Pie in the Sky

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.

A couple of weeks ago, we talked about breaking up. Specifically, how do you decide when it’s time to break up with a book? Maybe you’ve given it 10 pages or 20 or 50. Grant, you said you gave them 100, right? I tried. But you decide that it’s just not working for you. What do you do?

Well, we heard from a lot of you who said you were really relieved to hear that conversation because you felt less guilty about deciding to move on. But my favorite email came from John Benbow. John lives in San Diego, and he said he has a term for this when he breaks up with a book. He calls it post-publication editing. Isn’t that great? That’s great. And he says that he considers post-publication editing necessary in the absence of good pre-publication editing. And he adds, many a book should have been an essay. Many an essay should have been a paragraph. Many a paragraph should have been a sentence. Isn’t that great? John, I’m with you, brother.

Me too. And you should see that sentence. Beautiful semicolons throughout. It was great. But, you know, Grant, it occurs to me that we should talk about the happier side of the romance with books. And that is specifically playing matchmaker, trying to fix somebody up with a book that we really love. And we’ll do that a little bit later in the show, but I wonder if other folks would like to share theirs.

Oh, I’d love to hear from anyone who has a book that they always recommend to everybody. What is your go-to book when you’re trying to get somebody to read? You want them to read your favorite book. What is it? Novel, a short story. How do you convince them? What is the book? Send us an email, words@waywordradio.org, or give us a call on the telephone, 877-929-9673.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi there.

This is Gloria Braddock. I’m calling from Indianapolis.

Hiya, Gloria.

How are you?

Hi, Gloria.

Well, I have a question.

My sisters and I go on a, it’s called a sister connection every fall, and we were trying to take a group picture.

My sister was standing there saying, I’ll stand out, I’ll take your cameras, and I’ll take the picture.

And a young man came bounding over to us, and he saw what our need was, and he said, hey, I’ll take the picture.

You can all be in the picture.

And I hope he’s listening, because he did a great job.

The picture turned out awesome.

So he left, and one of my sisters said, thanks for being Johnny on the spot.

And my younger sister looked at her and whispered, you just called him a port-a-potty.

And I’m going, excuse me?

I thought Johnny on the spot meant like he was there, he saw me, he was ready.

Then the more I thought about it, it was like, wow, maybe she’s right.

It could be both. It makes sense.

What came first?

Gloria, how many sisters do you have?

How many were there?

I have four sisters.

We have a sister-in-law who goes with us and a stepsister.

So we have a group.

So in the seven of you, how many of you agreed that Johnny and the Spot was a porta potty or a portable toilet?

Two.

Two?

There were two that thought, yeah, I think that’s what it is.

And the other three of us, we got in.

Then we went to a gift shop and were in there kind of whispering and talking, no, no.

I don’t know who was over eavesdropping on our conversation, but it had to be interesting.

Oh, this is really interesting.

I would call this a lexical collision because you’ve got two different meanings of a term and they’re both valid.

And so this is just a place where they run into each other and the context isn’t necessarily completely clear.

Here’s what happened to you.

This is how you get to that position where there’s some confusion.

There’s an expression called Johnny on the Spot that dates to the 1870s.

And it does refer to a person who shows up at just the right time to help out. Johnny on the Spot.

And then there’s a term John, meaning toilet or outhouse, which dates to the early 1900s. It’s a little less common in the South, a little more common in the North and the West.

And then there’s another term, Johnny House, which means outhouse, which is far more common in the South and not so common in the North. So you’ve got these three different terms.

And then you’ve got the people in the business of making portable toilets. And apparently they are devious punsters because what they like to do, and this happens all over the country, they rifle through the English language, finding words that they can turn into toilet puns.

And so this Johnny on the Spot pun has been used so many times for businesses that make, sell, rent, whatever, portable toilets. There are tons of them called Johnny on the Spot. There might even be a chain, for all I know.

And so they took this term that already existed in English and applied it to their business. And so this is how you get this confusion. I was guessing that was what it was.

It’s really interesting, though, because a lot of people might think now that because they’ve only known that one particular brand of portable toilet, that that’s what they’re called. Like in my lexicon, in my idiolect, it’s always a porta potty, which is also a brand name.

Yeah, that’s what I call him. That’s also a brand name. He was a young man, so he may have been thinking that, too. I’m older, and I think I’d heard it before as a young child.

So Johnny on the spot, meaning the person who shows up at just the right moment to help out, is not that common anymore, but it does exist. You will find it in literature and more thoughtful writing. It’s not the kind of thing that you’re going to see in Facebook posts usually.

But there wasn’t one John who did that, one guy named John. No, it’s Johnny’s like the generic term for any guy or any dude, right? Very interesting, yes.

So now you’ve got to go back to your sisters and explain all this. I know. I told them that I was going to ask you guys, and they just thought it was hilarious.

Because at the time, we were all, hey, hey, no, no, surely he didn’t think that. He couldn’t have thought that. You know, we’re never too old for potty jokes.

Right. Clearly. Thank you so much for calling. Hey, Gloria, thanks for calling. Really appreciate it. Hey, this has been fun. Thanks.

All right, take care. Not my answer. Bye-bye. All right, bye-bye.

