Pig Latin

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

And I’m Martha Barnette.

In English, if you’re at a loss or you’ve stopped making progress and you’re otherwise stymied, you might say you’re spinning your wheels or something like that.

But in French, one way to say that translates as you’ve peddled into the sauerkraut.

Peddled into the sauerkraut.

Yeah, isn’t that gorgeous?

I mean, can you imagine peddling your bicycle into a whole bunch of sauerkraut?

I think that’s so much more evocative.

Definitely in the weeds there.

Yeah.

I got this from a beautiful little book that just came out called The Illustrated Book of Sayings.

It’s by Ella Frances Sanders.

And there are wonderful phrases in this book from all parts of the world.

I won’t try the original language, but in Turkish there’s a proverb that translates as grapes darken by looking at each other.

Can you imagine what that means?

Grapes darken. I don’t know.

It’s like we resemble the company that we keep.

Oh, of course.

You know, that notion that you’re the average of the five people you spend most of your time with.

Interesting.

Grapes darken by looking at each other.

And there’s a Latvian phrase that translates as blow little ducks.

And that means they’re not telling the truth.

If somebody’s not telling the truth, you say they’re blowing little ducks.

Little ducks are like popping out of their mouth, little fuzzy ducklings are popping out of their lungs.

Pustpilites.

Pustpilites.

They’re so picturesque, and proverbs and idioms often contain so much wisdom.

So I’m going to share some more of those later in the show.

If you’d like to talk to us about anything related to language, we’ll talk about slang, a new word, something you heard, something you said, how to write well, how to speak well.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org or talk to us on Twitter @wayword.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hey, this is Sharath. I’m calling from Austin, Texas.

Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

I’m doing great.

So I’m a longtime listener, and this is my first time calling into the show.

So the other day, my friend Patrick and Lara, they’re having a kid.

So we threw a baby shower for Lara.

When I was doing that, I was talking to Patrick, and I was like, how is he celebrating?

You know, the arrival of a new kid in his life, you know, they’re having a kid.

So we were like, is there an equivalent for like men who are like having kids,

You know, an equivalent, like baby shower-esque kind of word to celebrate?

We were like going to go camping and, you know, like smoke some cigars and stuff like that.

Yeah. So we didn’t quite know, like, if there’s a word for like a male equivalent for a baby shower.

I mean, it’s not like he’s getting mad at him.

You know, it’s like a bachelor party, right?

Right.

So I was just curious, and I did some, like, Googling,

And I couldn’t quite figure it out, so I was like, let me call in.

Were there only women at the shower for Laura?

No, actually, my friend Patrick was there.

Okay, so the shower was…

And, you know…

So the baby shower was for him also, but it was probably very feminine.

They tend to be, don’t they?

Yeah, I mean, you know, there were, like, games and, you know,

With like diapers.

They have like a castle.

Or something.

I don’t know.

Like I was just cooking.

I was just cooking food.

And I was like.

Serving everybody.

Well diapers are for real men too.

Yeah, I was gonna say.

The women give each other diapers.

And the men go camping.

And smoke cigars.

Yeah, that would be fun right.

There’s a couple words.

That have been tossed around.

In a number of articles.

About this.

They’re all kind of meh.

But I’ll share them with you.

If you’re interested.

Man shower was one I heard.

Which sounds like for some people.

The idea of a really good time. I don’t know. Suggestive.

Is something erotic. I don’t like that word, though.

Too simple. Too simple?

Well, there’s one that’s really complicated, which I think

Is a terrible blend of words. It’s

Dad-chiller party.

So it’s bachelor party with dad at the

Beginning. Dad-chiller party.

It’s terrible to read and terrible to say.

And not a good word at all.

Okay. Okay.

Do you have one? No, I mean,

I’d like to imagine there’s some funny

Like, you know,

Some funny word with like play on

Some dad-esque kind of thing.

I don’t know.

I mean, I know you don’t like dad-chiller,

But I think it sounds funny.

You like it just because it’s goofy.

I call it dad-chiller because it sounds funny,

But probably not a very good word

In terms of origins and stuff.

Dad-chiller party.

So I want to get a clear picture.

If you’re having one of those,

It’s a bunch of guys,

And are their presents involved?

They’re celebrating the arrival of a baby, right?

Yes.

What happens there?

He just wants to, like, have one last hurrah kind of deal with just the guys being a single man without a kid, you know.

I see.

Okay.

So a celebration of bro time rather than getting the useful things that it will take to do the day-to-day care of the baby.

Is this what we’re saying here?

Because he’s not going to be unwrapping nappy warmers out there in the camping site, right?

I don’t think so.

No, no, no.

Or putting together a stroller or something.

Although I think that’d be hilarious if you guys do go out to camp.

You should do that.

You should bring all of the babies.

Tons of cool baby stuff.

Oh, yeah.

Who doesn’t like open baby stuff?

It’s all tiny and cute.

Yeah, and play those goofy games.

All the goofy baby games.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, yeah, that could be fun.

Like, it could just be like, you know, we could be teasing him.

