Put That in Your Pipe and Smoke It

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

And I’m Martha Barnette. I was reading a magazine article the other day, and I came across the following sentence. There’s a strangely atavistic slant to British political culture at this moment. And I had to put down the magazine, go to the dictionary, and yet again look up the word atavistic.

Grant, I think there ought to be a word for those words that keep sending you to the dictionary again and again and again because you can’t remember the meaning. Tell me that I’m not the only person who has this problem.

I know you’re not the only person. Everyone has this problem, right? Because it solves the problem for the moment, but for some reason it doesn’t stick. It doesn’t stick. Why doesn’t it stick?

You know, I’ve learned to just sort of stop and wrestle that word by the serifs. I mean, in the case of atavistic, I finally thought, okay, this is it. I’m going to figure out this word and I’m going to make it my own. It means reverting to or suggesting the characteristics of a remote ancestor or primitive type. And the way that I made it stick in my head is that I figured out that the AV in atavistic is related to the Latin word spelled A-V-U-S, which means grandfather. It’s a relative of the Spanish word abuelo, which means grandfather. So if you think of grandfather, then that helps you so often.

That’s a previous era. Yeah, the etymology. But do you have words like that that send you back to the dictionary?

Mine’s a little different. I just wanted to share this. This happened to me recently. I found out that I’ve been using a word wrong my whole life.

Really? I’m 40. It’s a little different. And it’s the kind of thing that you can only find out by looking it up. I didn’t know that upwards of means more than.

Really? I always thought that upwards of meant up to. And so I’m reading this and talking with a colleague, and we’re talking about something like upwards of 30,000 books in the library. And I’m thinking up to 30,000 books in the library.

Oh, wow. And it actually means more than 30,000 books in the library. Like a little more, not a lot more, right?

Yeah. And so I’m like, whoa, how does that happen? How do I get this far and not know that? That’s kind of what you’re saying. That happens. How do I get this far and not have that in my head? That happens.

We know there are words that you have this problem with. We know there are words that you keep having to look up. We know there are facts that you should have known by now and you only just figured out. Give us a call, 877-929-9673. Or send us an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hello.

Hi, who’s this?

My name is Kevin. I’m calling from Lakewood, California.

Hi, Kevin. Welcome to the program.

Hello. Well, the other day, I was riding my unicycle through a long park on a bike path.

That was you?

That was me. And there were a circle of young girls warming up for a soccer game. And when I turned around, they were all kind of looking at me, and they were cheering, and one of them shouts out, I want your bike. So I replied, cool, this is a bike you should want.

Okay, well, the term bike rubs a lot of unicyclists the wrong way. They think my unicycle is a unicycle, not a bike. And this is actually the first time I’ve turned around to somebody and said, yeah, cool, it’s a bike, you know, and acknowledged them, and the wave of energy continued instead of correcting them and putting out fire.

Right, sure, yeah, great. So the question is kind of, I see bike as being one step removed from bicycle and not as exact as bicycle, and I think it has a little more wiggle room. Now, I don’t know if it has enough wiggle room to fit a unicycle inside of it, but I don’t know. I mean, I’m tolerant of it, first of all. It’s not a big deal. I think it’s an easier way to express what they’re trying to say.

So you’re saying the problem is that a bicycle should only refer to a vehicle with two wheels, and you were riding a bicycle with one wheel, so it might not really be a bike?

Well, that’s the argument. See, I’ve been discussing this online on a unicyclist forum called unicyclist.com, and a lot of people have been sharing their opinions. Now, me personally, I’m totally tolerant of somebody calling it a bike, because I think it’s an already existing word. I think it’s a little looser than bicycle already. And it’s one syllable instead of four. And, I mean, there’s a dozen reasons to use it, even if it’s not perfect.

Kevin, far be it for me to incur the ire of the unicycle community. I would not want to be pelted with beanbags and clubs. But you know what? I have a little bit of cred on this myself because I, too, ride a unicycle, Kevin.

She’s coming out, everyone.

Yes.

All right.

Yes. I mean, I haven’t done it in, oh, maybe decades, but there was a point in my life when I begged my parents day after day for a unicycle, and they finally gave me one, and I learned to ride it. I was very, very, very bruised that summer.

It takes a long time. You really have to be dedicated to it, don’t you?

You do, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. And I even rode one of those big ones, the six-foot-tall ones that they called giraffes.

Wow. You know, with the chain, I had to hold on to a basketball rim and have somebody put it under me. Please tell me you have video. This could be the next YouTube sensation, right?

It could. Kevin, I’m with you. I think bike is a perfectly fine word. And you’re talking to somebody who really cares a lot about the etymology of words. And, of course, bike is from bicycle, which is two circles, right? Two wheels.

So what do you call it for short? A eunuch?

Yeah. Well, we call it uni among ourselves.

Oh, uni? But I think that if you take it out of context, that’s a troublesome abbreviation.

Absolutely. Yeah, and the dictionary definitions are pretty loose on this. They mostly say things like a wheeled vehicle that’s powered by the foot or something like that. Because you can have a bicycle.

Okay, which brings up another point, which I really hope you guys will attack.

Okay. Because the first question is a little bit subjective, I would say. Now, some people on there really object to a unicycle being described as a one-wheeled bicycle because they think that is an absolute contradiction in terms. To me, that’s no more contradictory than saying Sunday night.