You know, there’s a couple other terms for outhouses or toilets that I, the Dictionary of American Regional English, my favorite dictionary of all time, has an entry for Mrs. Jones. And apparently Miss Janet, Mother Jones, Mrs. Murphy, and Neighbor Jones are also all terms for an outhouse or a toilet.

Is that right? Yeah. That’s interesting. And it’s part of the euphemistic tradition of not referring directly to this place where we defecate and urinate.

Well, right. I mean, I remember if you’re talking about indoor plumbing, you can say, I’m going to go see Miss White. Yes, yes. Visit Miss White. That’s a little more obvious to me.

Yeah. English language is amazing. But you still have questions, right? Well, send them an email to words@waywordradio.org or call us on the telephone 877-929-9673.

Do you remember in 2008 when we talked about suicides? Yeah, where you go down the line at the fountain and you put all those different… Tab, Coke, Diet Coke, Mountain Dew, and just put them all in there.

Yeah, put them all in there. Well, in most of the country, they’re called suicides. But in pockets here and there, they call them something else.

And we heard from a lot of people, but there were two terms that I just came across that I’ve never heard before. Some people call them graveyards. Graveyards. Have you heard that?

And other people call them swamp water. Well, gee, I wonder why. The sodas that you make at the fountain with a little bit of everything, right?

Yeah, when you’re in elementary school, right? Are you doing now? Yeah, elementary school. What do you call that when you go down the taps in the restaurant?

And make yourself a mixed drink with all the different sweet sodas?

Or the bar.

Or the bar.

I think that’s called a visit to the bathroom.

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

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, my name is Dan.

I’m from Boyd, Wisconsin.

I was calling.

I heard a debate a while ago.

I’m real big into listening to them. I’m up in Minnesota.

And there was a gentleman on there that stated that he didn’t like his pie-in-the-sky approach to things.

And, you know, in context, you kind of figure out kind of what he means by it.

But I was kind of wondering what the whole pie-in-the-sky thing really meant, where it came from, etc., etc.

So the idea was pie in the sky was something that was unreasonable or couldn’t possibly be achieved?

That’s kind of the way, in context, he was using it.

Yeah, his pie in the sky approach to, I believe it was economics.

Yeah, well, actually, I’m really glad you asked about this, Dan, because pie in the sky has a fantastic history.

It goes back to a song that was a parody back in the early part of the 20th century.

It was popularized by a labor organizer named Joe Hill.

And Dan, have you ever heard this song, In the Sweet By and By?

Absolutely.

Oh, yeah? You’re familiar with it then?

Yes, I am. Yeah, I actually have heard that.

Now, do I know all the words to it? No.

No.

I am familiar with the song.

No, but yeah, yeah, I mean, it’s a beautiful song.

Johnny Cash recorded it and Willie Nelson.

And some of the words you may remember are In the Sweet By and By, We Shall Meet on That Beautiful Shore.

And it’s a song about how, yeah, life may be tough here on Earth, but once we get to heaven, it’s all going to be great, right?

Right.

Yeah. Well, what this labor organizer did, he was unhappy with preachers who would go around and say this kind of thing, but ignore the fact that there was a need for social justice and alleviating human suffering right here on Earth, right here and now.

And so he wrote a parody of that beautiful hymn in The Sweet By and By, and he called it The Preacher and the Slave.

And the line that’s key here is that he says, you will eat by and by in that glorious land above the sky, work and pray, live on hay, you’ll get pie in the sky when you die.

Oh, OK.

So this was something that he would he would go around to logging camps and mining camps and organized migrant workers singing this song that made fun of people who were pushing, you know, happiness out into the afterlife.

Oh, okay.

All right.

So is this from Heaven Was a Fallacy in a way?

Exactly.

Okay.

So his parody song was sung from coast to coast by labor organizers and people in unions, right?

Yeah.

Oh, that’s crazy.

And it made a lot of fun of this beautiful song.

And, you know, with the rhyme and everything, pie in the sky, and it’s such a great image, and it really caught on.

And now we use it, but we don’t really associate it with this song.

No.

That’s cool.

So in context, when he was using pie in the sky when it comes to economics, he said it was just a false hope.

Exactly.

Exactly.

Okay.

Yeah.

All right.

All right.

Well, that’ll do it.

I appreciate it.

Take care now.

Thank you.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

877-929-9673.

words@waywordradio.org.

Here’s something you don’t see every day.

You.

We’ve just launched a brand new section of the website where we’re featuring pictures of listeners just like you.

We had been asking folks what their favorite words were, and we decided that the best way to share them would be make a word wall of faces.

Want to be a part of it?

Want to get your fizz, your mug, your chops, and your special word on our website?

Then write your favorite word on a blank piece of paper, take a picture of yourself holding it up close to your face, and send it to us.

You can see the faces and words we’ve already received at waywordradio.org.

Just click on the Word Wall link at the top of every page.

More word lustitude as A Way with Words continues.

Support for A Way with Words comes from the Ken Blanchard Companies, whose purpose is to make a leadership difference among executives, managers, and individuals in organizations everywhere.

More about Ken Blanchard’s leadership training programs at KenBlanchard.com slash leadership.

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

And I’m Martha Barnette. And joining us now is our quiz guy, John Chaneski. Hi, John.

Hi, Martha. Hi, Grant.

What’s up, buddy?

I have just started something brand new and wonderfully interesting for myself.

I want to share it with you guys.

I am working at the National Museum of Mathematics opening up in New York City.

