Pickle Seeder (episode #1420)

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.

You’ve probably played that game, Would You Rather, right?

Where you say something like, would you rather never have internet access again or never be able to take an airplane again?

Wow, yes.

That’s a tough one, right?

It is a tough one.

And you learn a lot about people with these.

Yeah, I think I know which one you’d choose, though, in that one.

I’d rather never take an airplane again.

You wouldn’t want to lose your internet access.

But, you know, I had to think about it.

Would I not fly to some place?

But yeah.

And so it’s a way of figuring out what’s important to you.

And I was thinking, well, maybe we could play linguistic, would you rather?

-huh.

Yeah.

Lay it on me.

Okay.

Would you prefer that everyone talk in a language that uses only verbs or only adjectives?

Wow.

I think adjectives.

I think adjectives.

Adjectives?

Me too.

But why?

Well, there was an episode of a show shot in the mountains between Pakistan and India.

And there was a local guy whose English wasn’t very good.

And he was the guide for these, you know, English-speaking British folk.

I don’t remember the show.

Okay.

But his English basically consisted of a string of noun and adjectives.

He, like, didn’t have the verbs and didn’t have, like, the conjugations there.

And he would just simply put them together in long streams of mostly nouns and occasional adjectives.

And it worked.

It really was effective communication.

I think you could do that with adjectives more efficiently than you could with verbs.

Isn’t that interesting?

Plus, there are a lot more choices.

For me, I would choose the adjectives, which is weird to me because I’ve always been taught that verbs are really, really important in your writing.

Sure, yeah.

That you really need to choose strong, specific verbs to liven up your writing.

But when I think about which one I would only use, I think I would have to go with adjectives.

And this is going to sound silly, but I mean, well, the first Portuguese word I ever learned was gostoso, which just sounds so sexy.

What is that?

Gostoso.

What is it?

Something boring, right?

It means delicious.

I’m not going to tell you how I learned that.

But anyway, I prefer adjectives.

You made a new friend that day.

Let’s just leave it at that.

Let’s put it that way.

So, yeah, I feel adjectives were kind of in agreement here.

Isn’t that interesting?

There’s possibilities.

Yeah, and lots of different flavors and nuance. Forget nouns, right?

Yeah, I love this linguistic would you rather, and if you would love to play the linguistic would you rather with us,

Why don’t you propose one to us, and we’ll see if we can put that on the air for you.

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

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi there, how are you doing today?

I’m good, how are you?

Good. My name is Jane Smith, and it is so fictitious sounding, but trust me, it’s real, and I’m real.

Well, Jane, we’re glad to talk to you. Where are you calling from?

I’m calling from Elk Park, North Carolina, way up in the mountains.

We’re just not on the edge of Tennessee and North Carolina in the upper portion.

But we have grown up with many what I think are funny sayings over the years,

But one I just had to share with you is when I was a young girl, my great uncle,

He always had this phrase that when he was referring to a small child or a child that was misbehaving,

And he was telling somebody about it later, he would say,

Now, youngins, I’m telling you, that child was cutting a head shine.

And it’s like, as a young girl, I’m thinking, what in the world would a head shine look like?

So here I’m still trying to, even as an adult, to figure out in my mind visually what cutting a head shine would look like.

So maybe you can help me.

So what are you imagining, that all the children are becoming bald from their antics?

Well, you know, that was my first thought, too.

Are they standing on their heads, spinning around like some demonic thing, you know, or something?

That’s the only thing I could come up with.

So what the thing would be is, okay, is any of the listeners able to put some kind of action, visual picture to this saying?

That would be very interesting.

Oh, my.

That is wonderful.

Well, now I have a question for you, Jane.

Did he ever use head in any other kind of way?

Not that I remember.

Okay.

The reason I ask that is because in the Smoky Mountains, the term head is sometimes used as an adjective to mean like the most outstanding of its kind, the best.

Oh, okay.

And I’m thinking that the word shine has been used since at least the 1830s to mean like a trick or a caper or a prank.

And so you might talk about somebody cutting a shine or cutting shines.

That’s true.

That’s true.

I had not thought about that.

That’s exactly true.

Okay.

All right.

So I’m thinking that maybe cutting a head shine is cutting just the shine to end all shines.

Like the finale.

Yeah, exactly.

With the fireworks and the Bollywood ending.

That is funny.

Do you know cut a Dido or to pull a Dido?

I’ve never heard that one, though.

It means the same thing.

You talk about a child cutting Didos or pulling a Dido.

Okay, they’re just connected.

Maybe that was the city-fied version of it.

No, it’s British and country, but okay.

But it’s all funny, and I do enjoy your show.

Oh, well, Jane, we enjoy hearing from you.

I’ve always said I always melt at the sound of an East Tennessee, West Carolina accent.

My dad was from Kannapolis.

Actually, he was born at the foot of Sugarloaf Mountain there in a log cabin.

So you sound like home.

Absolutely.

We can fix you up.

You’ve got my number.

All right.

I’m going to hike in the Smokies this summer, so I may just call you.

Do call me.

I’m telling you, we could have so much fun.

I’ve got a list of more things I could tell you.

The state will be on fire, you two together.

Oh, Jane and I are going to be cutting a head shine.

We will cut a head shine, a dual head shine.