So you’ve reached the truth that Martha and I generally agree on, which is once a word has left its etymological root, it is free to do and become whatever it pleases, just like when children leave the home of their parents.

That was my theory. A bike now has a rich, flourishing life that part of it is disconnected from its root as a bicycle.

Yeah. Okay. So you would agree that bicycle and bike are not identical?

I would agree with that. I think bike is more affectionate somehow.

If you do not want to be ostracized at the national unicycle conventions, I would recommend not calling it a bike.

No, I don’t really care. I’m me. I say what I want to say, and I say what I think, and it doesn’t matter.

You know, unicycles are the purest kind of rebel.

Yeah, I guess so.

That’s great. That’s a good quote. Thanks for sharing your story with us, and I hope at least we made you feel better about your word choice.

Oh, sure. I feel good about it. I just thought I’d run it by some educated and unbiased professionals.

And when are they coming? Let us know when you do get them.

I don’t know when I’ll find them. I thought I’d ask you in the meantime.

If we know any.

Thanks, dude. Appreciate it.

All right.

Okay. Thanks a lot, you guys. Roll onward, unicyclists.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Are you a unicyclist?

Drop us a line at words@waywordradio.org and tell us what you think about calling a unicycle a bike or not.

And you can give us a call, 877-929-9673, with any question you have about words, language, slang, grammar, punctuation, spelling, and so forth.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Leanne in Mission Viejo, California.

Welcome.

Hi, Leanne. Welcome to the program.

Hi, thank you so much.

I just wanted to tell you that we had a funny little thing here in our office one day when it was looking like it was going to pour.

And I looked out the window and said, and me without my bumbershoot.

And the other office mates looked at me like I had two heads.

They said, what do you mean bumbershoot?

And I said, well, you know, my umbrella.

I said, haven’t you ever heard of that word before?

And they said, no, they hadn’t heard of it.

So I looked it up in the dictionary.

I said, I think it’s a real word.

And we’ve been using it in my household for, you know, the last 50 years.

I don’t know where it came from.

So then the next day, another storm was coming in, and I said, oh, nuts, and me without my broly.

Just another one.

You just keep your coworkers on their toes, don’t you?

Yeah, so we decided to make a list of words that we need to know,

And we’ve all sort of chipped in and added a word or two here and there to this little list that we have, and we’re all trying to improve our vocabularies.

Nice.

Lumber shoot at the top of the list, huh?

And Broly is next.

Yeah, yeah, so everybody’s adopted those two in the office?

Exactly.

So everyone wanted to know where I heard it, and I said, gee, I have really no idea.

No idea at all.

Do you or did your parents use it?

I imagine so.

My grandmother was British, and it sounds like something that would be British, a British word.

And also I think it might have come from Dickens, and she was a librarian, so she read a great deal,

And we talked funny in our family.

And that’s probably why.

Well, Brawley, yeah.

I think that one comes from, doesn’t that come from university slang?

Yeah, definitely.

It’s more common in the UK and the Commonwealth countries.

It’s short for umbrella.

B-R-O-L-L-Y.

Brawley.

Definitely not in Americanism, although Americans might know it.

Bumbershoot, though, that’s more American, right?

Yes, yes.

And you can find that one more than 100 years ago recorded in different lists of slang and dialects.

And there are a lot of variations actually on Bumper Shoot, right?

There’s a list in the Dictionary of American Regional English.

They’re all very similar.

Blunder Shoot, Brumber Shoot, Bumbler Shoot, Bumble Shoot, Bumper Shoot, Bumper Shoot, and Bumper Shoot.

Oh, come on now.

And don’t forget Bumper L.

Yeah, I think I’ve seen Bumbarella, too.

But it just kind of shows, as we talk about on the show repeatedly, when you have all those variations in a word, it usually means that it’s primarily transmitted by voice and not through reading or learning in school.

The theory on Bumbershoot is that the bumper part comes from the same root as umbra, which means shadow in Latin, right?

And just kind of put a B on there because it sounds funnier, right?

It’s a jocular word.

It’s used almost always to entertain someone else.

It’s not the kind of thing that you’ll find usually used in a serious tome or anything like that.

Right.

Just like you did.

Yeah.

And the chute part probably is related to the chute and parachute.

Parachutes have been used long before the airplane era.

During all kinds of periods of hot balloon exploration, the parachute became an unknown thing.

And besides a variety of other words with a C-H-U-T-E in them.

Although this is spelled B-U-M-B-E-R-S-H-O-O-T.

Different spelling there.

Yeah.

In any case, so there’s strong etymological roots there.

Pretty natural kind of creation of a word.

It is definitely a fun word, wouldn’t you say?

It is a fun word, and I think we have lots of fun words in the English language.

It is a beautiful language, and certainly it is an evolving language.

Hey, Leanne, this was a lot of fun.

Thanks for calling.

Bye-bye.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bumbershoot.

You know, you mentioned parachutes, and in the U.K., brawleyhop.

Did you see that?

No.

Brawleyhop is a jump made with a parachute.

Oh, very interesting.

What’s the strange word that you got caught using?

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

There was an article in Wired Magazine recently about how Twitter has created a whole new genre of comedy.

You know, because it has to fit into 140 characters.