I don’t think I knew there was one.

It’s going to open up very soon, and I’m part of the team that’s sort of connecting the museum to the community.

We’re doing programs, and it’s going to be a lot of fun.

There’s all these interesting little exhibits that illustrate different mathematical concepts, and it’s going to be great.

Oh, cool.

In that spirit, I’ve created a puzzle that has to do with number words.

You know, we can’t do math puzzles here.

We can talk about the words that represent numbers.

Okay.

For example, what number word can be anagrammed to a word that means pull something with a rope?

Pull something with a rope.

Yes.

Number word in English?

Toe.

Yes.

Toe and toe.

T-W-O-T.

Oh, very good.

That’s right.

The answer is to can be anagrammed to or transposed to toe.

Very good.

So that’s how this is going to work.

You ready?

Okay, yeah.

If you want to write out the numbers in front of you, that might help.

Okay.

Okay.

Here’s the first one.

Counting upwards, what is the first number that becomes an uncapitalized singular English word when reversed?

Oh.

Ten?

Ten is correct.

It is net.

Backwards.

Good.

Now, we’re talking about the numbers between one and 100 here mostly.

We’re not going to go far afield if that’s okay.

Between one and 100, what’s the longest number whose only vowel is E?

E.

Let’s narrow it down.

Between 1 and 20.

Okay.

Oh, so there can be more than one in there.

Yeah, it could be, but 17 is exactly correct, Martha.

Good work.

This is kind of tricky.

Ready?

Okay.

What number becomes 9 when you remove its first letter?

I get it.

You get it?

6 is correct.

We take up the S.

It’s the Roman numeral 9.

Oh.

Very good.

I told you it was tricky.

Oh, hello.

All right, let’s get away from Roman numerals and try something else.

What number is odd unless you remove its first letter?

Between one and ten.

Seven.

Seven is right.

Very good.

Take out the S, you got even, right?

I feel like I should have learned some of these when I was in grade school, but I didn’t.

Well, I have kids that are in grade school.

That’s how I learned them.

Okay.

How about this?

What is the first number word counting up that becomes a homophone of itself if you remove one vowel?

Oh, you remove a vowel, so it’s not going to be two.

Oh, it’s not?

Oh, it’s four.

It is four.

Because you would remove a consonant to make two sound like to be T-W-O-B-T-O, but in four you remove the U to make F-O-U-R become F-O-R.

Oh, oh, oh, oh.

Exactly right.

Well done.

What is the only number you can multiply by ten just by adding one letter to the end of it?

The answer to this is between one and ten.

Eight.

Eight is correct.

What letter do you add?

Y.

A Y.

It becomes 80.

80.

Very good.

Can’t do that with the five.

You get fivey.

With the four, you get foury.

It doesn’t work.

What two numbers are the only two between one and 100 that begin and end with the same consonant?

19.

19 is one?

And numpteen.

Numpteen.

By the way, 11D12 will not be an answer on any one of these.

40 Lim.

97.

97 is correct.

Very good.

Oh, it’s confusing to think about numbers as words and not as numbers.

It’s hard.

You’re not supposed to do math on the radio.

I don’t have that lobe.

I didn’t bring that lobe to work today.

I did not say there would be math.

But if you come to the Museum of Mathematics, I can promise you that there will be math.

What’s the highest number between 1 and 100 that is a word, even if you remove its first and last letters?

This one’s between 60 and 100.

60 and 100.

Oh, 70.

Oh, look at that.

Okay, very good.

You got a little vent in there.

Yeah.

Sitting right in there, between there.

These last two are related, okay?

And they’re kind of classic, so here we go.

Okay.

What number has all of its letters in alphabetical order?

Ooh.

Ooh.

This one’s between 20 and 60.

Oh, between 20 and 60.

Yeah.

I’ll give you a hint.

It begins with F.

Not four.

And it goes on from there.

40?

40 is correct.

Very good.

Oh, nice.

Okay.

Very good.

And finally, what number has all of its letters in reverse alphabetical order?

It’s between one and ten.

Six?

No.

No.

Reverse alphabetical order.

It would be the number one.

Number one is correct.

Oh, really?

And the first shall be last.

That is our last question.

Thank you very much for the quiz.

You’re always welcome.

Thank you, guys.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

words@waywordradio.org.

And the Twitter handle is Wayword.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Kathy, and I’m calling from Greensboro, North Carolina.

Hello, Kathy, from Greensboro.

Hi, Kathy. Welcome to the show.

Thank you, thank you.

I was calling, I was telling my parents about your great show,

And it started a wonderful conversation about some of the things that my grandmother used to say.

She’s from Savannah, Georgia.

And so she used some wonderful phrases to describe all of the enormous bugs that they had down there.

And we were just wondering what was unique to her and what was unique to Savannah or just what was unique to places with enormous bugs.

Bugs? What kind of bugs?

Specifically mosquitoes and palmetto bugs.

Oh, yeah, those are real, those big palmetto bugs.

Yeah, I lived in Florida for a while. I know all about those.

Yeah, so she used to call the really big mosquitoes, she would call them gallon nippers.

Gallon nippers.

Yes, because they would take a gallon.

Yeah, they’d nip you and take a gallon of your blood, yep.

And then she might also say about the mosquitoes that they were so big that they could stand flat-footed and kiss a turkey.