And we could just play, like, baby games and be like, this is what you have to do.

So let’s just prepare.

Right?

Yeah.

Teach him how to teach him.

You know what you should do?

You should bring dads to the campsite who already know all the dad stuff and teach them.

Here’s how you change a diaper.

This is how you birth a baby.

Right?

Yeah.

These are the things that you need to say to your wife when she thinks you haven’t been helping enough.

Right, right.

And then do some drumming.

Everybody’s sitting around in a circle.

Yeah, but pass on that wisdom.

It needs to be passed on.

But let’s go back to the linguistic stuff because that’s what we’re here for.

Oh, we are?

I really think that baby shower is totally fine whether or not it’s a male-centric or female-centric party.

But if I said there’s a baby shower next week, I just, I have a different, I mean, I know it would require the context.

But we can alter that, right?

It’s a baby shower and everyone’s invited.

Bring your husband.

And then you’re problem solved.

Yeah, yeah.

Could be both sexes.

Right?

Bring grandpa.

Have the cousins show up.

The male cousins, right?

Yeah, you’re right.

I mean, I’m like, it shouldn’t be gender specific.

So, yeah, I’m more than happy to use the word baby shower when we go camping.

You’d be like, hey, man, we’re throwing you a baby shower.

We’re going to go camping next week.

I love that.

But I love where you were headed before with something super goofy like babypalooza.

Yeah, I wanted it to be funny.

That’s like a big priority for me.

Well, I bet we could get some suggestions from our listeners.

What would you call a male-centric baby shower?

Let us know.

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

And if you’ve had one, what did you do there?

Yeah.

Was it any different than the female-centric ones?

Yes.

Was it?

Okay.

We’d love to hear about it, though.

Sherid, thank you for calling.

Oh, thank you.

Thank you so much for taking my call.

Enjoy the show.

All right.

Good day.

Bye.

Thank you.

Take care.

Best to the happy couple.

Dad-chiller party?

No.

No.

I kind of.

Never.

I have to say I kind of like it.

But no, like man—

No, no.

There’s so many things wrong with man-shower.

I’m thinking like—

So many different ways.

The wrong parts of Manhattan at the wrong time of night is what I’m thinking.

That’s what I’m thinking.

Anyway, if you’ve got suggestions for Shirada on what you call a male-centric baby shower, you let us know and we’ll share them with everyone on a future show.

877-929-9673.

My friend Lindsay and I have been friends for decades now.

We go back like car seats.

I came across that phrase the other day and I just loved it.

Go back like car seats.

And it’s been around for a while.

It’s been around since at least 1997.

97.

That means you go way back, right?

Way back.

Into the way, way back of the station wagon.

Yeah, exactly.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Rachel from Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Hello, Rachel.

How are you doing?

I’m well.

How are you?

Excellent.

Thank you.

Welcome to the show.

What’s going on, Rachel?

Well, I have a question for you about the words liberal and libertarian. I know the ideologies are very different, but to me the words sound really similar. I remember hearing the word libertarian first when I was in college in the early 2000s and thinking that they were somehow related. But I’m wondering if the words are related, even if maybe the ideologies are not.

You’ve summed it up very, very well, as a matter of fact.

These words have gone by lots of different definitions over the years and applied to lots of different ideas.

And people will argue till the cows come home over what exactly they mean.

But you’re absolutely right that both of them look similar because they go back to the Latin root liber, meaning free.

And they found their ways into English in different ways.

For example, the word libertarian was formed by analogy from an existing English word, liberty.

And the other one came to us via French from Latin.

Libertarian shows up in the late 18th century as somebody who believes in the doctrine of free will.

And it’s formed from the English word liberty by analogy with other kinds of words like necessitarian, which is a believer in necessity or someone who believes that human conduct is dictated by circumstances as opposed to free will.

Or unitarian, for that matter. Unitarian is a word that’s been around for centuries.

Actually, the U.S. Libertarian Party wasn’t formed until 1971.

That late?

Yeah.

That’s unexpected.

And the word liberal has been around for hundreds of years with lots of different definitions.

It was used in the 16th and 17th century as a term of reproach to criticize people who were too liberal, meaning free of restraint.

Right.

Like libertines might have been liberal.

Yeah, yeah.

Right, right.

Yeah, that’s a good connection.

And then it took on the political sense later in the mid-19th century, the sense that we think of today, a person of liberal political principles.

Interesting. So are the etymologies of the words connected in any way other than that root of liberty? Because they just sound so similar to me.

Not really.

No, there was a point at which liberal kind of definition of liberal and political senses kind of matched the definition of libertarian that some people use today.

And I hope you hear all the caveating and hedging I’m doing there.

Because you can have two separate groups of libertarians and they’ll have two separate ideas of what a libertarian is.

But generally, they just go back to the same root.

So you get the kind of coincidences that happen with the shared etymological root.

But once they move out of their parents’ house, words are their own thing.

They’re their own adults that make their own life decisions.

Interesting.

Okay, well, that’s really helpful.