And they had some examples.

My favorite was from Judah Friedlander, who’s on 30 Rock.

He tweeted, I think more than one company should be allowed to sell Monopoly.

Love it!

Write to us in 140 characters or less or more.

words@waywordradio.org.

Support for A Way with Words comes from the University of San Diego,

Whose mission since 1949 has been to prepare students for the world as well as to change it.

More about the college and five schools of this independent Catholic university at sandiego.edu.

You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett, and here once again is Greg Poliska, our quiz guy.

Hello, Greg.

Hi, Greg.

Hello, Grant. Hello, Martha.

What can we do for you, Greg? What did you call us about? Can we answer a question?

I was going to just tell you that my daughter is actually a very adept user of a certain tablet computing device that we have in our house.

Oh, she got a Barnes & Noble Nook, did she?

Yeah, that’s not the one.

She’s got an iPad.

Well, I have the iPad, but my daughter knows how to use the thing intuitively.

It’s amazing to see.

Awesome.

So I have a ton of apps on it for her.

And that gave me the idea of a little puzzle for today, which is called There’s an App for That.

Okay.

Let’s try this out.

See how it goes.

So you’re going to respond to various mythical listeners who are looking for solutions to their problems.

And in each case, there’s an app for that.

The solution is a word starting with app.

Already.

I got you.

So here you go.

Dear Grant and Martha, if I tell the truth about my SAT scores, I’ll never get into the college of my choice.

What should I do?

Apply yourself.

Applying, yes.

Oh, I thought it was take the aptitude test.

Oh, I like that.

But that’s only one P.

Here’s the trick.

It’s actually if you remove the app, you get another word that is also clued by what I’m saying.

So lying is part of the answer.

App plus lying.

I see.

Okay.

Oh.

Oh.

All right.

Dish it out.

Let’s have another one.

Here’s another one.

Dear Grant and Martha, my name is Linus, and I’m a famous chemist, peace activist, and multiple Nobel Prize winner.

It’s shocking to see how many people don’t know who I am.

It’s appalling.

App plus appalling.

Appalling.

Yes, Linus Pauling.

All right, here’s your next one.

Dear Grant and Martha, I’ve got bugs all over my apartment and I’m afraid to get near them.

Can you help?

Approach them.

App plus Roach.

Approach.

Oh, I get it.

App plus Roach.

Yeah.

Here’s another one.

I’m starting to get the hang of it now.

You’ll get it.

Usually it’s by the end you figure out exactly what’s going on.

Dear Grant and Martha, are there any city ordinances regarding the behavior of audiences in the theater?

Are there app laws?

App laws.

Yes.

App laws laws.

I see a little phonetic action there.

Not just the spelling.

Okay.

Yeah, that’s right.

Things get phonetic occasionally around here.

Dear Grant and Martha, I’d be so, so happy if I could just remember my name.

Appalachian.

Appalachian.

Appellation.

Elation.

I’d be so, so happy.

Oh, you’d be so happy.

Yes.

Dear Grant and Martha,

I’d like to read all the Supreme Court cases about slithery sea creatures.

Is there an app for that?

Yes, the appeals.

The appeal would be the one.

Yes.

Dear Grant and Martha,

We’ve decided to put our house up on stilts,

And we want to know how much it will be worth if we do.

You’re going to appraise it?

We’re going to app raise it.

Yes.

Appraise.

App plus raise.

And here’s a little grammar lesson for you.

Dear Grant and Martha, I’m learning how to make bread.

How can I tell when my dough is ready?

You have to apprise it.

Yes.

App plus rise.

Apprise.

Very important, the distinction between appraise and apprise.

And one more.

Dear Grant and Martha, I have a rash, but I keep forgetting to call my doctor to see him about it.

What should I do?

Apply the lotion?

No.

You should make an app ointment.

App ointment.

Right.

Terrible.

That’s me.

That’s my middle name.

I’m terrible.

First I laugh, and then I say terrible.

So take your pick.

So you know.

You guys had a real aptitude for those.

We did.

Thank you.

Thank you, Greg.

That was a lot of fun.

It’s a pleasure.

Thank you.

Well, if you’d like to appear on our show, it would be apropos to call us, 877-929-9673, or email us.

The address is words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha.

Hi, Grant.

Hello.

Who’s this?

This is Brian Barnhorst from San Diego.

How are you doing?

Mr. Barnhorst.

Howdy.

So I have a question for you.

Okay.

Am I better off being correct or sounding stupid?

Oh, we run into that all the time.

I usually go for sounding stupid.

Martha usually goes for sounding correct and in the middle.

So here’s the question.

When you say that someone has a strength, or usually when you’re saying it’s not his strength, you will say that’s not his forte.

But am I correct in saying that that is an incorrect pronunciation and that the correct pronunciation is forte?

Yes.

I thought so.

No.

The second question, though, is if you say that, is everybody going to look at you like you don’t know how to pronounce the word because everybody says forte?

Yes.

All right.

Let’s rewind this for just a second.

We’re talking about the word F-O-R-T-E, and it means if something is your F-O-R-T-E, it’s something that you’re good at.

It’s in your wheelhouse.

It’s a strong point. It’s a strength, right?

Right.

Okay, good.

And the E has no accent mark over it.

Correct.