Oh, I know.

Which is my favorite.

That’s nice.

I know a less polite version of that.

Oh, goodness.

And then she also used to call the palmetto bugs, she called them Chatham County eagles.

Oh, nice.

Chatham County?

Is that Savannah’s county?

Yes, it is.

Chatham County eagles.

Oh, there’s a long tradition.

And I would say that it comes from the American tall tale tradition.

There is a long tradition of making up stories about the size of the bugs where you’re from.

How big was that bug?

There’s a ton of these.

Like in Arkansas, they would say that a mosquito was so big that you could trap it and train it to drill for oil.

Oh, that’s good.

In Louisiana, the mosquitoes are so big they show up on radar.

Oh, that’s nice.

And in Wisconsin, in the summertime, they’re so big that they have to file flight plans.

There’s a ton of these.

That’s great.

And in Florida, the mosquitoes are so big they have leashes.

But to answer your original question, the one about the turkey, that a mosquito is so big that it can stand flat-footed and kiss a turkey,

That one’s got some mileage on it, so folks know that one.

The gallon nipper, I’ve heard versions of that as well.

Here we go.

In East Texas, you’re just not safe.

The big mosquitoes push the little ones right through their window screens.

Oh, that’s wonderful.

I had no idea there are so many different ways.

Yeah, but Kathy, this is part of the American tall-tailed tradition,

Like the riverboat guys and the liars competitions,

Where the folks would just sit on the porch and everybody keeping a straight face,

But each fellow taking a turn at a lie and just see if he could top the other guy.

And you know that you win because everyone just leaves.

There’s no laughter.

There’s no applause.

But you told the best thing.

Everyone just gets up.

And this might be a tall tale,

But my father always said that my grandmother used to say

That you should never let the truth stand in the way of a good story.

Right on.

Or a good idiom.

I know some politicians who believe that.

That’s right.

Kathy, this is wonderful.

I don’t know if I helped you at all, but I had some fun.

No, no, that was very interesting.

Thank you so much.

Our pleasure.

Thanks for listening.

Thanks, Kathy.

Bye-bye.

Take care now.

Bye-bye.

If you’ve got local stories or catchphrases or jokes about how big or bad your insects are,

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

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Yeah, hi, Grant and Martha.

My name is Nathaniel, and I’m calling from the great state of Vermont.

Hi, Nathaniel.

Hiya.

Great state indeed.

What can we do for you?

Well, I’ve got a question I’m hoping you can give me a little info about.

It’s really a grammar question.

It’s regarding the use of they or their in place of his or hers in a sentence.

So, for example, someone might say, everyone should do their own work on this project.

Mm—

And this kind of sounds to me to be pretty acceptable.

I mean, that’s what I would put in most sentences.

It’s what I’d say.

It’s what I’d usually write.

And I’m 23 now, but for most of my life, I’ve kind of been told that that’s, you know, to shy away from that or that it’s not really correct necessarily, that I should use his or hers or his or hers in that place.

And it kind of bugged me, honestly, because it just doesn’t seem to flow in my mind, I think.

I guess my question is, am I committing some sort of, you know, atrocity, grammar atrocity here when I do this?

Or is it acceptable? Is it, you know, is it changing as, you know?

Who is telling you that it’s wrong?

I’d heard it from teachers in high school just that, you know, to use he or she in place of that.

And then I’ve heard, like, some people say, oh, well, you know, to use him as, even if you don’t know the gender, is, that’s sexist.

You know, use hers instead or that kind of thing.

And that’s kind of bugged me as well because that’s not solving any problems as far as I’m concerned.

Yeah, it’s not solving any problems.

I would agree with the sexist part, though.

I think that if you’re going to default to him and people have said that, you know, it doesn’t matter because it’s generic.

Him is generic and he is generic.

If it’s generic, then let’s make it she and her.

Right.

If it doesn’t matter, let’s do that.

But, Nathaniel, I think you’re right.

I think you’re absolutely right.

And I think Grant and I are on the same page here.

In fact, for hundreds of years, people were using they and them as what we call an epicene pronoun, which is a pronoun without gender.

And for the singular, right?

I mean, all the way back to Chaucer’s time.

And then along in the 18th century, some grammarians decided that, no, no, no, we’ve got to do it this other way.

We’ve got to make it singular so that it agrees.

But that’s only been for a couple hundred years.

There’s a much longer history of using they and them.

Yeah, and the argument of these grammarians in the 1800s was basically that it was illogical.

They misapplied logic that they borrowed from other languages like Latin and said, well, English should behave like Latin, which is just patently ridiculous.

And you will find no professional grammarian or linguist who disagrees with the opinion that you have and that we have.

None.

Very good.

And I say that just knowing I’m going to get somebody’s email going, well, actually.

I know.

I was taught.

I was taught to use me and him.

Just to kind of anticipate an argument.

Some people go, well, them and their are plural.

What about you?

Y-O-U.

Y-O-U is both singular and plural.

And them and their follow a very similar pattern.

Well, that’s why we have y’all.

And there are going to be times when you do want to use him or her or his.

Yes.

You know, I mean, every person should decide for himself what to do before a hysterectomy.

You know, that’s not going to work.

Well, we know the gender. We know that it’s always you, she, or her.

For me, it’s always been a matter of just what sounds right, you know, in a lot of ways.