Jane, you’re a treat.

Thanks for calling us.

Really appreciate it.

Thank you so much for having me.

All right.

Bye-bye.

See you later.

Bye-bye.

Yeah, I see you.

You’re packing your bags already, aren’t you?

I am.

I am.

She just sounds like…

You’re going to go up in the woods, pick blackberries in August, poke in the spring.

We might drink some splo juice or some panther sweat.

On the porch, right?

Looking down in the holler.

I get it.

Oh, those are my daddy’s people.

Call us. We’d love to hear from you. 877-929-9673 or send that email to words@waywordradio.org.

And you know what? We’ve got a great set of discussions going on on Facebook.

I mentioned on an earlier show that some Texas friends of mine use the expression,

I’ve slept since then, if you ask them a question and they don’t remember the answer.

The idea meaning that, you know, it’s been more than 24 hours.

Why should I be expected to remember?

Right.

And we heard from Summer Backett, who’s also from Texas,

And she says that the expression in her family is, I’ve blinked since then.

Oh.

And indeed, I Googled it, and a lot of people say, I’ve blinked since then.

Oh, the short-term memory is a lot shorter than overnight.

So I think that one’s going to become more and more useful as I get older.

I’ve blinked since then.

What do they say out your way?

Let us know.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Felipe from Tegucigalpa, Honduras.

Wow.

Welcome.

What are you doing there?

I’m actually working with a Christian mission here.

Oh, that’s awesome.

That’s amazing.

Thanks.

Well, I’m originally from Indiana.

Okay.

And growing up, I heard my grandpa always use this phrase over and over again when people

Would ask him how he was doing or how his tractor was running, how his car was running.

He’d always say, running like a pickle seeder.

And I have since used that phrase over and over again until someone finally questioned.

Me, what is a pickle seeder and how does it run?

And I didn’t have an answer.

Oops.

Any guesses?

Well, I figured that a pickle has really small seeds. And so if a machine could sort the seeds of a pickle, perhaps it was running very well. But I don’t really know.

Every time he used the phrase, it meant that everything was running perfectly. I think this one goes back to the jokes about machines that don’t exist. Because why do you need to seed a pickle? Why do you need to take the seeds out of a pickle at all? You can’t do anything with them, right? They won’t sprout.

This is true. And there’s another whole joke in the farming business where you get the newbie, the rube, who comes in from the city and wants to work on the land for a while. You give them a bag of seeds and tell them that are pickle seeds, and just wait a little bit and the pickles will come up. Of course, there’s no such thing as pickle seeds. You can’t plant pickles, right? And the rube doesn’t know that.

So I think what you’ve got here is a multilayered joke where it’s running fast as a pickle seeder because there’s no such thing. So it runs as perfect as your imagination will allow.

Very good. All right. Well, thank you very much. I like the phrase, though.

Our pleasure. I wonder what the equivalent is in Spanish. Have you run into that?

I have not run into that in Spanish yet, no.

Dude, you’ve got to keep your ears open for us. Send us some cool stuff that you learned in Honduras, all right?

I will do, will do. All right, thanks for calling.

Okay. I really appreciate it. Thanks for the favor.

Bye-bye. Ciao. Ciao.

Purring like a kitten, that’s another one, right? There’s a bunch of those. But most of them aren’t as jocular as that one.

There’s a lot of the discussion about pickle cedar online is people asking Felipe’s question. What’s a pickle cedar?

Yeah, okay. All right. I just love the idea of the farm where he’s going giggling at all the city folk, I know what a pickle cedar is.

That’s good, right? Absolutely. It’s great.

877-929-9673. Sometimes the posts on our Facebook group really crack me up. There was one the other day that went, does anyone else get frustrated when people pronounce the second P in apoptosis? Sigh.

And everyone else is like, what does that mean? That’s like cell death, isn’t it? You knew that to begin with?

It used to come up in my…

No. Oh, no, you didn’t. Nope, seriously. Even before, yes.

What? It used to come up all the time. All the time. All the time in my word hunting because it’s often defined by the writer because it’s related to cancer research, where you need cells to kill themselves when their DNA is bad. So they talk about forced apoptosis.

Well, yeah, I was going to read this whole definition that I had to look up. There’s a reason there’s two of us. It’s like two parents and a family. It’s the overlap between the two roles that really does the job, right?

Our kid is kind of funny looking. But, you know, the thing is, when I looked it up, and since you’ve already given the definition, it’s also known as programmed cell death.

Programmed cell death, there we go. And the punchline is that in the American Heritage Dictionary, it gives both pronunciations. It’s spelled A-P-O-P-T-O-S-I-S. But the P-T-O is related to tomaine.

Isn’t tomaine poisoning? Yeah, from Greek for fall, I believe.

Oh, interesting. Yeah, so you can pronounce the P or not, but it just, it makes me laugh. Because he said it in such a way that people usually list the word that you’ve probably heard of before, but now he’s got this word that people are like, what?

Yes. Wait, what circles are you traveling in, doctor?

Yeah, so no, it doesn’t bother me when people pronounce it that way.

877-929-9673. Email words@waywordradio.org. What we talk about when we talk about language is family, work, and community. Stick around for more.

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

And I’m Grant Barrett. And in the studio is John Chaneski, our quiz guy.