Thank you so much.

Glad to help, Rachel.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

All right, bye-bye.

There are some great political jokes that come to mind.

Can I tell you one?

Oh, please.

How many libertarians does it take to change a light bulb?

Oh, no idea.

Just let the market decide.

Okay.

Send your complaints about my libertarian jokes or your own libertarian jokes to words@at waywordradio.org or call us at 877-929-9673.

This is a show about language examined through history, family, and culture.

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Thanks.

You are 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 we’re joined once again by that man of mystery, John Chaneski, our quiz guy.

Hi, John.

Hey, Grant.

Hi, Martha.

What is up?

Well, as you know, I’m trying to promote puzzle solving as a way to keep your brain sharp.

Okay.

And hopefully train yourself to look at situations with an analytical eye, all situations hopefully.

Any kind of puzzle is great.

But as you know, I recommend cryptic crosswords.

Every clue in a cryptic crossword is a little mini puzzle.

And they fall into about a dozen different categories.

And we’ve talked about these before.

But today we’ll play with what are called container clues.

Now, with a container clue, the wordplay half of the clue tells you to put one word inside another.

For example, if the definition half is kind of potatoes, the word play might read, she is in mad.

And if you put the word she in the word mad, you get a kind of potatoes.

Mashed.

Yes, very good.

Or shamed if they’re feeling bad about themselves.

Well, there’s a little bit of an anagram in that situation.

So it goes in an anagram.

The whole word just goes right inside somewhere between the letters.

Okay.

But good knowing about shamed.

So you don’t mix them up like potatoes.

Okay.

We’ll take it nice and easy.

In fact, for the ones we’re going to be using,

The inside word will always be two letters.

It’ll be two-letter words inside three-letter words, okay?

Cool.

Okay.

Good.

I’ll get a pen and paper just in case.

Here we go.

Let’s try.

The word play is at is in sin.

Satin.

Satin.

Very good.

At is in sin.

You put at in sin.

You get satin, a smooth, shiny cloth.

Here’s the next one.

Is is in ale.

Aisle?

No.

Aisle, yes.

Passage between rows of seats is in ale.

That’s all you need for that is the two is’s would be superfluous.

Passage between rows of seats is in ale.

How about we is in ten?

Tween?

Tween.

A middle schooler say.

Yeah.

Middle schoolers say we in ten.

Very good.

Us is in fed.

Us is in fed, right?

Fused?

Fused, yes.

To join together as one.

Joined together as one.

Finally, in the five-letter words, ox is in tick.

Toxic.

Toxic, yes.

Harmful to ingest.

Ox is in tick.

Let’s try some three-letter words in three-letter words, okay?

She is in did.

Dished?

Yes, to deal out some gossip.

She dished some gossip.

Or he dished some gossip.

R is in red.

Reared?

Not reared, no.

Reared?

Reared, yes.

To brought up a child.

Brought up a child, R in red.

How about ash is in say.

Sashay.

Sashay, yes.

To walk confidently.

Confidently, ash in say.

Here’s a good one.

All is in bad.

Ballad.

Say again?

Ballad.

Ballad, yes.

It’s a good clue right there.

All is in bad love song.

You break that and you forget the parts to get the word ballad.

Finally, pun is in sky.

Spunky.

Spunky, yes.

Lively pun as in sky is a good, perfect, simple cryptic clue for the word spunky.

But yeah, but you spunky guys did very, very well on your container clues.

Nicely done.

Appreciate it.

We always appreciate the quiz.

We’ll talk to you next week.

Talk to you next week.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

All right.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673 or join us on our Facebook group.

Just look for A Way with Words and join thousands of other people talking about language.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi.

This is Anne.

Hi, Anne.

Where are you calling us from?

Cornwall, Indiana.

Carmel.

Okay, a Hoosier.

Yeah, welcome to the show.

What can we do for you?

Thanks.

I work in a grade school, and this is my 10th year,

And I just noticed a few words this year from some teachers

That I’ve never noticed them pronounced the way they pronounce them.

A good example would be the word spelled K-I-T-T-E-N.

And being a Hoosier, and I don’t know, I haven’t talked to a lot of people from all over,

But being a Hoosier, I pronounced it kitten or mitten.

Now, this year, a few teachers, I’ve been in classrooms, and I’ve noticed they say kitten,

Like K-I with a marked break, U-N, or mitten.

So not only do they leave out the T sound, but it’s just really obvious.

And this is the first time I’ve ever noticed this.

These are teachers?

Yes, teachers.

And I work with mostly women.

And, I mean, I would say the age range is, you know, 25 to 50.

But I would say a lot of them are younger.

And do your students say it as well, that way?

Yes.

So I don’t know if it’s a lazy pronunciation.

I never even thought about it because I guess, like I said, most people say kitten, but at least in this area.

But when someone, you know, when you’re hearing someone teach and they say, you know, they put on the mitten, you’re like, what?

What word?

All right.

We’ve got some information for you.

We can help you with this.