It does not in English. It does not. That’s correct.

And so the problem is that some people pronounce it forte, and some people pronounce it fort.

And I would say most pronounce it forte.

Correct.

Most do, yeah, by something like a margin of like 10 to 1.

Yeah.

However, there are the sticklers and the pedants and the people who fashion themselves as sophisticates say that fort is the only correct pronunciation.

Martha’s raising her hand.

Well, until you got to the part about that’s the only correct pronunciation.

And so, Brian, you say, what do you say?

Well, I try to avoid it for that very reason.

Right.

Very good.

And Martha, what do you say?

Right.

Strong suit or strength, I do the same thing because this…

It’s a trap, right?

It’s a trap.

It’s what they call a skunked word, which is you can’t win.

In the Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, they put it very distinctly.

They say you can take your choice knowing that someone somewhere will dislike whichever variant you choose.

You can’t win with this word.

And the arguments in favor of fort versus forte are they’re just as weak on both sides.

People will call up etymology and talk about French and Italian and go back to Latin and they’ll pound the table and they’ll throw wine in your face.

But no side has really got the moral high ground on this or the grammatical high ground for that matter.

Yeah, there’s not an accent in French. I think that’s what you were getting at, right?

I’ll tell you, though, that somebody else recently came to a decision on this, and I would love to meet the people who came to this decision.

What do you drive, Brian?

Volvo.

There is an automobile that’s been manufactured since 2008, and it’s the Kia Forte, F-O-R-T-E, and that’s how they pronounce it.

Oh, my goodness.

And they have several different models, and they sell a lot of them, and they’re very popular with rental agencies.

So if they’re tooling around, you drive to Atlanta and you rent a car, there’s a really good chance you’re driving a Kia Forte.

Now, does it have an accent mark?

No, there’s no accent.

Oh, my goodness.

Not that I’ve seen.

And I’ve listened to the ad specifically because I recognize, like, oh, hey, somebody somewhere in the naming division of Kia decided that this was an acceptable thing to do, right?

But what’s really interesting is they also have a model, which is the Forte Coupe, and they spell Coupe K-O-U-P.

No.

Yeah.

No.

So I’m not sure that they should be trusted when it comes to manner of pronunciation.

The forte coupe.

It’s like from a certain point of view, that could be twice wrong.

Oh, my gosh.

So, Brian, it sounds like your option is to sound stupid or be correct.

No, sound smart just by avoiding it altogether.

I’m good at sounding stupid.

That’s my forte.

You and I have a lot in common.

Brian, thanks for calling.

My pleasure.

Take care.

Thanks, Brian. Bye-bye.

Call us with your questions, 877-929-9673, or send those emails to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Tracy Cook from Pleasanton, California.

Hi, Tracy.

Hi, Tracy. Welcome to the program.

Thank you.

What would you like to talk with us about?

Well, I’ve been using a term lately that I remember my parents saying when I was growing up.

And when I’ve used it a couple times lately, no one else knows what it means.

And so I thought I would see if it was a term that other people had used, something my family used, and maybe why it’s gone out of fashion these days.

And the term is busman’s holiday.

And how would you define that?

The way we always used it is when somebody went to their job on their day off, not because they had to work, but just because they enjoyed it.

And the way I always understood it is that on his day off, the bus driver rode the bus just because he enjoyed it.

And you call it a busman’s holiday.

And how did your family use it?

We used it that way.

My dad worked for TWA at the San Francisco airport for years.

But if he had to go pick someone up at the airport or, you know, pick one of us up, he would go early and park and watch the planes land.

So we would always say it was his busman’s holiday.

He enjoyed being at the airport even on his day off.

So sort of an air busman’s holiday.

Exactly.

I love this term a whole bunch.

How long ago was this that you used it or do you still use it?

I still use it, and even people my age have never heard it, and they don’t know what it means.

That’s interesting. I love it. I know a variation of it, too. Postman’s holiday, which is exactly the same sort of thing.

A postman’s holiday is if a mailman who ordinarily walks his mail route decides to take a walk on his vacation, then that’s a postman’s holiday.

That’s a postman’s holiday.

Oh, that’s cute.

One of the things that throws American speakers is that in both of these expressions, we use the word holiday in the British sense to mean a vacation or time off.

And Americans might understand it, but it’s not universal here, whereas the British get it completely.

And actually, both of these terms are far more common in the UK than they are here in the US.

But Bussman’s holiday dates back to the late 1800s.

I don’t know that it’s particularly significant for the era, but you’ll find it used again and again and again.

And it’s always, it’s a little different than what you described.

It’s not necessarily that someone goes into the office on their day off.

It’s that, for example, I’m a dictionary guy.

I’m a lexicographer.

What I might do is go visit Noah Webster’s home on my holiday, right?

I go do stuff that’s related to my career.

I might go to an exhibit at the British Museum of great dictionaries of our time, right?

That’s kind of, it’s also about doing things associated with your work.

Right.

I hope that’s interesting.

Yeah, so it’s not just that you go into the office.

I did a little dictionary entry for Postman’s Holiday.

When I was researching that, I found there’s a song published in French called Le Fête d’Embalade, which means the postman’s holiday.

And it’s 1900 to 1920, not quite sure of the date, but it was a ragtime song.