Hi, John. Hi, Grant. Hi, Martha.

Oh, me darn. John. What’s up, bud? How you doing?

I’m doing great. I’m going to tell you guys a true story.

Okay. One time I was having dinner with some friends, my friends Blossom and Jeff. Now, Blossom, who’s Chinese, she said, you know, in Chinese culture, it’s common when you name a child to give them a name related to your occupation.

To which Jeff replied, oh, you mean like two botanists who named their daughter Blossom? And immediately she dropped her face to the table. She had never realized.

Are you serious? Yeah. She’s even going around telling people about how she realized her parents are both botanists, and so they named her Blossom.

Yeah. Beat Stamen or Pistol or Cotyledon. Yeah, not that easy. By a long shot.

Well, it’s a lovely name. I love it, actually. That’s inspired me to come up with this quiz. I’m going to introduce you to some friends of mine. I’ll tell you what their parents did, and you guess their names.

Oh. Quiz based in a real-life story. How about this?

All right. The best ones. That’s the best ones. Those really are.

All right. Yeah. Here we go. Here’s the first one. I’d like you to meet my friend. His mom is a recording engineer.

Mike. Oh, good. Very good. Try saying, like, oh, you must be Mike.

Okay. All the people at the party will say, wow, they must have paranormal powers. I’d like you to meet my friend. His dad is a probate lawyer.

Oh, Bill, it’s nice to meet you. Oh, Will. Oh, Will. He’s going to ask about a legislator in a minute. Luckily, he didn’t ruin anything with that one. But yes, his name is Will.

Will, okay, good. I’d like you to meet my friend. His dad is a barber.

Hi, Harry. That’s not bad. That’s good. That’s not what I was going for.

Oh, really? His dad is a clumsy barber. Oh, Nick, nice to meet you.

Very good, yeah. Okay. I’d like you to meet my friend. His dad was a barista.

I’ve never met a frappe before. Hi, Starbuck. I don’t know. You still have it. Let’s see.

Oh, what do you know, Joe? Very good, yes. Oh, right. My friend’s name is Joe. Some of these, by the way, are phonetic. Okay?

Okay. Don’t forget that. I’d like you to meet my friend. His dad was a miner.

Cole? Yeah, that’s what I’m looking for. Yeah, I see. Let’s do some women. I’d like to meet my girlfriend. Her mom is an astronomer.

Stella. Stella. Very good, Martha. Finally, I’d like to meet my girlfriend. Her dad is a meteorologist.

Windy. Breezy. Everyone knows it’s Windy. Windy Breezy. There’s actually a few for this one, but neither of those are on the top 100. But the first one I have is.

Rainbow, Iris. Meteor. Oh. Summer. How about summer?

Summer’s good. That’s not bad. April? I was gonna. I was gonna. I was gonna take.

Sunny. April shower. Or rain. Or gale. Gale. Gale.

The name that’s in the top 100 is Haley. Oh. Haley. Spelled how?

Oh. H-A-L-E-Y. I think. Okay. I think. I know many nice Haley’s, many fine Haley’s. Those are all my friends.

Thank you for having me over. What a party. Yeah, right? A lot of good conversation there. We’ll talk to you next week.

Talk to you next week, guys. I’ll bring some more friends next time. This is a show about words and language and how we use them.

Give us a call, 877-929-9673. Email us at words@waywordradio.org. And find us on Twitter under the handle Wayword, W-A-Y-W-O-R-D.

Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hi, my name is Alexandra, and I’m from Los Angeles, California.

Hi, Alexandra. Welcome to the show. What’s on your mind today?

Well, sometimes you put out a call for folks who know of unique words in the industry in which they work. And I’m an actress here in Los Angeles, and I have a couple fun sort of phrases that we use that I thought would be of interest to you and to your listeners.

Okay, sure. Well, the first one is Alan Smithy. Have you ever heard of that?

Oh, Alan. Alan Smithy. Yes. Your old friend? I don’t know Alan. Tell us about him.

Alan Smithy is a pseudonym on a lot of films when directors feel like their film has been taken away from them and recut.

And they don’t like what the end product is and they don’t want to have their own name on it.

So the pseudonym Alan Smithy goes up on it.

It was a term that came into being in 1968 when Richard Widmark fired a director.

He was a star back then, and he fired a director, hired another one.

They finished the film, and neither director wanted to take credit.

Because they thought that Richard Widmark had basically done all the directing and things.

So the Directors Guild came to an agreement that they would put the pseudonym Alan Smithy.

First they thought Alan Smith, and then they thought that was too common, and there were already Al Smith in the Directors Guild, in the industry.

So Alan Smithy is the name that was used up until 2000 when directors didn’t like their films.

It’s not an easy pseudonym to get.

You have to go before a board in the Directors Guild, and you have to prove that your film was wrested away from you,

Not that you just were a terrible director and you don’t like the end product.

And you also have to keep the reason that you’ve disavowed the film a secret.

Oh, interesting. Interesting.

This kind of reminds me of when I was writing for Glossy New York magazines a few years ago.

And every once in a while, my fellow freelancers and I would get so upset with an editing job

That we would threaten to yank our bylines.

And I almost had a piece published under the name Dot Matrix.

And can you do that just whenever you want?

You could just choose your name because you can’t do that with the Directors Guild.