And first, anytime you think that it might be a lazy pronunciation that you hear people say, it probably isn’t.

So we’re just going to discard that idea for now.

Almost always, especially when a lot of people are doing it, we can look at it like a scientist or a sociolinguist and say, all right, I’ve got data here that I can analyze and I can come up with a conclusion.

And as a matter of fact, that’s what sociolinguists have done for this particular thing, which is called glottalization.

G-L-O-T-T-A-L-I-Z-A-T-I-O-N. Glottalization. And I win the spelling.

Wow.

And there’s a fellow by the name of David Eddington at Brigham Young University who, with some of his colleagues, has published a few papers on this phenomenon.

And what he’s discovered is that generally it happens for people in their 20s or early 30s and young women, but particularly from the western part of the United States.

Now, that doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen in Indiana or Rhode Island, but in the data that he gathered, which admittedly was a smaller sample size, that’s what he found.

What’s happening here is, as in other dialects of English, such as cockney, which everyone knows, his bottle, right, instead of his bottle or bottle, his bottle.

Right.

We have increasing glottalization where there’s a place where we’ve got a T sound surrounded by vowels.

And so it’s not just in words like mitten and kitten, but you might also have it in words like Netflix, where most people don’t say the T.

Try it.

Netflix.

If you’re consciously saying it, if you’re self-conscious about it, you’ll probably say it.

But the number of people who pronounce the T in Netflix approaches zero.

Most Americans, at least, or North Americans who speak English say Netflix.

Try it.

It’s pretty cool, right?

But we do it in other things like Bill Clinton.

A lot of people, the T doesn’t appear.

It’s a glottalized.

And the glottis is this little thingy in the back of your throat.

And so what happened is you’re having a sharp kind of of air instead of doing the T sound with your tongue on your mouth.

So it’s way back instead of up at the front.

That’s right, way back instead of in the front.

And those double T words kind of are prone to that, but they’re not the only place that it happens.

It happens in short words, too, like the words like bat, B-A-T.

If you hear people who are speaking unselfconsciously and using the word B-A-T, they’re very likely to say bat.

Without a T, bat.

It just kind of stops.

There’s a gust of air in the back of their throat.

Bat.

And there’s no T in it.

But in any case, yeah, so what you found is a change in some of the American ways of speaking.

It is a growing dialect feature of American English.

So it’s not lazy.

No.

Wow.

No, it’s not lazy.

It’s just something they’ve learned from their cohort, from their peer group.

We speak mostly like the people around us.

We speak mostly like the people that we go to school with and we work with.

And a little bit like our parents and family.

Okay, yeah, I can see that, absolutely.

So in 100 years, it could be that whoever takes over the show from me and Martha

Takes a phone call or a vid call or whatever they call it at the time

From somebody who says, yeah, all these people aren’t glottalizing the word mitten and couldn’t

Like they’re supposed to.

What’s happening with that?

And it’s going to be unusual.

Isn’t it interesting?

Absolutely.

Because, you know, even at my age, you learn something new every day.

You do.

You sure do.

Ann, thank you so much for your call.

We really appreciate it.

Yeah, thanks for the field research.

Well, thank you.

I appreciate it.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673 is the place to submit your field reports about language

Or send us an email.

That address is words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Yeah, hi.

This is Jerry Farrs calling from Hell’s Kitchen, New York.

Hi, Jerry.

How are you doing?

Hell’s Kitchen.

Somewhere up there in the 50s, on the 50s on the west side, right?

Yeah, absolutely.

I live on 48th Street.

48th Street.

Right between 8th and 9th.

I know that area well.

Well, the other day I was out and I got caught in the rain.

And I thought to myself as I was heading back home that I needed to go and change my duds.

And I thought to myself, why am I calling closed duds?

And I was pretty sure that it had nothing to do with misfired ordinance or firecrackers that didn’t go off or something like that.

It just doesn’t seem related to clothing.

And I thought, well, I’m going to just have to check with Martha and Grant on this one because I can’t find anything on it.

And the only other thing I was thinking was, I remember there was a laundry product called Suds, but I think Duds is spelled D-U-D-S,

Not D-U-D-Z as Suds would be S-U-D-Z.

Right.

So I thought maybe you could help me on this.

Well, we can offer a little bit of help.

The origin of Duds is not really clear.

We can tell you it’s a super old word.

It goes back to around 1300 or so.

Oh, I wasn’t around then.

You weren’t?

I didn’t pick it up then.

Well, I maybe picked it up in an earlier life.

It could have been. Yeah. If you were running around in 1300, you would have worn a cloak or a mantle called a dud, D-U-D-D-E.

Really?

Yeah. Yeah. It was usually of coarse cloth, not anything particularly appealing.

And then later in the plural, duds came to mean ragged clothing.

And over time, it just came to mean generally clothes and personal effects.

So it’s been around a very, very, very long time.

So it doesn’t come from the idea of dud like munitions failing to go off, although it may have influenced the term dud.

How would that be?

In that sense.

Well, for a while, dud also meant something that was sort of counterfeit.