And the whole idea in the lyrics of the song is that the postman who walks his route on his holiday also walked.

He would just go walk up the coast or walk through town and sometimes walk to exactly the same places that he ordinarily would deliver mail, only not deliver mail.

Carrying something really heavy and being chased by dogs?

Maybe, yeah.

Hopefully he was pulling a keg behind him or something.

Some kind of vacation there.

So, Tracy, what would a busman’s holiday be for you?

Well, I work in the education field, so I imagine it would be going to school or reading about education, that kind of thing.

Thank you so much for your call.

Oh, thank you.

I’m a big fan of the show.

Oh, yay.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Well, I love the fact that Tracy had this expression in her family, didn’t know if it was unique to her family, couldn’t find anybody else who understood it, so she called us.

If you have one of those, call us, 877-929-9673, or email us, words@waywordradio.org.

A while back, we were talking about oxymorons, those fabulous expressions that derive their name from the Greek for pointedly foolish.

And we got a great list of them from Angela DeStefanis, who also notes that she has a favorite T-shirt that her mother, the English teacher, gave her.

It reads, an oxymoron a day keeps reality away.

I want one of those.

And then her list of oxymorons of some of her favorites include death benefits and standard deviation and legal brief.

I like those.

We also heard from Ken Clark, who called us with his favorite oxymoron, which is Dodge Ram.

I like that. Dodge Ram. Think about it.

You will now.

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

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Isaac from Richmond, Virginia.

Hi, Isaac. Welcome to the program.

Hi.

Thank you.

I was calling about my disability claim with the company.

Oh, sure, yeah, we can help you with that.

All right, Buckeye.

What?

Wait, wait, what?

I was just going to say yes to anything he asked.

What I’m calling about is the word Buckeye,

Which is something that we used to do when we were kids in Richmond, Virginia.

You would pull somebody’s leg about something,

And then you would, at the end of it, once you got them going,

You would say Buckeye, and you would pull your eyelid,

With your finger. And I went to college in Rhode Island. So I was up at studio one day

And I went to art school and I was up in studio and I was pulling somebody’s leg and I went

Buckeye and pulled my lower eyelid and they looked at me like I was crazy. And I was like,

You don’t know what Buckeye is? They’re like, what are you talking about? What is Buckeye?

So I started running around studio asking people if they knew what Buckeye meant and nobody knew.

And I was dumbfounded because I thought everybody knew what Buckeye was.

And so I started asking people around campus, and then there was one woman from Virginia who worked with horses.

And she said, you know, this was a fellow student, and she said that,

I don’t know what Buckeye means in the way that you’re using it,

But a horse with a Buckeye is a horse that’s blind in one eye.

And I started thinking, well, maybe that’s the connection.

So I wanted to find out more about it.

Huh.

You can tell me.

Well, I think maybe they were all pulling your leg.

Maybe they were all standing behind you saying, Buckeye!

They cracked up when you left the room.

I do know that the horse person’s use of it is in a couple dictionaries referring to horses that have odd eyes one way or the other.

They stick out too much or they have some weird kind of blood thing going on.

They squint or something weird.

And, of course, buckeye for the brown nut comes from the name of, it refers to the actual eye of a buck, of a deer.

Yeah, it looks like that.

It’s got the little spot in the middle.

So it does refer to an eye to begin with.

So we have two different connections to the eye.

Now, as far as this ritual of taunting someone and then pulling down your eyelid and saying buckeye, that I’ve never heard before.

Never heard of it.

You can’t give me more information about it.

Buckeye, no, we can’t.

Well, you know what we can do, and that’s what we’re doing now,

We can put it out to hundreds of thousands of people who are listening to the program

And find out what they know about it and then get back to you.

We do have a lot of listeners in Virginia and various parts of the South

And, of course, across the country, and somebody’s bound who have heard of this besides you.

Okay, well, great. I’ll look forward to that.

Yeah, now I do know that Buckeye in the 19th century referred to something that was sort of inferior,

Like you might talk about a buckeye lawyer or a buckeye doctor being not so well trained,

Or it also referred to country bumpkins.

So I’m wondering if that has something to do with it.

But the pulling down the eyelid?

Oh, so you might be calling the person a rube or a bumpkin by saying that they were fooled by your trick.

That’s what I’m thinking, but I don’t know for sure.

And I sure don’t know about that.

So you pull the lower eyelid down to expose more of the eyeball.

Exactly.

Huh.

Exactly.

For how long?

Just for a second.

Oh, just for a second.

Okay.

You just pull it down and let it go.

Well, Isaac, surely there are other people besides you who have done this.

There must be.

And they will let us know about it.

877-929-9673.

Or if you’ve heard of this Buckeye ritual, drop us an email, words@waywordradio.org.

Thanks, Isaac, for calling.

We’ll see what we can do for you, all right?

Well, thank you very much.

You have a good day.

Take care.

Okay.

Bye-bye.

So, of course, we have to mention the two other kinds of rituals related to this.

In California, we’ve talked about this in the program,

Moated is similar, right?

Oh, right.

You trick somebody and you say, Moated!

And then when I was growing up in Missouri in the Midwest,

Lots of people know the psych one, right?

You do something that tricks somebody and you say, Psych!

But not Buckeye.

We sure didn’t do that in Kentucky.

And there was no eye jester either.