Good point. Good point.

Yeah, you can choose your name, but I think as soon as I threatened to do that,

They backed down a little bit and left some stuff in that I wanted in.

Well, they no longer use that pseudonym.

If a director is unhappy with the film and can show that it wasn’t because he was a bad director,

That it was wrested away from him by the studio,

Then the director can come to another name.

Because what happened was that in 1999, a film came out called an Alan Smithy film,

Burn Hollywood Burn.

Yeah, this was this terrible thing with Eric Idle, right?

Yes, it was a terrible film.

And ironically, the director didn’t want his name on it.

So it was going to be a film called an Alan Smithy film, Burn Hollywood Burn.

And then the director was going to be Alan Smithy.

Arthur Hiller hated the final edit so much.

And so the director’s guilt, and I guess there was a lot of publicity about it.

So then the term Alan Smithy became too well-known.

People knew that that meant it was a pseudonym.

That’s probably where I learned it.

So now there’s not just one pseudonym.

There can be, I guess, a bunch of different pseudonyms.

It doesn’t happen often, but it does happen.

And even writers, actually, Martha, occasionally use variations on Alan Smithy.

Oh, really? Yeah, like what’s the female Alan Smithy?

Alana.

Alana, okay.

Very good.

That’s great. And you said you had another one?

We also had something called the Eastwood Rule.

And, yes, it’s because of Clint Eastwood.

In 1976, he was the star of the film The Outlaw, Josie Wales, and he got the producer to fire the director, Philip Kaufman, who’s a very respected director now.

But the producer fired Philip Kaufman, and Clint Eastwood took over the directing.

And the Directors Guild of America decided that they could not have powerful producers and actors firing directors and then putting themselves as directors.

And so it became a rule that you couldn’t do that.

You couldn’t fire a director and then put yourself in the director’s place.

So that was known as the Eastwood rule.

Complicated.

Hollywood looks easy from the outside.

You guys do a great job of making it look simple for the rest of us.

Well, it’s not boring.

Let me put it that way.

There we go.

There, that’s a perspective I like.

Well, thank you so much for your call and all this amazing information.

I know you’ve got tons of this.

Maybe we’ll do like a 10-hour show one time and you can be our guest.

Yeah, I’d love to talk to you about it sometime.

It would be fun.

Take care now.

Well, thanks so much for calling.

Thank you so much.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

We’d love to hear the slang and jargon that fills your ears every day.

Call us, 877-929-9673, or send it to us in email.

The address is words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Harry Rosetto from Falls Church, Virginia.

Hi, Harry.

How you doing?

Well, I’d like to talk about the changes in meaning.

When I was in school, and it was sort of an SAT word,

The word fulsome seemed to have a negative connotation,

Basically excessive or foul or too much.

But lately I’ve been seeing it both in print and on the media

As having a positive connotation as being perfect.

And that kind of switch, you know, seems odd to me.

Yeah, yeah, you’re right.

Folsom is a real mess of a word.

It originally meant copious or abundant.

The full in there is what that was about.

And then it sort of became a term that meant excessive, too much, almost like eating too much to the point of nausea or disgust.

And so in the 17th and 18th centuries, for sure, it was a disparaging term.

And Noah Webster used it that way.

But you’re right.

It sort of underwent some amelioration in the last couple of decades,

But it’s so confusing now.

I’m with you.

Yeah, it seems that I think more often than not now,

It means perfect or thorough or something to that effect.

Well, it’s so confusing that way that a lot of authorities

Just recommend not using it at all,

Unless it’s in a context that’s unambiguous.

So if we talk about fulsome praise, half of the listeners will think of it as meaning a lot of great praise.

And half the listeners will think of it as meaning so much praise that it’s obviously you’re insincere.

Exactly.

Yeah, I remember reading years ago that Ronald Reagan said something about having gotten a very fulsome apology from someone.

I mean, what does that mean?

He made it sound like it was positive, but it doesn’t sound so much that way.

It reminds me of enormity in that way, in that whether you have these two, not perfectly contradictory meanings,

But like not sufficiently synonymous that you just really should stop using the word,

Because it’s not quite skunked, but getting there.

Yeah. So, Harry, how do you use it?

I have never used it, to be honest with you, because, you know, it’s not the kind of word that’s in my vocabulary.

But, you know, it really shows how language is dynamic, and dynamic in sort of odd ways.

You’re exactly right. That’s a great example.

Language is just a wonderful thing.

I agree. Couldn’t do without it.

No, we couldn’t.

Well, thank you very much for using my question.

Yeah, take care now.

Harry, you’re one of us.

Oh, it’s one of my favorite shows.

Oh, yay. All right. Call us again sometime, bud.

Thanks, Harry.

Take care.

All right. Bye-bye.

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

I’ve mentioned before that I’m taking a wilderness basics course where I’m learning to go out into the wilderness and hike at altitude.

And I came across during a lecture last night by a physician who specializes in treating altitude sickness.

He was talking about the term insensible losses.

Do you know what that is?

Insensible losses.

I have some guesses, but go ahead and tell me.

Okay, it’s a medical term that refers to the loss of something from your body, like insensible water loss.

One example of it is the vapor that comes out of your mouth that you see when it’s really cold, but we don’t see it otherwise.