And therefore, I could see how that would be applied eventually to something that doesn’t do what it was promised to do.

Yeah.

Yeah, so it’s generally a kind of pejorative term, or at least it was early on.

But for clothes now, it’s kind of neutral.

Yeah, my duds.

Jerry, thank you so much for your call, dude.

Thank you very much for clearing that up.

That’s good to know.

All right.

Thank you.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

So pervasive throughout English, right?

Duds.

Duds is pretty common, but it does sound like modern slang.

I know, doesn’t it?

I was really surprised to learn that it goes all the way back.

1300s.

1300s.

Yeah.

1300s, 14th century.

That’s incredible.

But how many of the words, they have to start somewhere.

They do, right?

Duds.

D-U-D-S, duds, close.

Give us a call, 877-929-9673.

Email us at words@waywordradio.org or hit us up on Twitter @wayword.

The other day I emailed a friend that I had some news to share with her, but I didn’t have enough time to tell her what it was.

So I wrote, film at 11.

And I realized there’s a whole generation.

Doesn’t know what that is.

Doesn’t know.

And not only do they not know what it is, they have to have it defined in Urban Dictionary.

I went to Urban Dictionary, which explained that before there was YouTube and things like that, there was the late night local news.

And announcers would come on during the commercial breaks of primetime TV shows and say whatever would get viewers to stay on that channel and watch the news.

So they’d describe something that would intrigue the viewer’s curiosity, then say, film at 11.

The actual film, shown at 11, rarely lives up to the hyped expectations.

I can’t believe I was having to read a definition of that on Urban Dictionary.

That’s going to happen more and more, Grant.

A squirrel in a top hat, film at 11.

It was 10 p.m. where I grew up.

It’s still the same principle.

Really?

All right.

A lot of people trace the jokes about this to the Kentucky Fried movie.

Google that.

I haven’t.

Yeah.

I haven’t watched it.

They use that kind of construction.

Oh, they do.

That newsiness is a way of kind of making fun of the news business.

Right, and now it’s filmed 24-7, right?

Filmed in just two minutes, and then we’re going to run it ad nauseum for the next 48 hours.

And then fake news in your Facebook feed.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Good morning. This is Libby Davis from Coronado, California.

Hi, Libby. Welcome to the show.

Hi, Libby.

What can we do for you today?

Well, I have a group of lady friends that we meet regularly.

Most of us are widows that live alone, and we’re used to coping with little emergencies that come up every day.

I mean, your aging house is breaking down around you, or God help us, your aging body is breaking down.

So every day you say, oh, what is the challenge today?

We were talking at lunch and saying how we were feeling very sad that one of our friends who had a medical emergency hadn’t snapped back.

She just crumbled and wasn’t leaving her home and joining us in activities we’d always done together.

And I said, well, her get up and go is just gone.

And Klessie said she needs to grab a root and growl.

And I said, wow, I’ve never heard that.

I love it.

Grab a root and growl.

It’s not only got resiliency, it’s got tenacity.

And I said, where did you get that?

She said she heard it from her mother-in-law, who was from Hattiesburg, Mississippi.

And she didn’t know anything about it.

None of us had ever heard it before.

What do you know?

What do we know?

First, I want to say that her get up and go was gone is also a great turn of phrase.

I love that.

Yeah, get up and go got up and went.

Yeah, indeed.

And I know the feeling.

I do, particularly when you’re coming out of a few days of not feeling well,

And you’re like, I just want to lie here like a lump.

So the grab a root and growl, we’re thinking probably R-O-O-T for root, right?

Like the root of a plant or a tree or something like that.

We’re figuring some kind of a root of a tree or something.

It reminds me of root hog or die, which is another one of these exhortations to figure it out, make do, find your guts, muscle on through.

Yeah.

To heave ho, put your shoulder to it, whatever your exhortation is to get somebody to do the thing that they need to do.

Hang on.

Hang on.

Get in there.

Do it.

Fight.

Be tough.

It doesn’t have a deep history, but it’s 100 years old at least.

I find it in some camping articles and stories about outdoor recreation and climbing in the mountains.

There’s one particular use of a magazine, which I thought was funny.

It’s where this Easterner is writing into this magazine about how hard a time he had in the Rocky Mountains.

And the editors in the magazine are like, yeah, well, that’s because you came out here with your East Coast ways and you didn’t come out here and grab a root and growl, which is to do the hard job of making it all work, which is kind of what we’re talking about, right?

I particularly like the growl. You not only hang on, you’re almost aggressive about it.

There’s a couple places where people have speculated, and I think this is really solid,

That what you need to think of when you say this phrase is a dog going after game.

Let’s say maybe a terrier going after a rat, and the rat has dived into a hole,

And the dog’s got to clear out the roots and dig down to where the rat is.

To get his prey, and he’s growling the whole time to make his intentions known.

And if you just think about it that way, that’s the kind of tenacity we’re talking about,

This fierce kind of almost instinctive desire to win and beat the enemy.

Well, there you go, Libby.