Because I think using him and her sometimes, if you’re forcing it in there, it doesn’t necessarily seem to want to go there.

It would sound awkward.

We should say that it is really difficult to shake these particular old traditions and to remove this idea that his slash her is the ideal way to use these pronouns.

Tell me about it. I had to get over it.

It is going to take probably another generation or two before people come around to it.

Really? You think that wrong?

Really. I really do.

Because there is no safety in pushing this point of view in a group of people who don’t agree with you.

And so people who write textbooks and people who teach grade schoolers, they’re going to go for the very conservative, very safe route, which is to follow the very loud people who actually happen to be wrong.

But I think the safe route is to use they and them.

They and them are totally fine.

And I just know that we’re going to get email and calls about this.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Bring them on.

We welcome them.

Yeah, I would have called 20 years ago to say that.

Yeah, what changed your mind?

I think just running into the same kinds of problems, Nathaniel, that you’re running into.

And then getting permission from more and more, quote-unquote, authorities in the field.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Cool.

And I’ve heard people side with me on this in a lot of ways.

I don’t want to say that everybody’s always been on the opposite side.

But I have had people on the opposite side, especially back in high school and being in teachers and marking me off for doing it.

And I’m like, no.

Nathaniel, if somebody does that to you, send them to us.

Very good. I will do that.

Or him or her.

Thanks for calling, Nathaniel.

Thank you so much. I love your show.

Take care.

Thanks. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

If you’ve got a question about language, something that’s just been bugging you, send it to us, words@waywordradio.org.

Or call us 877-929-9673.

You know what I like best about our new word wall?

What’s that?

We can finally put faces to names.

I know. Isn’t it great?

We’ve got thousands and thousands of tweets and emails and other messages every year, and we have almost no idea what anybody looks like, what our listeners look like, right?

Yeah, we’ve grown accustomed to their typeface.

But now we see their real face.

That’s right.

We’re getting the picture, so to speak.

You can go to our website at waywordradio.org and click on the word wall link.

You’ll see lots of gorgeous visages.

We want your face, too, and your favorite word.

Write your favorite word on a blank piece of paper.

Hold it up next to your face.

Take a photograph and send it to us.

We’ll put it up with all the other ones.

It’ll be beautiful.

You can see Martha and me there, too, on the website at waywordradio.org.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha. Hi, Grant. This is Christine from Sebastian, Florida.

How can we help you?

Well, on shows, you guys have talked about family sayings that people’s families say, and we have a little quirky one in my family, and I thought it’d be kind of fun to share it with you and maybe see if you guys know where it might have come from, because nobody in my family seems to know where it first originated, so I don’t know if it’s something we made up.

Okay, let’s hear it.

Well, it’s see you in church if the window’s open.

And how would you use this? When does this come up?

Basically, it’s kind of a goodbye.

So if you were talking and you left without making some plans to see each other again, instead of I’ll see you when I see you, it would be see you in church if the window’s open.

So in my mind, there’s an image of one of the people in church in the pew praying or listening, and the other person just like leisurely walking on by, just like going to the pool hall or whatever.

Exactly.

So there’s a little joke about somebody not being a very good churchgoer, huh?

I like it. It’s funny. It’s automatically funny.

And so everybody says this in your family, that’s just a thing?

Yeah, and I remember it mostly my dad saying it when we were younger, but I don’t remember hearing it outside of our immediate family anywhere.

So nobody knows where it really came from.

And you didn’t hear other people saying, see you in church?

No, not that I can remember.

Because that is a fairly widespread saying, see you in church, with the same kind of undertone and connotations to it that, like, not bloody likely. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.

I’ll see you in church, meaning the bar.

But your version is an expanded version that I like.

I like it a lot.

I actually haven’t seen anywhere else.

So it is possible that your family invented it.

Who’s the cleverest one in your family?

Well, like I said, I think it came from my dad, and he was in the Navy for about 25 years, so we were kind of thinking maybe he heard it somewhere else that we just hadn’t heard it.

Yeah, there’s no telling what those Navy guys will pick up and bring home.

No, the Navy, the military.

Maybe your mom.

Well, yeah, the military is rich with two or three different levels of language, and the lower registers of language, the slang level, has got a ton of stuff in it like this, and usually stuff we can’t say on the air.

But that’s a good one.

See you in church at the windows open.

I love it.

Well, thank you.

Thanks for calling.

Really appreciate it.

All right.

Thanks.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

What do you say when you say goodbye?

Or do you have a language question for us?

We’ll give it our best shot, 877-929-9673.

Or send the full details of your lifelong question about language to words@waywordradio.org.

Grant, I came across a cartoon recently that I think you’ll appreciate.

There’s a drawing of a dog inside a gate, and the gate says, beware of the dog.

And the dog is saying, can I read you my poems?

Ain’t that the truth?

Run the other way.

I thought he was going to say, do you want to come see my comedy show?

Call us with your language questions, 877-929-9673, or send them an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Our book recommendations and more of your questions about language coming up.

Stay tuned.

Support for A Way with Words comes from National University, where flexible online classes let you earn your degree or credential on your schedule.

More at nu.edu.

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.

Earlier in the show, we asked what books you were recommending to other people these days, and I wanted to share the one that I’m recommending to people.

It’s a book for anybody who wants to write better English.

It’s by Constance Hale, and it’s called Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch.