877-929-9673 is the number to call if you can help out Isaac with Buckeye

Or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

More of your calls as A Way with Words continues.

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. I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett, and I’m a very happy man.

Yeah! Why is that?

Well, it’s something called the Google Books Corpus.

Oh, yeah.

Mark Davies, who is a researcher at Brigham Young University, has a site where he’s made a lot of corpora.

Now, these are big collections of text that you can use to discover new things about words.

It’s what we call in the dictionary trade the pragmatics, how words are really used, like what words they keep company with.

Right. So corpora from the Latin for body.

Exactly right. One of them is a corpus and more than one are corpora.

And so what he’s done is taking Google Books, which is this massive online archive of text, and he’s marked every word in it that he’s been given with a part of speech.

So the nouns are marked and the verbs are marked and so forth.

And then he’s put them into his program and his database, and we can search that in clever ways.

For example, if you type in the word suitcase, you’ll see that suitcase is often prefixed by the word battered.

Oh, really?

Battered suitcase is like a thing.

It’s actually so much of a thing that it’s kind of a cliche.

So maybe if you’re a writer and you’re using this corpus, you might want to avoid it.

On the other hand, if you’re a dictionary editor and you want to provide a good illustrative sentence for your readers, right,

If you want to show how the word is really used, you might say, he picked up his battery suitcase and went to the bus station, right?

So that’s just one of a thousand examples of the kind of things you can find there.

But for the average person who’s not a dictionary editor, I think the best use of these corpora are kind of doing dictionary work yourself.

Look, let’s put it this way.

Who arranges your travel now?

You do, right?

Yeah, right, right.

20 or 30 years ago, you called an agent, right?

Right, right, right.

When you want to do research on the best computer to buy, what?

Do you go into a store now?

Most of us don’t.

We do it online, right?

Oh, yeah.

We do our own digging.

Yeah, buying a car.

So many different things that we do now.

We go online.

We figure it out for ourselves because the data are out there.

And it’s the same with language.

If you go to Mark Davies’ site, just look for Mark Davies, BYU.

It’ll be the first thing you find.

You can do the kind of dictionary digging that I do for a living and get paid for it.

You can do it for yourself for free, right?

So it’s not a dictionary itself.

It’s all the raw material that somebody would use to make a dictionary.

It’s kind of a – frankly, for our audience, it’s a black hole because I just know that they’re going to go there and go, oh, just one more search.

Oh, just one more search.

Because you’ll type in words.

Here’s a favorite thing to do.

Go to Mark Davies’ site and type in the word instantly.

And then type in the word instantaneously.

And you will see immediately that although they seem to be synonyms, they have differences.

For example, instantaneously is often used after the word it’s modified, where instantly is almost always used before the word it modifies.

Hours of fun for the whole family.

Well, no, but if you want to be a precise writer, and if you want to get, particularly if you’re not a native speaker of English, you can get closer to the native speaker intuition by getting in there and kind of just thinking about every word that you use.

The best writers think about every single word they put down in this way, and this is a tool to help you get there.

I mean, I don’t know that you should be looking up and and the and so forth, but for the most part, if you’re trying to decide between two words, this is a tool that can help you.

Interesting.

What’s the side again?

Just look for Mark Davies, that’s D-A-V-I-E-S, and B-Y-U in Google or Yahoo or wherever, and it’ll be the first thing that comes up, I promise.

Cool.

It’s tremendous. It’s free.

You may have to register after a certain number of searches, but it’s still free.

And just think about using it to inform your own writing and your own speech in a way where you learn new things that you didn’t know about language.

So, Grant, are you saying that going to someplace like dictionary.com isn’t enough anymore?

I think in most cases going to an online dictionary is fine and will get you there.

But I also know from the email and the phone calls that we get, we have a lot of sophisticated language users who need a little more.

They need more example sentences, for example.

They need to find words that the dictionaries haven’t recorded yet, which is actually quite a large number.

Yeah, a lot of people don’t think of dictionaries as a work in progress.

Yeah, actually, dictionaries are usually far behind the language.

They’re slow to update, and they’re rather conservative in their inclusion policy.

So I think for a lot of our more advanced users, and frankly, it might be most of our listeners, there’s some use at Mark Davies’ site for them.

At the very least, it’s no different than just looking for a random page on Wikipedia and just seeing what you can see.

Type in your own name or the name of a town or your favorite verb and just see what comes up.

And you might learn something new.

Interesting. Do it yourself.

Do it yourself lexicography.

Well, if you want to talk about dictionaries, grammar, language, slang, call us 877-929-9673 or send those emails to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi there.

This is Marie, and I’m calling from Anna, Texas.

Hi, Marie.

Welcome to the program.

Anna, Texas?

Anna, a little bit north of Dallas.

Okay.

So I have a burning question of my family.

Vacation, every time we enter into the driveway from driving home, my mom would exclaim,

Home again, home again, jiggity jig.

And we have no idea where that comes from or what the heck she’s talking about.

Do you know what?

My mother did the very same thing.

Oh, dear.

Every time.

I can remember her switching off the ignition and there’s this silence and then she says,

Home again, home again, jiggity jig.

Yeah.

Where does that come from?

We should form a support group.

I know, right?

Yeah.

But wait a second.

Mother Goose, right?