I’ve seen one slight variation, which is not grab a root and growl.

It’s grab, comma, root, comma, and growl.

So all three main words are verbs, and they’re telling you to grab on, to root in,

And then to growl to show that you’ve got the guts to do it.

Oh, I like that, too.

Yeah, and that aligns very well with root hog or die, I think.

I think so.

So Libby, thank you for sharing that phrase with us.

Well, thank you for explaining a little bit of how it came about.

Take care now.

All right, bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

Somebody sent me an essay the other day.

It’s by Laura Sekharan-Pollett, and this was in the online magazine Aussie.

And I’m not sure how I feel about this essay, so I’d like to get your thoughts, Grant.

She’s writing about the word expat, and she thinks that this word should be retired

Because she said that, you know, when you say the word expat,

You probably think of a couple of adorable British retirees reading Agatha Christie novels

While slowly roasting under the unforgiving Spanish sun.

But she says that the word expat connotes a certain amount of prestige.

Why can’t you just say immigrant rather than expat?

She thinks it’s a racist term.

Oh, that’s interesting.

I’d have to read the whole essay to counter the whole argument.

But pretty much everything you’ve just said is counter to what I understand about the term expat.

What’s your understanding of that?

Well, part of it is you don’t become a citizen of the new country and are not seeking citizenship.

You’re allowed through various laws and whatever cases to own property or co-own property.

And you’re simply residing there.

Another thing about expat, it usually suggests a permanence, but with a connection, a foot still in the other country.

So you haven’t picked up and sold off all of your stuff.

Maybe you still own a house in the other country.

You still have kids in the other country.

Perhaps you even have a business that is generating revenue for you in the other country or that’s where your retirement funds are located, that sort of thing.

It’s almost the same as moving from New York to Florida to live in your retirement, except you’ve crossed a national border.

Oh, interesting.

Yeah, I was surprised to come across that essay, and I wasn’t sure what I thought.

I asked a couple of friends of mine who grew up in the United States and moved to Mexico, and one of them said that she came to that same conclusion, that she was wondering, why do I get to be an expat because I’ve actually moved to Mexico? Why am I not just an immigrant?

She felt like using the term racist sort of was too much, that that was closing a door to discussion, to an interesting discussion.

My other friend wasn’t bothered by it at all.

She says, I call myself a Mexpat. And they’ve moved permanently to Mexico.

Yeah.

Yeah, that’s interesting.

Isn’t it?

And I could see, but I don’t know why there has to be one term or one would force the others out.

I could see somebody being an expat and an immigrant or one or the other without definitely being the other one.

Like to me, if I were going to immigrate, say, to Sweden, which is a wonderful place, that would mean I’m abandoning everything here.

I’m selling it off.

My roots are done.

I’m cashing out the accounts.

We’re setting up a home.

We’re laying out a future.

And I’m going to start a business there or have a job there and live a regular life there.

Whereas expat to me does suggest like I’m coasting.

I’ve got funds in the bank.

I’m going to the beach every day or I’m hiking in the mountains.

And I’m not building a business.

I’m not building a new life there.

I’m just simply kind of petering out what’s left of my time on Earth.

That’s interesting because I think of expats as getting together as expats, you know, in the same way that I get together.

They certainly do, don’t they?

Yeah.

English speakers tend to glom onto each other no matter where they are in the world.

Exactly.

And sometimes, yeah, just have their own little communities without really interacting with the larger community there.

Yeah, I wonder if you could take an article about immigration and replace the word immigrant with expat.

Yeah, wouldn’t that be interesting?

And see if people would buy that, if that would still work.

Yeah.

Maybe it’s not so much that expat is racist.

Maybe it’s more that immigrant isn’t always the right word.

Yeah, I would love to hear from our listeners on this.

Well, let’s share that article on the website so everyone else can throw in their two cents.

Excellent.

And you can also throw in your two cents by calling us at 877-929-9673 or send us an email.

That address is words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Eric Ott. I’m calling from Marquette in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

Welcome, Eric. What can we do for you?

Well, my question today is about the phrase, I’ll get there or I’ll be there directly.

So I’m not originally from the UP here in Michigan. I’m from eastern Tennessee.

But my wife and I were first together. She asked me, when are you coming home? And I’d say, I’ll be there directly.

And when I wasn’t there, you know, in the next hour or so, she would be wondering where I was.

And to me, I’ll be there directly. I will get there when I get there.

To her, it meant exactly what it sounded like. I will get there directly.

That’s the sense I grew up with.

Yeah, we have these two overlapping senses of directly, one meaning immediately and the other meaning as soon as possible.

And they’re in conflict and they occur in the same parts of the country, mostly in the upper American South, let’s say Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, those sorts of places.

And the only way you can tell is by asking for clarification or just by context alone.

And your wife is probably never encountered it before because she’s not from Tennessee.

So she would not have that. She would not have that alternate meaning of that meaning as soon as as soon as I can.

Also, most people probably would be looking for a preposition after directly, so directly after, for example.