But it’s an insensible loss.

And I was thinking, my gosh, what a beautiful phrase.

I got all distracted from the lecture he was giving because I was thinking, insensible losses.

Boy, if somebody hasn’t written a poetry collection titled Insensible Losses, they should.

And send it to me.

So this is stuff that is happening to your body that you don’t notice?

Right, right.

Sensible meaning you can’t sense it.

You can’t sense it.

Oh, really interesting.

And moisture loss is a big one.

Oh, yeah.

You’ve got to hydrate.

Because our internal regulators for that are really inaccurate.

We’re not thirsty automatically when our body needs moisture.

Right, right.

Or hungry, right, when you need to, you know.

Your body doesn’t have good signals for some things.

Right, right.

So you have to be aware of those insensible losses.

And I was thinking, what a metaphor.

You know, the things in your life that seep out and you don’t realize until it really affects you cumulatively.

I just thought it was a gorgeous phrase.

It is good.

Yeah, I can think of when coworkers leave at a job and you didn’t realize how much you depended on them to brighten your day.

Oh, great.

Something like that.

Another insensible loss.

Beautiful.

But I’m a little worried about you because you were so distracted.

Does this mean that you’re going to get lost in the wilderness and we’re going to have to go find you with helicopters?

Probably not.

They’re really good at teaching you to hike with a compass, which you have to do because there are no trails out there in the desert where we live or where we’re hiking.

And, of course, you always go with other people.

Right.

Smart.

So not to worry.

Give us a call, 877-929-9673.

Send us your question on Twitter to the handle WayWord, W-A-Y-W-O-R-D, or throw it on our Facebook group where lots of other listeners can join you in finding answers.

Hi.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha and Grant.

This is Mark from York, Pennsylvania.

Hi, Mark.

Welcome.

How are you doing?

Good, good.

I’ve noticed a phrase in recent times that catches me off guard.

I hear it when someone is only speaking, never in written form.

A person would say, you know, when replying to someone.

So I have two examples for you.

The first one is, I believe the sky is always blue.

You know, the sky is definitely always red.

Or, that guy is from San Diego.

You know, I think he’s really from St. Louis.

Is there a history behind this type of speech?

Yeah, you know, I might argue a little bit with your examples, at least in terms of what I hear, because they don’t really fit the pattern.

Yeah, no, just to be clear, is really common in all the varieties of English that I’ve seen come up in Australian, UK, South African, Canadian, and so forth.

And usually what’s happening there is that you are agreeing with one part of their sentence, but disagreeing with another part.

And so a better example might be, I think that restaurant reservation for 11 p.m. will be fine.

And then the other person says, yeah, no, we should move it to another night.

So they’re agreeing with the fact that they heard me.

So they’re just saying, I heard you.

I acknowledge you.

That’s what the yeah is doing.

And then the no is disagreeing with the content of what I said.

And so not always, but usually that’s what’s happening here with the yeah, no.

In your examples, I feel like kind of the reverse was happening.

The no was a strong no, and the yeah wasn’t even acknowledging anything at all.

Well, Mark, where did you run across this?

Is this the kind of thing that you have in your speech or hear it from colleagues or friends?

Where did you get this?

It sounds like I get it from colleagues.

I hear colleagues say it occasionally.

I try not to say it as much as I can, and I’ve just heard it mainly in speech, just from other podcasts.

I don’t hear it on this podcast, but I just hear it in different places.

Mark, does that make sense to you that it’s okay to say it?

That does make sense.

It definitely softens things a little bit instead of a hard yeah or a hard no.

So, yeah, I think I would agree with it.

But, you know, Mark, I think you raised a really good point when you said that you only hear it orally.

I mean, I’ve never seen it written.

Only time I’ve seen it written is when it’s a transcript of oral speech.

Yeah, I think that’s a really good point.

Very interesting.

Cool.

Thank you so much for your call.

All right.

Thank you very much.

Take care now.

Okie doke.

Bye, Mark.

Bye-bye.

Well, we’d love to hear your questions about language, so call us, 877-929-9673.

Send them an email to words@waywordradio.org.

And you can find us on Twitter with the handle Wayword.

I saw a great production the other day at Moxie Theater here in San Diego called Trouble in Mind.

This is by Alice Childress, who was born in 1912, and she was the first African-American woman to have her work professionally produced on the New York stage.

And there was a phrase in there that just made me sit straight up in my chair.

Someone says to another person, where are you going?

And the person responds, down to Turner’s Corner.

And the first person says, you ain’t lost nothing down there.

Grant, that sent a chill down my spine because I have not heard the expression, you ain’t lost nothing down there or you ain’t lost nothing over there in decades.

But I don’t quite get it.

What does it mean?

You don’t have a reason to go there?

It means that’s a place you don’t want to go.

Yeah.

I mean, it’s really derisive.

I can remember Aunt Mazo saying, why would I go there?

I ain’t lost nothing over there.

I have not heard it in decades.

And it reminded me of how, you know, you smell something and all of a sudden you’re back in kindergarten in the lunchroom or whatever.

I mean, it was just one of these really limbic, just bypassing the cerebral part of your brain and going right to the limbic system.

It was amazing.

Where does language connect with your limbic system?

Let us know.

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

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.