Yeah, Mother Goose.

It’s the last line of a bit of Mother Goose, right?

Did your mother read Mother Goose rhymes to you, Marie?

Yeah.

How does it go?

Do you read your group?

And I kind of seem to remember something about a fat pig or…

Yeah, yeah.

To market, to market, to buy a fat pig.

Home again, home again, jiggity jig.

To market, to market, to buy a fat hog.

Okay.

Home again, home again, jiggity jog.

Yeah.

Mystery solved.

Mystery solved.

Yay.

This is one of the most transmitted after, let’s say, the Bible, right?

Right.

Mother Goose rhymes are everywhere.

Yeah, kind of universal.

Yeah.

My son, who I admit has a lot of books, has probably six different versions of the Mother Goose rhymes and six different books.

It’s tons of stuff.

Well, that’s interesting.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, great.

I’m glad to hear that.

Well, I’m glad to hear you weren’t deprived of Mother Goose when you were a kid.

Me too.

I was worried there for a second.

No, it wasn’t deprived.

Well-rounded.

Did we put the fire out?

Yes, you did.

Everything’s cool now?

Thank you so much.

Our pleasure.

Glad to help.

Okay.

Thank you.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Thanks, everybody, for your responses about Scrabble rules that you use at home.

Lots of variations, some really interesting stuff there.

I really liked the one from Steve Smith.

They do this thing with the blank tile when they play Scrabble, Martha.

Yeah.

If you put it down and say that it’s an E, and then I have an E on my tile rack,

I can put my E in place of the blank tile and then use the blank tile again.

So in that way, the blank tile circulates.

And I bet it makes for a really kind of vital and exciting board that way, right?

Yeah, I bet it does.

A lot more possibility anyway.

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

This is a show about words and language.

Bring it on.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, is this Martha?

Yes, who’s this?

Martha, this is Charles, and I’m in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Hi, Charles, welcome.

Hi, Charles, how are things in Charlottesville?

Hey, just great.

My question goes to a program recently, Masterpiece Theater on PBS, called Downton Abbey.

Oh, yeah.

And it is a, is it a period?

Yeah, period piece, yeah.

Period piece, sure.

Having to do with the time in the first session, at least, the first season,

Exactly between the sinking of the Titanic and the start of World War I.

Now, there are various phrases that are tossed about, some of which are alive very much today.

One of which I stumbled upon was, put that in your pipe and smoke it, delivered by Maggie Smith.

Oh my, I love that image.

And someone said, if so-and-so doesn’t like it, he can lump it.

And I wondered if both of those phrases and others, not the least of which is,

One of the servants, O’Brien, is told by the lady of the house, you’re sailing perilously close to the wind.

Whether all of those phrases, the last one I can kind of interpret, nautical phrase, of course, but the first two, still common very much today, were they common then?

And is that something we want to discuss?

Sure. I love that expression, like it or lump it.

Yeah, and I don’t know where it comes from.

Well, there is an old sense of lump as a verb to mean to look sulky or disagreeable.

So like it or lump it, that goes back to at least a century earlier.

Yeah, yeah, 1830s or earlier.

Well, at least 100 years before the period that you’re talking about.

Yeah.

About 100 years.

Okay, so it’s legit that that be in the…

Yeah, it’s a rare use of the verb lump, meaning to deal with something in a sulky or kind of grumbly way.

Yeah.

Let them lump it if they don’t like it.

Yeah, there you go.

Lots of variations.

And I always love to put that in your pipe and smoke it, mainly because it makes me think of my Uncle Ernest, who has long since gone, who smoked a pipe.

And so, you know, when you have a pipe smoker in your life, that particular aroma of their tobacco is always associated with that person.

I just realized I miss pipe cleaners.

My dad smoked a pipe, and I used to do the coolest things with pipe cleaners and no more.

But put that in your pipe and smoke it is from just about the same period.

We have citations for that back to the 1820s, meaning that people used it exactly as we use it today,

meaning whether you like it or not, take that and just deal with it in any way you can.

It’s very much related to like it or lump it.

Is that right? I thought it would have gone back to the 60s or something.

That kind of pipe.

No, it’s older than that.

Wow, that’s interesting.

Dickens used a variation of an 1830s and pretty much it just keeps coming up again and again and again.

Writers love it.

I don’t know that people say it all together that much aloud, but writers love that expression.

It’s a bit of color that they can use.

All right.

The final one then is sailing perilously close to the wind.

That’s a warning to the servant who has gotten a little out of hand and has said things maybe she shouldn’t have.

To the wind.

I could see if it was to the sun, maybe alluding that they were Icarus, right?

Icarus, right.

I don’t know that one.

That’s a big hunk for me.

Surely from the period, sailing was far more common and prevalent, right?

So I could see it coming from the sailing.

Gee, if only we lived on the coast.

Oh, wait, we do.

There are lots of people.

Yeah.

Well, Charles, I guess we’ll have to put that in our pipe and smoke it.

All right.

Well, then.

But thank you.

You have a great show, and I listen to it regularly.

Thank you so much for calling, Charles.

Well, thank you.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

If you’ve got a question about something that you saw, something that you heard, something that you read, give us a call, 877-929-9673, or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

We talked about corpora earlier.

These are the big collection of texts that let you find interesting things about words and language.