I’ll be there directly after I go to the store or directly after I drop off the kids, something like that.

So I just wonder, it’s so understood down south that when you say that phrase, and as I think about it, I think my grandmother used it more often than my parents did.

It was just understood that it would be a long while before you actually got there.

And I just wonder how you take something that means directly that the understanding is just the opposite.

Well, the best guess that I have is that it means I’m going to be – I am there directly, but I’m directly after a series of events that have to happen first.

Exactly.

So there’s plenty of things in my mind, in my itinerary that must occur before I arrive at your door.

Yeah, but I’m going to get there.

I am direct, but it’s direct through these other points on the map.

Exactly.

So we all understood that as being in parentheses, and the parentheses aren’t up here in Michigan, I guess.

Exactly.

They have a parentheses shortage there in Michigan, but we have them all there in the South.

An abundance of parentheses.

Yeah, and it sounds like music to me.

That word is just so musical to me.

I have family in East Tennessee, and I think it’s just gorgeous.

My grandmother from Southeast Missouri said it, too.

I’ll be there directly, Grand Andy.

Grand Andy?

That’s what she called me.

Grant Andy?

Yeah.

She was the only one.

She was the only one.

Oh, my gosh.

Grant Andy.

I’ll be there directly.

Grant Andy and Martha Ann.

But directly means, kind of to a kid at least, it always meant hold your horses.

Like, just, you know, rein yourself in.

I’ve got a life that, you know, things to do.

Directly means in all due time, I will get to it.

Oh, a parent talking to a kid?

Yeah, yeah.

My grandmother in particular.

Oh, I see.

I see.

So that’s what we know, Eric.

How about that, Eric?

Well, thanks so much.

And I’ve adjusted my speech patterns to make my wife happy.

Yep.

Merit of bliss requires all kinds of compromises.

I give her definite times now.

Thanks for calling.

I’m going to stash of those parentheses somewhere because I love the phrase, the expression.

Will do.

Take care now.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Thanks, guys.

877-929-9673.

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Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi.

Hi, who’s this?

This is Mary Beth McManus, and I’m from West Palm Beach, Florida.

Hi, Mary Beth. How are you doing?

Good.

What’s up?

Well, I was listening to your show on a long drive on my way back from Canada.

About a year or two ago, I noticed someone being interviewed on TV.

She started her answer with the word, so.

And it seemed very odd to me.

It just didn’t feel right.

And I started noticing it on TV a little more.

And a few weeks ago, I noticed a reporter on TV or someone he was interviewing do the same thing.

And to me, it felt very peculiar.

It felt like, okay, he was saying, okay, here’s how I’m going to answer your question instead of just answering the question.

So the word so, I feel, is becoming invasive.

I don’t know how you professionals feel about it.

The way this is usually referred to in the linguistic world is sentence initial so, which basically means so at the beginning of a sentence.

And you can actually find some other information we have on this sentence initial so on our website.

And what we’re finding here is that this is a really common usage.

I actually want to quote something from a paper by a woman named Galena Bolden from Rutgers.

And she writes in this paper, so prefacing is recurrently used in context where the activity being launched has been irrelevantly pending, which is a really complicated way of saying, in other words, people use so when they’ve been aware that the thing that they’re about to say was going to have to be said.

Like they’re launching into a thing that they had mentally or actually physically prepared, which is why you so often see this in interviews.

And you kind of mentioned this in a couple different ways that the guy was saying what he was going to say rather than saying it, if that makes sense.

He’s kind of prefacing his comment.

And it’s a real legitimate use of this, of so as a conjunction, which is how it’s behaving here.

And it plugs in very well to some other uses of so where I think of the storyteller so.

Like let’s say that you’re at the library listening to a storyteller story to kids.

She’s like, so here’s a tale of Miss Mousy and how she beat the cat.

Right.

Yeah.

I’ve seen it referred to as a backstory.

So.

Great.

Yes.

I think of it as I think of it as a storyteller.

So but that’s very much the same.

And also it’s very much related to another use of the preposition.

So where let’s say you’re helping someone with their homework and then you say after you explain all this complicated stuff, you say, so does that make sense?

And what you’re doing here is providing that bridge between an activity or comment to the thing that follows and kind of trying to wrap it up.

You’re looking for the closure of the subject.

And certainly in these interview situations, at least in most of the examples that I see, when someone says, so here’s what we were doing at Microsoft when we built this product, right?

It sounds like what they’re trying to do is assemble all of the data together into a kind of minor narrative arc and just kind of finish it off and just kind of give the interviewer what they were after.

Aha.

Well, that’s really good to know that it isn’t just me.

Not at all.

Not at all.

Linguists have been all over this.

Yeah, it’s not a crutch word either.

It’s not a filler word.

And if you take it out of the sentences where they use it, the sentences’ meanings shift.

Yeah, I think in a lot of cases it is.

I remember as a child it carried a lot of emotion because you would say, so, so what?

You know, like it bared some emotion and not always in a positive way.

So like so many words has lots of different uses here.