And supposedly this book is about verbs.

The subtitle is Let Verbs Power Your Writing, and verbs, after all, are the heartbeat of a sentence, right?

But this book is really not just about verbs.

It’s a bang-up course about writing well.

It’s really accessible.

It’s really practical.

It’s often funny.

And what she does is she debunks a lot of the language myths that vex us.

She shows you how to smash your bad writing habits.

And she gives you examples of writing so good that you’ll want to smooch whoever wrote it.

That’s her idea.

But, you know, Grant, what I didn’t know before reading this book is that Constance Hale grew up on the island of Oahu speaking pidgin English with her peers and speaking proper English with her East Coast educated parents at home.

And what I love about the book is that she has this appreciation of English and exuberance, really, that we see so often in people who speak more than just English.

So it’s an enjoyable book for improving your writing, no matter how good you are as a writer.

I really recommend it. It’s called Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch by Constance Hale.

I’ve got one book to recommend.

You know, in my house, we read a lot of books to my son.

My wife is an avid reader.

I’m an avid reader.

He is turning into one.

At night, we have the ritual where we read from three to six books to him, kids’ books.

And one book that really struck me recently was a biography of William Carlos Williams, written for kids.

It’s not only a beautiful book.

The art is outstanding.

They’ve done amazing things in presenting his poems with an interesting collage and, like, layers of color.

Gorgeous.

But it tells the story about this man in a way that doesn’t aggrandize him, but it plainly states, here is a man who got good at something and made the most of it.

And I loved that simple message.

The book is called A River of Words.

Oh, nice.

Yeah, and it’s a biography of William Carlos Williams.

Nice. Lots of examples of poetry?

Yes, lots of examples of his poetry in the book.

I should say that one of the reasons this book struck me is that my son has this problem that a lot of beginning writers have, and even older writers.

You have a vision in your head of an idea, and you can’t put it down in words.

It’s somehow cheapened or lessened as it’s transmitted through your body to your hands, right?

Oh, yeah, the great frustration.

And my son immediately picked up on this notion that that was something that this famous poet and pediatrician, this famous poet had gone through, and he had palpable relief.

He was noticeably relieved to find that somebody else had had the same problem that he had.

Oh, wow.

So the book is called A River of Words, and it’s a biography of William Carlos Williams.

We’d love to hear your recommendations, the books that you’re pressing into people’s hands these days.

You can email us at words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Amanda from La Mesa, California.

Amanda.

Hi, Amanda. Welcome to the show.

She who must be loved. That’s what your name means.

I love her already.

How can we help you?

Well, I had a question about a word my mom used to use, charley horse.

And what is a charley horse?

Oh, I take it to Nina Cramp in the calf muscle.

Yeah, almost always, yeah.

Was she prone to these?

No, but I got them a lot when I was a kid, and that’s what she called them.

Oh, and you were probably confused as heck the first time she said it.

Oh, you have a charley horse.

Yes.

It never made much sense to me, so.

You’re saying, I want a pony.

My little Charlie horse.

Not the same.

Did you brush its hair?

Depends on your calves are hairy or not.

So Charlie horse, that’s a tough one.

So you wanted to know where it came from?

Yeah.

He should eat more bananas.

Oh, the potassium helps?

Yeah.

Oh, I didn’t know that.

Yes, it does.

How about that?

I think she wants to know where the word comes from.

Yes.

Oh, yeah.

All that.

Thank you, Dr. Martha.

That’s right.

Well, nobody knows for certain the origin of Charlie horse.

But it shows up first in the 1880s in the language of baseball players.

It just kind of starts popping up in these newspaper reports of players that have got this problem.

They call it the Charlie horse.

There are no good theories on the origin of Charlie horse, but I want to share with you the best bad one.

All right.

And this is that old broken down horses used to be given to night watchmen who would make their rounds in cities and towns in the eastern part of the U.S. And in the U.K.

And both the horses and the watchmen tend to be older and retired and creaky at the joints and not spry at all.

And they might have a limp.

Now, these watchmen were called Charlies.

It was never a very common term.

And so, therefore, their horses that they rode would be literally the Charlie horse.

So, if you have this cramp in your leg or some kind of knot in your muscle, then you might limp in the same way that a Charlie horse would walk.

Okay.

That’s a theory. Like I said, it’s the best bad theory about the origin of Charlie horse.

But we do know that it first pops up in the United States in the 1880s in the language of baseball players.

Okay.

Cool.

Interesting.

Yeah, it’s the best I can do for you.

All right.

Keep eating those bananas, though.

All right, I will.

Thanks for calling, Amanda.

Thank you, Amanda.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

You know, it’s lucky at all that we can never come up with theories for some of these words, right?

Well, that’s a good one. I hadn’t heard that one.

Yeah, it’s not bad. The problems with it, of course, is that Charlie was never a very common term.

And the data that we would need to support the etymology is not really there.

And it’s a little bit of guesswork and hopeful thinking.

Well, interesting that it shows up with baseball players first.

Well, baseball language, we’ve talked about this.

Baseball language and sports writers and sports in general.

It’s a colorful profession.

And the standards of editing for the sports pages tend to be much laxer than for the entire rest of the paper.

Except for the Sunday-style section of the New York Times,

Which is its own weird other tangent of non-news that’s not true.

I never understand that.