Yeah, database diving.

Database diving. I love it.

Well, one of the things that I talked about was the word battered and how it was associated with the word suitcase.

In a more serious note, you can also use this kind of big database that has a lot of text over time to find out what people are talking about over a particular period.

And so you’ll find, for example, that the phrase battered women doesn’t really start to occur very much in English until 1910.

And then you can see the interest level rise as the frequency level rises.

1910? I would have thought it was much later. Interesting.

It begins to be talked about as the women’s movement becomes strong, as the suffrage movement becomes strong,

as all of these things start to arise, then the idea that it’s not right for a husband to beat his wife also becomes well-known.

And you can see these kinds of things in the historical data gathered in the corpora.

Wow, what a window on history.

If you’d like a little bit more information about the corpora, drop us a line, words@waywordradio.org.

And we’re here to take your questions about language, slang, grammar, punctuation, spelling, and more.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Deb, and I’m calling from Chicago.

Actually, I live in Waukegan, but I’m at work, and so I’m calling from Chicago.

You commute from Waukegan to Chicago.

I do.

Well, how can we help you today, Deb?

Well, I wrote to you about which came first, the color orange or the fruit.

And I’ve been thinking a lot since how, you know how sometimes a color just really pops up in your life?

I mean, this is the year of the color orange.

I mean, I’ve always loved it, and I had sort of orange hair as a kid.

But I just noticed it’s a color I’m really gravitating to.

It’s really expressing me.

And also, my husband and I are eating one heck of a lot of oranges.

I think it’s natural that this question arose.

So which came first, the fruit or the color?

Yeah, because I thought, and I was remembering that in Spanish we say color de naranja.

And the one other piece of information I gleaned, I didn’t want to look this.

I wanted to have a conversation with you guys rather than try to figure it out.

But I was talking to a friend of mine about it.

And she thought she was pretty sure that the Moors brought oranges to Spain.

That’s where they first crept into our language.

But again, I still don’t know whether that’s because we already have the color orange.

Yeah, oranges did travel a long, long way.

That’s right, yeah.

Yeah, from East Asia all the way over here.

The original term was in Sanskrit, and it found its way going west through Arabic and Persian and Italian.

And you’re right, it turned into naranja in color de naranja in Spanish.

And eventually it found its way into English.

But you’re right. It’s the fruit that came first.

Long before that, for centuries, it wasn’t as if the color wasn’t there.

In Old English, before that, you would say yellow red or something like that for yellow red.

This fascinating fruit was so striking that within 100 years or so of it first appearing in the West, they started using it as the word for the color, sort of like beet red, I guess.

Yeah, there’s two interesting things here that have always struck me about orange.

The first is that like the parts of the body, colors travel very well in language.

It’s very easy to find the etymology of colors because we are constantly using them.

We are constantly speaking them and writing about them or using them in our writing.

So this is why we know the history of the word orange.

And actually, it’s kind of the reason that we know the history of the fruit orange as well.

The second thing about orange in English, which is really interesting, once the word appeared in some form in Italian and then entered French, in France, the name of the fruit became a little confused with a place spelled O-R-A-N-G-E.

It just coincidentally was very similar to the word.

And so that is where we got the English spelling and a bit of the English pronunciation of orange.

Yeah, there happened to be a lot of oranges coming through orange.

Yeah, so it’s just from the East, yeah.

Very much a coincidence.

It’s very interesting.

But what a strong etymological path we have here.

We’ll make sure to put some information about this on the website.

Deb, I’ve got to tell you, this was a great call.

Thank you for calling and asking us about this interesting word.

Yeah.

Thanks so much.

I’m glad to know it’s the year of the orange.

Or the year of orange.

Love orange.

Really enjoyed it.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

So to sum up, that word orange is fruit forward.

The fruit comes first.

Fruit forward.

You like it?

Forward thinking fruit, like orange.

And can you imagine how exotic that must have been?

Because, you know, you look at some of the Germanic languages like German and Dutch.

The term translates as Chinese apple, the term for orange.

Oh, very good.

So even in those languages, it retains a bit of the history of the thing.

Yeah.

I love that.

Yeah, it’s an apple, but it’s from this exotic place to the east.

Word origins, they make us hot.

877-929-9673.

Or send your questions about those strange histories to words at wewordradio.org.

Grant, I came across a great quotation the other day.

I’m not sure who the author is, but I really love it.

It’s very timely.

Okay.

I don’t find it hard to meet expenses.

They’re everywhere.

Ain’t that the truth?

And yes, I said ain’t.

It’s in the dictionary.

Call us with your words of wisdom, 877-929-9673, or send those emails to words@waywordradio.org.

Things have come to a pretty pass.

That is our show for this week.

Don’t forget, you can leave us messages even when we’re not on the air.

Call us, 877-929-9673, or send us email.

The address is words@waywordradio.org.

Stay in touch with us all week on Facebook and Twitter.

You can listen to all our past shows online by going to waywordradio.org or get the podcast on iTunes.

Stefanie Levine is our senior producer.

Our technical director and editor is Tim Felten.

Tim also chooses our music.

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

A Way with Words is independently produced and distributed by Wayword, Inc., a nonprofit organization.

The show’s recorded at Studio West in San Diego, California.

Thanks for listening. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. So long.

Ta-ta.

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