Every once in a while we get a call that just makes our email box explode and our phone rings off the hook.

All lines on red.

Yes, yes.

They’re just calls that somehow connect with listeners or they want to help a fellow listener.

Who was it this time?

This was, remember the call from Mitch in Florida?

Oh, he’s the video editor.

Yes, he is a video editor, and he was looking for a word that sounded expensive to try to designate this thing that he did with video.

And you understand the technical stuff better than I do.

Yeah, so it was the opposite of ingest.

When you bring video into a system, you are ingesting it into the system.

But he wanted a word that wasn’t about just dumping the video, but it was maybe extracting the video so that you get the final product or you get a product that you can share.

Right, because it’s not exactly deleting, right?

It’s some kind of more specialized.

And it’s not always exporting either.

Right.

It’s not necessarily, yeah.

Right.

Now, why in the world this struck a chord with listeners?

I have no idea.

What are we looking at here?

Hundreds?

Maybe even more than a thousand?

Yeah.

Yes.

And I have just culled a few of them.

Okay.

In fact, cull, John Foster suggested the word cull, which I kind of like.

So he culls the video when he removes.

Okay.

Yeah.

And we also, you mentioned extract.

We heard that.

We heard evict, extirpate, expunge, expede.

And then there was disassemble, disentangle, disassimilate, deassimilate, deintegrate, devid.

And somebody said if you’re working on Windows machines, you could say defenestrate, which I kind of like.

But they’re probably working on Macs, wouldn’t you guess?

A lot of people called with suggestions from the medical field.

Jane was watching Grey’s Anatomy that very night and thought of us because they were talking about resecting a tumor, which is sort of a difficult and risky procedure.

And she thought that maybe resecting the video would work.

And we heard from Stephen Holloway, who’s an RN, and he suggested lavage, which also sounds sort of like a $200 word.

You squirt saline solution on the site of surgery or something?

Yeah.

We also got a couple of suggestions involving the word deaccession.

Andrew from the Erie County Public Library in Pennsylvania said, in libraries, museums, and the archiving world, we use deaccession when we’re removing something from an established collection.

Yeah, that’s what they use in museums as well.

When you take something out of your collections to sell or to give to another museum, or just because it’s a fake and it’s not what you thought it was.

You deaccession it?

You deaccession it.

Oh, de-accession it.

Yeah, you de-accession it.

You don’t de-access it.

Okay.

So that’s the verb.

And somebody else referred to that same process more informally as media flushing.

Media flushing.

Outstanding.

Yeah.

Well, Mitch, you’ve got a lot to work with here.

All these terms for the variety of ways you might take video out of your system so that it sounds billable to a client.

That’s the key, isn’t it?

And I think the other thing to take away from this is that our listeners are so helpful.

I know, right?

Right.

This is the right attitude.

We have a community.

This is how it works.

It takes a village.

To make a language.

A worldwide podcast radio village.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

You can find us at Wayword on Twitter.

We’ve got a great Facebook group that’s super lively.

Join us.

Talk to us.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, how are you doing?

My name is Matt Brunker.

I’m from Grapevine, Texas.

Oh, welcome to the show, Matt.

How are you doing?

Hi, Matt.

Doing all right.

How are you all doing?

All right.

What can we help you with?

I wrote in a couple weeks back to share a story about a word that my wife and I, when we started dating, had made up to fulfill a certain conversational need.

We would find that oftentimes when we’re telling one another about our past or anything that was bad, or even on days when someone just had a headache or something, one of us would say, well, I’m sorry.

And we never knew really what to respond with.

We both felt that trying to respond with, well, that’s okay, when sometimes it wasn’t okay, or it’s not your fault, and clearly it wasn’t the other person’s fault, never quite sufficed.

So we tried to think of a word that sounded sympathetic.

And so one day I suggested we say the word Salma, S-A-L-M-A.

And ever since then, normally I come home from, spend a hectic work day or whatnot, come home, and I tell her about it, and she says, Salma, baby.

And it’s kind of filled that little void for us for not knowing exactly what to say, but trying to show some sort of sympathy and or empathy to the other person.

Matt, how did you come up with Salma?

I guess mostly completely, only because it just sounded like a soft sound.

It sounded soothing or something that you would say to a crying child or something.

It sounded lyrical almost.

Nice.

Nice.

So that word just came to you, huh?

I mean, it’s sort of like a verbal one-armed hug or something.

Right, exactly.

Maybe.

Exactly.

It kind of has echoes of Saul good or Saul right, kind of like that.

Salma.

So instead of saying you’re sorry when somebody’s had a rough day or a rough time, you just say Salma instead.

Yeah, that’s correct.

Or is it the response to sorry?

Like, you’ve had a rough day, I’m saying, oh, I’m sorry, and then you say Salma.

Is that what’s happening?

Yes.

That’s where it originated.

Sometimes it jumps in earlier now because that’s clearly the progression of the conversation.

It perturbed us that there was never a good way to say, you know, without saying, I thank you for your sympathy.

It sounded too, you know, too starched.

And so we look for something a little bit more conversational to put in there.

But nowadays, sometimes we just jump the gun and we know that that’s where the conversation is going.

The bomb becomes out sooner.

Yeah, Matt, what I like about it is it sounds like it’s the language of connection.