Very odd.

877-929-9673.

words@waywordradio.org.

You know how wine drinkers will twirl their glass, hold it up, look at it,

And they’ll be watching those little thick streaks that come down, the colorless streaks.

Oh, I didn’t know. I thought they were looking for lipstick stains.

No, they’re looking for what they call the legs.

These are the things that are due to the high glycerin and sugar content of the wine,

And it’s sort of these clear little things that come down.

And they call them legs.

That’s a cool term.

But I’m never going to call them legs again

Because I came across a great German word for these.

How long is it?

It’s pretty long.

Let’s hear it.

It’s Kirschenfenster.

Oh, that’s nice.

Isn’t that great?

Kirschenfenster.

Church windows.

Yes, that’s exactly it.

Because, you know, they look like the little arched windows,

A row of windows in a church.

Isn’t that great?

Yeah, but you know what that reminds me of?

The legs dripping down.

Remember when we talked about this term for the snot dripping out of the nose of a kid?

Lamb’s legs.

So, yeah, definitely.

Yeah, Kirschenfenster.

I’m a Lake Christian Fenster.

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

Hi there.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi there.

I’m Ken.

Where are you calling from, Ken?

Ruidoso, New Mexico.

So what can we help you with?

We don’t get your show in this part of New Mexico.

And the first I’d heard of it, I was driving back from Dallas after picking my daughter up at a camp a couple of weeks ago.

And I heard your show on, I guess, KERA.

And you were talking about the different words and terms and experiences with baldness.

Oh, yes, I remember that very well.

Yeah, Grant’s experience.

When you have no hair, somebody always has something to say about it, don’t they?

Well, it got me thinking.

I have similar experiences with my height.

Are you very tall or very short?

Well, if it weren’t for short people, I wouldn’t be tall.

I’m 6’8″.

Oh, hello.

Wow.

So you get people saying the same stuff over and over to you.

Yes.

Yeah, I’m trying not to say any of them right now.

But maybe you can tell us about it.

No, no, it’s okay.

Me too.

My tongue is muddy.

Well, very often it’s just a matter of how tall are you.

And sometimes I’ll just tell them.

Sometimes I will say 5’20”, and they look at me.

You can see the hard drive spinning.

Yeah.

Trying to figure out just what that is.

I bet.

I even had one person say, no, you’ve got to be over six feet tall.

What?

Five foot 20.

That’s a good one.

I haven’t heard that.

But you probably get how the weather’s up, how is the weather up there, right?

Yes, I do.

And what do you tell them?

I just say the same as it is where you are.

We all look like ants to you.

They probably say stuff like that.

Yeah, or sometimes, I’m sorry, I couldn’t hear you.

You have to speak up.

Oh, that’s good.

Speak up.

Yeah. Or they’ll say, well, did you play basketball?

Right.

Yeah.

Well, do you play miniature golf?

That’s very good.

That’s good.

What else do you have here?

One time my wife and I were at a movie, and before the show started, a lady two rows back reaches forward, taps me on the shoulder, and says, how tall are you?

And I turned around and said, what are your measurements?

And it completely shut her up.

I figured, you know, it’s an exchange of information.

Trading data.

Yeah, right.

That’s great.

A little anthropology in the movie theater.

Well, but think about it.

It’s no big deal or socially acceptable, I guess, to ask how tall you are.

You’re a tall person.

But does anybody ever go up to a short person and ask them how tall they are?

Peter Dinklage, who was in the Game of Thrones, I know that he’s talked about this in interviews about his height, because he’s a little person.

And he’s like, it always comes up.

So I guess they always get that, too.

Whatever annoyance you have from hearing the same thing over and over, you’ve managed to deal with and come up with some humor.

That’s a great response.

Well, it is what it is, and you may as well have fun with it because you can’t run away from it.

You can’t change human nature, not in bulk.

Or your height.

Watch that term.

Thank you so much, Ken.

And if you’ve got any more of these, we’d love to hear them.

Ken, thanks a lot.

This was lots of fun.

Hey, have a good day.

Take care now. Bye-bye.

Take care. Bye-bye.

It’s clear he said this stuff over and over, but it’s new to us.

And can you imagine being 6’8 and having every single time you meet new people, this has to be talked about?

Yeah, exactly.

But he’s got such a great attitude.

It sounds like he’s having fun with it.

Yeah, yeah.

That’s the only way.

Otherwise, life is miserable if you can’t make fun out of the rough stuff, right?

Yeah, exactly.

877-929-9673 or send your questions about language, grammar, word disputes, whatever to words@waywordradio.org.

I’ve explained many times that in my house we read a lot, right?

One of the things that we like, actually, for my son is a magazine, or a series of magazines.

Oh, really?

There’s three of these magazines, each one for its own age group, Click, Cricket, and Ladybug.

And I’m kind of hesitating about telling people that this magazine is really great, but it really is.

The art is beautiful.

The poetry is beautiful.

The stories are wonderful.

The craft projects are interesting.

They’ve just kind of really done it all well without being too didactic.

You don’t get the sense that they’re trying to jam a lesson or a moral down someone’s throat.

They’re all really interesting.

We not only subscribe to one of these magazines, we also check them out from the library so we can get back issues.

And it works very well because it’s bite-sized.

The attention span of a child, of course, maybe won’t last throughout a whole book.

