barbara. How are you doing?

Good, and yourself?

Excellent. Thank you.

What’s going on, Barbara?

I was calling to see if you might be able to tell me something about a saying that my great-aunt used to use.

She used to say if us children, well, several of us would maybe be in a problem or not listening well,

She’d get upset sometimes, and she’d say, crime in Italy.

And I guess I always wondered, you know, what does that mean?

And is, you know, we say, well, is it because a crime in Italy is so rare,

Or is it because it’s something so horrible then, if it is rare,

And, you know, that that was something that we were doing that was that extreme and that bad,

And I never did ask anyone.

So I kept thinking, oh, this would be a good chance to maybe see someone else heard such a saying or something real close.

They might be able to tell me something.

Why not crime in Indonesia or crime in India or crime in Iran or some other country beginning with an eye, right?

Yes, yes, you’re both raising very good questions because it actually comes from crime in Netly, which has nothing to do with crime in Italy.

And that itself derives from criminy, which is sort of a way of not saying Christ.

It’s an exclamation.

And you don’t hear it so much in the south, but in the north and certainly in the west,

You would hear criminy or criminitely.

See, maybe that was it, and we thought for sure it was Italy, not just Italy.

Yeah, well, it sounds that way, doesn’t it?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But writers from Faulkner to Ray Bradbury have used crime in Italy.

Yeah, you’ll find it often spelled that way and said that way by people who don’t realize that there’s this long series of euphemisms that traces it back to saying Jesus Christ.

Yeah, that is strange then, yeah.

Yeah, I wouldn’t have thought so with my great aunt being, you know, the way she would curse in.

That’s maybe like saying shut the front door.

Right.

Or something. You’ll get away with it that way and not sound really bad.

Yeah, I hadn’t heard it anywhere else.

Yeah.

Except from her.

We all learn it from each other.

And because it’s so distanced from the kind of swearing that it originated from,

There’s no judgment made about anybody who uses it now.

Anybody who goes to church could say it and not be called out from the pulpit.

Thanks, Barbara, for calling us about this, all right?

Yes, thanks a bunch.

Okay, take care. Bye-bye.

You too. Bye.

877-929-9673.

Here’s another baseball term that I wish would be adopted into everyday speech.

It’s pebble hunter.

Have you ever heard this?

Pebble hunter or pebble picker?

No.

This is a defensive player, usually an infielder,

Who picks up a real or imaginary pebble and blames his error on that.

And in the old days, they used to sometimes carry pebbles in their pockets

So they could hold up a pebble and say, this is why I missed the ball.

I think that’s great, Diane.

It’s hard to be on the spot like that, thousands of people watching.

Sure it is, but I could just see somebody in the office who’s always blaming everybody else

Or the machinery, the Xerox machine, whatever.

We know these types.

Yeah, yeah, he’s a pebble picker, a pebble hunter.

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

Things have come to a pretty path.

That’s all for today’s broadcast. But don’t wait till next week to chat with us.

Find us on Facebook, Twitter, iTunes, or SoundCloud.

Check out our website, too, at waywordradio.org, where you’ll find a dictionary, a newsletter, mobile apps, and a discussion forum.

And you can listen to hundreds of past episodes for free.

You can also leave us a message anytime, day or night, at 877-929-9673.

Share your family’s stories about language.

Or ask us to resolve language disputes at work, home, or in school.

You can also email us.

That address is words@waywordradio.org.

Our senior producer is Stefanie Levine.

The show is directed and edited this week by Tim Felten.

We have production help from James Ramsey and Tamar Wittenberg.

A Way with Words is independently produced and distributed by Wayword, Inc., a nonprofit supported by listeners and organizations who believe in lifelong learning and better human communication.

The show’s coming to you from the Recording Arts Center at Studio West in San Diego, California.

Thanks for listening. I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett. Bye-bye.

So long.

I like tomato, potato, potato, tomato, tomato.

Let’s call the whole thing off.

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

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