It sounds like shorthand for lovers or people who are on the same team.

It’s like you don’t have to say anything more than just that.

Right.

Like we’re in this together, even though maybe it’s not fixable.

Exactly.

And it does come in handy sometimes when there are quarrels.

Oh, really?

Your own secret.

It’s not so much secret anymore if I’m sharing it with you, but having your own homegrown terminology to put in there.

-huh.

You know.

Well, that’s really sweet.

I think so, too.

Well, we’re glad you shared that with us.

I bet we’re going to hear a lot more of that from our listeners.

That’d be great.

Thanks, Matt.

Appreciate it.

Thank you.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

I do like that shorthand communication.

It reminds me of my favorite shorthand communication, which is in volleyball, when you are going to take the ball, you say, I go.

Because it’s so perfect.

It’s exactly what needs to be said.

It’s no more than what needs to be said.

And it tells everyone else on the court exactly what’s going to happen.

I am going to get this ball.

I go.

I go.

Sometimes it’s me go.

I go.

I go.

Yeah.

I go.

I go.

Huh.

I have never heard that.

Really?

Yeah.

And I wonder if some of it is the distinctiveness of that sound.

You’re not going to confuse it with any other term.

Yeah, you’re not going to say you get it or your turn or I can’t reach it.

If you can’t get it, you say nothing.

Yeah, that’s interesting.

And I guess volleyball players have a relationship.

I mean, I love the whole notion that he was raising of the kind of language that develops when you’re on planet us.

Right.

Just between two people.

That’s all that’s required is whatever they understand between them, right?

Exactly.

Yeah.

Well, it’s a good one, Matt.

Thanks for sharing that.

And we’d love to hear all of your stories about language, so call us, 877-929-9673, or send them an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Yes, hello, Martha and Grant.

Yes.

This is Joanne from Montreal.

Hey, Joanne, welcome to the show.

How are you doing?

I’m doing fine.

It’s a bit cold, but I’m doing fine.

Okay.

Well, that’s Montreal for you, right?

Minus 10 is a bit cold, right?

Yeah.

So my question is related to that, actually.

I was wondering if there was a particular word for the dirty, frozen, solid pack of brown snow that gets jammed in the wheel wells of a car?

You want only one?

I got a whole bunch, and none of them are polite.

Oh, yeah.

Right.

The impolite ones are more fun.

Yeah, yeah.

None that you can share?

Well, no, not really.

Well, the only one I came up with was crud.

Yeah, really common one.

Good one, yeah.

And then car crud has a nice alliteration to it.

I like that.

Yeah, but it’s general.

I mean, if I say I have to take care of the car crud, is it in the inside of the car or the outside?

Right.

Is it the pizza boxes in the back seat or is it the ice in the wheel wells?

Exactly.

That’s right.

Yeah.

Yeah, I have car crud here in San Diego, I’m afraid.

Both kinds.

The internal kind.

Not the same kind.

Yeah.

But what about, so you’re in a bilingual city.

Are there French words for this?

Well, actually, this comes from a friend of mine who was looking for the French version and asked all her Anglo friends, you know, is there a word in English?

They didn’t come up with anything, so they invented sort of a portmanteau word, you know, with gadou, which is slush, and mutt, which is a lump, so it comes out as a gamut.

Oh.

Maybe.

Nice.

It might work.

But, you know, I think she’s going to submit it to some lexicographers or something.

But in English, we didn’t come up with anything except car crud.

I like that.

Running the gamut is going to each of the wheel wells around the car, right?

You make a loop, right?

Well, actually, it gets so frozen solid that you can’t kick it.

Oh, and then what happens?

And then you have to drive a couple of blocks before your wheels turn properly.

Wow.

Yeah, it gets that cold.

I forgot about that.

Well, as Grant said, there are lots and lots of terms for this, I guess, because it’s something that people deal with all the time in wintry places.

How about fenderbergs?

Fenderbergs is good.

Yeah, I’ve seen carnicles.

I’ve seen ice babies and slush flaps and snow goblins and snow boogers.

Yeah, and tire turds and snow turds and tire snot.

All the rude ones are in there.

Yeah, but those are soft.

You have to forget all the soft words.

Why?

You want hard ones.

Yeah, we need the hard ones.

How about chunkers?

Yeah, I’ve seen clunkers.

Oh, chunkers is good.

Yeah, or clunkers, just the sound that they make when they fall.

So grice wouldn’t work.

It’s too soft.

Yeah, another portmanteau is snert, but that is also a term that’s used for other things.

Somebody recommends Braxis to us.

B-R-A-X-I-S.

Braxis.

I don’t know where they got that from.

Snard.

Did we already do snard?

Slush puppies.

Yeah, well, slush, as I said, slush is really soft.

Too soft, yeah.

You sort of step through it and they leave a whole bunch of blah things on your driveway.

Two more, snow lactites and nabicles.

Snow lactites.

Snow lactites is good.

But it’s hard to say.

It’s too long, right?

Yeah.

Did we say shark tooth?

Ooh, good one.

I like that.

I kind of like that because of the shape and just because it’s sort of something you don’t want to run into.

Yeah.

But something tells me we are going to hear a lot of other suggestions.

Yeah, this is something that comes up all the time.

And nobody’s really satisfied with the existing terms because they think most of the fun is in the coining.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think so.