And we have to be careful to separate those and not think of this as one large monolithic so that is now being misused because it’s not what’s happening.

It is not a misuse of so.

Just to be clear.

It’s not.

Yeah, it conveys a little bit.

I won’t judge anybody anymore.

But yeah, yeah, it depends on context and it conveys a certain kind of meaning, as Grant was saying.

I think of it as replacing well, too.

You know, every time, and we get this question all the time, and people often mention interviews on NPR.

Right, because that’s our audience.

That’s our group.

Yeah.

But well has kind of fallen away in that.

Right.

Because that is the way that you would begin your sentences, your explanation, you know, your answer to a question.

Yeah.

So I kind of get a kick out of just listening when the interviewee takes a breath to figure out if they’re going to say well or so.

Yeah.

And if they’re older, they tend to say well.

Mary Beth, thank you so much for bringing this up.

Okay. Thank you.

Take care.

Bye. Bye-bye.

Bye.

I just want to make sure that we really got to give a good example of the kind of stuff that she’s talking about before we move on.

Okay.

Let’s say that you are interviewing someone about a book and you say, your new book seems like a real departure from your previous novels.

And then the guest says, or the author says, so I was trying to avoid writing another Professor Falls in Love with Students story, right?

Right.

And so they are continuing your thought and kind of saying, they’re kind of yes-anding you.

They’re confirming your question or the thesis of your question and then supplementing it with information that kind of fills in the details.

Yeah, I guess so.

I mean, I would have said, well, I, whatever the answer was.

Right.

And for me, well often suggests that a contradiction is in the offing and that we might be encountering some kind of resistance to the thesis of the question.

That’s another example of it.

But I think for me, well is sometimes just a warm-up, you know, just kind of a throat clearing.

Well, you could say that.

Yeah, well can be.

But this is a really interesting, again, the phrase that you need to Google to find out tons about this,

Either from popular treatments to the academic treatments, is sentence initial so, S-O.

And if you want to talk with us about language on the air, call us at 877-929-9673

Or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

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Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Benjamin from North County.

Hey, Benjamin, North County, San Diego?

That’s right.

Are you there on the coast?

Oh, right there on the beautiful coast with the beautiful waves.

Nice.

Well, what can we do for you?

I’ve been brainstorming on some things I’m sure you know about.

One is, where did pig Latin come from?

Like, ixnay on the aqua che and the ubbard ke?

Say that again?

Nix-nay on the ocklet-chay in the ubbard-kay.

Nix on the chocolate in the cupboard?

We talked about the chocolate in the cupboard.

Got it.

Okay.

It’s pig latin, and I don’t know where it came from,

But my grandma, if she ever wanted to say anything that she didn’t want us to hear,

She would say that.

Oh, okay.

That reminds me of my son likes to say that he’s fluent in two languages,

English and pig latin.

That’s hilarious.

My friend used to say I speak every language except Latin,

And no matter what you would ask him, he’d say, that’s Latin to me.

We have a really long history of all these kind of nonsense languages where syllables are reversed or sounds are inserted or things are like repetitively changed in order to make something sound a little non-obvious.

And some of it goes back to people imitating sacred rituals and kind of doing a fake mass or something like that and doing the fake church latin and that sort of thing.

Some of it obviously comes from school kids, but we have hundreds of years at least of people making these variety of pig latins.

And they’re not all the same as the one that you used.

Some of them have just adding a syllable or changing all the vowels to the same vowel, different things like that.

So pig in this sense meaning inferior or not the real thing.

Yeah, not human.

The other one that comes to my mind is where did the term doohickey come from?

Because people use that a lot if they don’t know what they’re talking about.

How do you use doohickey?

Well, it would be like if I didn’t know where we were going or what tool I was going to use, I’d say, yeah, the doohickey for the whatchamajig or whatchamacan.

That’s right.

And the thingamabob.

Yeah, the thingamabob, of course.

You’ve got to have that.

Well, we have a whole bunch of those words, too.

Yeah, these replacement words, right?

They’re kind of, they almost behave like pronouns in a way because they vaguely and indeterminately stand in for another specific noun.

Whatchamacallit.

Whatchamacallit’s a good one, right?

Right. Yeah, that’s interesting. And I really appreciate you guys. It just makes it so fun to just kind of use your brain for a little different things besides what’s been going on in the political world.

Yeah, we’re happy to do that for you.

Nicely put.

What do we have? I’m looking in the American Speech here, which is a journal about the American language.

And there’s a variety of things. There’s a doohickey, doohiccus, doohinky, doohinkus, doohonkey, doohonkus.

And these all go with thingum and thingumabob.

And they all kind of refer to gadgets or widgets and that sort of thing.

There’s no, unfortunately, they’re all origin unknown.

They’re kind of these goofy pass along things that are really impossible to trace to their roots.

Yeah, silly words that are fun to say.

Dude, it’s been really nice to talk to you.

Thanks for calling us.

Oh, my pleasure.

Take care.

Take care.

Bye.

All right.

Thank you.

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So long.

Bye-bye.

Thank you.