You haven’t played in the mud until you’ve done it in South Carolina, where a particularly fine, silty mud is called pluff. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Play in the Mud”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette.
Last week I was giving a talk about language here in San Diego, and I did what you and I both love to do beforehand, which is to pass out index cards to everyone and say, tell me something you think I should know. Tell me something about language, a story, or a word, or a phrase that has caught your ear lately.
And I love getting home and going through all of those because it’s sort of like getting a swag bag from your own talk, right?
Yeah, exactly. Dumping out the bag after you’ve gone trick-or-treating, all kinds of great stuff.
Last week, one of our listeners who was there in the audience gave me a great word, which is pluff. Pluff. Do you know this word?
I don’t know it. P-L-U-F-F.
Is this a family word?
No, it’s not a family word, but it’s particular to South Carolina. It’s a word that refers to a kind of fine, silty mud, and there are all kinds of references to it online. You can go to YouTube and see people playing in the pluff. It’s a particular kind of mud that you see there on the coast.
So the reason that we ask people to tell us things we don’t know is because there are only two of us, and even though we’ve got a lot of great correspondence and email and wonderful things come over the transom in social media, and we’re out meeting and greeting when we do our public events, speeches and whatnot, and presentations and this and that, we’re still feeling behind, right? There’s always more to learn.
It’s like shoveling snow in a blizzard, right?
Yeah, and I had the experience recently. These two lovely young women came up after an event, and they’re from two different parts of San Diego County, and they had two different slang uses of the word burnt. And one of them used the word burnt to kind of mean played out or finished or kind of like, that’s burnt, that’s over with.
The other one used burnt to mean like we don’t have anything to do with him because he’s burnt. He’s just not one of our people. Not desirable.
Not desirable, yeah. Uncool.
It was really interesting that in San Diego County in these two women’s vocabulary were two different forms of the slang word. I had no idea.
Very cool.
Yeah, so this is why we’re asking you right now to tell us things that you think we don’t know, but you’re pretty sure that we should. Fill out those virtual index cards by calling us at 877-929-9673 and tell us something about language that you think we don’t know. Or send it an email to words@waywordradio.org.