But for a magazine, when you’ve got a three or four page story, not bad.

And again, the art, beautiful art is so important to a book because the art is in itself sparks conversation.

I love this.

So these are Click, Cricket, and Ladybug, these magazines for kids.

Three different magazines.

Yeah.

Good stuff.

I mean, it’s weird.

Why do I feel guilty about recommending a magazine?

I don’t know.

I used to read Golden Magazines when I was growing up.

Oh, man, that was great.

Anybody who read Highlights Magazine as a kid will get the spirit of these magazines as well.

Okay, cool.

Let us know what you’re reading with your kids.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi there, this is April from Iowa City.

Hey, April, welcome.

Hey there, what’s up?

Well, I was listening to a show that you probably enjoy as well, This American Life.

Oh, yes.

And I heard the narrator of a story, and he was Mexican-American, but obviously a native English speaker.

He said a word that I would have pronounced and have always heard chicanery, but he said it chicanery.

And that got me thinking, was he just being clever?

Was he just playing on words because it sounded a lot like the word Chicano?

You know, Mexican-American?

So that just made me wonder, are those words related in any way?

Because I sure never would have connected them.

Okay, this is good.

We’ve got layers of questions here.

So a Mexican-American said chicanery instead of chicanery.

Yeah.

He did not pronounce it correctly.

It is supposed to be chicanery.

There’s one other variant pronunciation, which is chicanery.

Or chicanery.

With a ch?

Yeah.

Some dictionaries sanction that.

But chicanery is most often the North American pronunciation.

Whether or not he was influenced in his pronunciation by the existence and his knowledge of the word Chicano, I don’t know.

But there’s no etymological or historical connection between the words at all.

None.

It pops up into French, and in the 1400s is the verb chicane, something like that.

And it has to do with willfully causing arguments, or willfully disturbing the peace, or willfully misdirecting people and creating a hard time for them for no good reason.

Yeah, trickery.

Trickery, yeah.

Right.

And that’s how it was used in the context of the story.

Yeah.

It’s held its meaning very firmly, as a matter of fact.

Chicano, I’m not sure of the origins of the word Chicano, but it rises first in the 50s and 60s as part of, what should we call it, the identity movement of Mexican-Americans in the West and the Southwest of the United States.

And it really takes on a strong importance then.

The importance of the word Chicano has faded quite a bit.

For example, you won’t find it being used that often anymore in university Latin studies programs.

I mean, in the neck of the name of the program or the endowed fellowships or that sort of thing.

One interesting thing about there’s a word, there’s a version of this word, April, that you might not know that I really love.

And it’s a name for a thing that you didn’t know had a name.

Do you know when you are, let’s say, driving through a parking lot that’s under construction or a highway that’s under construction and they put these giant concrete barriers in the road and they kind of like detour you maybe onto the side of the road so you can go around the construction equipment, you know, those big concrete barriers?

Those are called chicanes.

That’s so great.

Yeah, because they are literally detouring you and routing you around something.

They are diverging you or diverting you from your original destination.

From the mischief of road construction.

Yeah, exactly.

Cool.

Well, it’s interesting.

I guess I was maybe hoping there was some kind of Latin commonality, but you don’t always get what you want.

No, we don’t.

But still, we’ve got a little bit of French in there and a little bit of this and a little bit of that.

Yeah, interesting stuff.

Thanks for calling, April.

Really appreciate it.

Well, you’re welcome.

Thank you for your help.

Best of luck.

Bye-bye.

All right. Bye-bye.

Grant, we do know the origin of Chicano.

It’s a dialectal variant of Mexicano, which is, you know, Mexican.

Right, the Spanish word for Mexican. Very good.

Now we do know.

Yeah.

First it was just you, and now it’s the two of us and everybody.

Yeah, so call us with your language question, 877-929-9673.

All right, I’m not going to leave the children’s rhymes alone.

Okay.

Every episode, I think I’m going to share a bunch of these.

Maybe not.

Try this one.

369, the goose drank wine.

The monkey chewed tobacco on the streetcar line.

The line broke, the monkey got choked, and they all went to heaven in a little rowboat.

I like that one.

It’s good, right?

It’s got a happy ending.

Yeah, you start shaking your booty to that, right?

That’s exactly what I was doing.

Well, I know that kids today still have rhymes.

I don’t think they’re all about Pokemon.

Send them along.

I’d love to hear them.

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

Things have come to a pretty path.

That’s all for today’s broadcast.

Don’t forget about our word wall.

You can send your face and your favorite word to words@waywordradio.org.

And you can leave us a message anytime at 877-929-9673.

Share your family’s stories, or ask us to resolve language disputes at work, home, or in school.

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Our production staff includes Stefanie Levine, Tim Felten, James Ramsey, and Josette Hurdell.

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 is recorded at Studio West in San Diego, California.

Thanks for listening. I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett. Adios.

Servus.

You like potato and I like potato.

You like tomato and I like tomato.

Potato, potato, tomato, tomato.

Let’s call the whole thing off.

Support for A Way with Words comes from the Ken Blanchard Companies, whose purpose is to make a leadership difference among executives, managers, and individuals in organizations everywhere.

More about Ken Blanchard’s leadership training programs at KenBlanchard.com slash leadership.

And from National University, where flexible online classes let you earn your degree or credential on your schedule.

More at nu.edu.

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