Yeah.

So, Joanne, we’re going to throw this out.

You’ve got a bunch from us, but we’re going to throw this out and see what else we get this time, all right?

Okay, and I’ll share that with my Francophone friends and see if that doesn’t inspire them.

Okay, great.

Okay, very good.

Let us know how it turns out.

All right.

Okay, thanks a lot.

Take care now.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

I want to know what people call the Fenderbergs where they live.

Do you have a term for it, something your neighbors use that you’ve come up with, something else?

What do you call the snow and ice buildup in the wheel wells of your automobile?

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

A few episodes back, we talked about Billy Badass and Ricky Rescue.

Yes.

These are, like, overly enthusiastic people who want to be involved in something.

Yeah, Billy Badass is the military guy who, like, knows all this about guns,

And he really wants to fight and go to war and prove that he’s a tough guy.

And Ricky Rescue is the guy who has fantasies about saving people

When they’re lost in the wilderness and coming home the hero

And parades in their honor.

Right.

Well, that discussion inspired Jared Ashton to call with one of his terms,

And it’s Mickey Mourneux.

Mickey Mourneux.

What’s that?

These are people who come into his salvage shop and act like they know everything

And he doesn’t, and they know more about his business than he does,

And it’s Mickey more than you.

Mickey more than you.

Mickey more than you.

I like it.

Oh, I know.

That tied very well.

Yes, don’t we?

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi.

This is Mark Stichon from Wisconsin.

Hey, Mark.

How are you doing?

Welcome to the show.

I’m doing great.

Thank you for having me on.

Our pleasure.

What would you like to talk with us about?

Well, my mom was a good cook, and she was from German heritage.

And one of the things, the saying she would have when we’re eating at the table,

We ate at 5 o’clock and meat and potato type of dinners.

And if there was food left, when everyone has eaten and had in seconds,

Small amount of mainly the main course, the meat,

And she would say, somebody has to finish that up so the sun shines tomorrow.

And I was just wondering about that saying.

That’s outstanding.

So sweet.

Wait, you said German heritage.

Did she speak German, perhaps?

Some German.

Her parents spoke more German.

And actually, her grandparents are the ones that came from Germany.

You know what? I got something for you, Mark.

I bet she got it from her German heritage.

Because this expression, to tell a child to eat their food so the sun will shine tomorrow,

Exists in German.

There’s a variety of versions of it.

For example, Kinder ist auf, dann gibt es morgen gutes Wetter.

Which basically means children go ahead and eat, then there’ll be good weather tomorrow.

And some of them actually kind of have a little bit of a double pun.

Like there’s one that’s, ist dein in Teller leer, dann gibt es morgen gutes Wetter.

And basically what it’s saying is, I mean, this is not a literal translation.

This is kind of a full-spirited translation.

Eat all your food.

There will be good eating again tomorrow.

Basically saying there’s no reason to hold back.

We’ll have plenty more when the morning comes.

And so you’ll find a wide variety of these in German going back at least 150 years.

So that’s probably where she got it.

And she just translated it into English.

I bet, yes.

There was other sayings, but I can’t think of them off the bat.

But that one I particularly remember she would say it a lot.

And she didn’t like the leftovers.

And there was always plenty more the next day.

Nice.

And so you found it persuasive, Mark?

Did it work?

Yeah.

Yes.

It was, okay, I’ll have the rest of that beef roast or whatever.

And finish that all up.

So you helped the sun come out.

Good for you.

Yes.

Gosh, that’s great.

That’s a lot more colorful than what I was told.

I was just told, you want to be a member of the Clean Plate Club.

And I was thinking, whoa, what is this club?

I’m not a member of.

Right.

Does it need to be a secret handshake?

I want the decoder ring.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Who are the other people in the clean plate club?

And when are they coming over to help me finish my lima beans?

Yeah.

Well, if you didn’t finish everything, sometimes someone would say, you don’t have a happy plate.

Oh, right.

You don’t have a happy plate?

You don’t have a happy plate.

Oh, my.

Yeah.

Oh, my.

Well, Mark, we appreciate your continuing to finish those meals because the sun has continued

To come out all these years.

So we’re personally grateful to you.

Well, you’re very welcome.

Thank you for having me on.

I love the program.

Oh, yay.

Take care.

Thanks, Mark.

Thanks, Mark.

Bye-bye.

All right.

Bye now.

One of the variations on this, the Wetter kind of sounds like another word in German, which

Can mean back.

And so that’s kind of where you get this double meaning.

It’s not just about…

Oh, like Weter?

Yeah.

Yes, exactly.

It’s not just about the weather.

It’s about everything will come back.

Good things will come back.

The food will come back.

Sweet.

Yeah.

That’s nice.

Cool, right?

Yes.

Yes.

So it’s funny to see this exist across languages, and here it is.

I forgot to ask if he told his children this.

Yeah, maybe he did.

Generations of it.

We love these family expressions, and we’d love to hear yours.

So call us, 877-929-9673, or send them an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Things have come to a pretty path.

That’s all for today’s broadcast.

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Our senior producer is Stefanie Levine. The show is directed and edited this week by Tim Felten.

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The show is 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.

Tomato, tomato, tomato.

Let’s call the whole thing off.

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