Polyglot Problems (episode #1374)

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

And I’m Martha Barnette.

A sniglet is a silly, made-up term for something that hasn’t been defined as a single word but perhaps ought to be.

For example, intoxication.

You know, that’s the euphoria that you get at getting a tax refund before you realize that it was your money in the first place, right?

Right, right, right.

And what I particularly like about intoxication is that it defines a feeling.

Because I think that when translating emotions, words really do fall short a lot of times.

And I’ve been thinking about this especially after an email we got from Christina Smith.

She’s from San Diego, and she sent us a link to something called emotionary.com.

And it’s this whimsical collection of Sniglets that specifically pertain to emotion,

Like this one, exochism.

Can you guess what exochism is?

Exochism. Nope, no idea.

That’s the act of torturing oneself by thinking about the existence of or compulsively checking in exes, Facebook, and Twitter feed.

Oh, you can’t stop thinking about your ex.

Or how about epiphyshtiny?

Epiphyshtiny.

Yes.

So some big revelation about something, but I can’t quite make up the parts.

Yeah, yeah, that’s good.

It’s knowing that all your problems are smaller than you think, often due to gazing out at a vast space and realizing how large the Earth is in comparison to how small you are.

Right. Yeah, I know that feeling.

Yeah, yeah.

So it’s got tiny on the end.

That’s the joined up word there, right?

Yes, yes.

And I should just add that an epiphanase is the moment one realizes aioli and mayonnaise are exactly the same thing.

I remember that moment.

I remember that moment.

And I know you can pronounce it aioli too, so don’t email us.

But do email us your questions about language.

You can send them to words@waywordradio.org.

And if you’ve got some sniglets of your own, cute little words about emotions or anything at all,

Send them along, email, Twitter, you name it, put them on Facebook, or call us on the phone, 877-929-9673.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, guys. This is Jeffrey from Cardiff-by-the-Sea, California. How are you?

Hi, Jeffrey. Welcome.

Hey, how are you doing?

Good. It’s good to be here. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, sure.

I’m having some marital difficulties.

Oh.

And I’ve been trying to figure out what to do, and I have a co-worker named Alicia who says,

I’ve got two great marriage counselors for you. Their names are Martha and Grant.

And you need to talk to these people because they can solve any of your marital difficulties.

Right. Tell my wife that.

What kind of insurance do you have?

So it concerns the way that I say a certain phrase.

And my wife disagrees with the way I say it, and she is holding it against me and is threatening legal action.

She says, when I go to visit my friend, let’s say my friend Alicia, I say I’m going over Alicia’s house.

And she, of course, chimes right in and says, are you going to fly there on a broom?

Are you on your broomstick?

You should be saying, I’m going over to Alicia’s house.

Now, of course, I learned in school that going over to is probably the correct usage.

But I was wondering if I’m just crazy, if I’m a grammatical slob,

Or if other people in parts of the country say go over someone’s house

Rather than say go over to someone’s house.

And can this marriage be saved?

Well, I don’t know.

Is she seriously?

Let’s ask the experts.

I mean, she’s not going to really divorce you.

No, she’s not going to.

Does it really bother her, though?

It does.

It does really bother her.

Every time I say it, she goes, oh, are you a witch?

Are you Harry Potter?

Are you going to get on your broom and fly over to their house?

And how do you feel about what she says?

Oh, it doesn’t matter to me.

You know, I always say, okay, I’m going over to Alicia’s house.

Is that better?

And she said, yes, that’s much better.

So this is interesting, Jeff, because I’m going to throw some jargon at you.

Here it is.

Locative preposition deletion.

Okay.

Or locative prepositional deletion is kind of common in English.

This is where we take out the prepositions that talk about direction or destination.

And it’s not that tied to very many dialects of English,

But it pops up so frequently because prepositions are these little mushy parts of English

That we can often do without and do.

It’s not that common.

There are parts of Michigan where people do this and are known to do it.

And the Northeast, too.

Yeah, some parts of the Northeast.

It’s on the record.

It happens.

I don’t know.

Where are you from, anyway?

Are you from Cardiff-by-the-Sea?

Well, no, I’m not.

I actually just moved here very recently.

Oh, from where?

Well, see, I grew up outside of Boston, outside of Worcester,

In a little town called Paxton.

Oh, okay.

And then when I was pretty young, probably 11 or 12,

I moved to Ohio, northeast Cleveland, and that’s where I met my wife. We’ve been together for 13,

Going on 14 years now. And so this has been an issue for 13, going on 14 years now.

The point here is that locative prepositional deletion happens in cases of minimal confusion.

That is where people are unlikely to be confused if you leave the preposition out. Now, your wife

Is making a choice to pretend to be confused in order to make a joke at your expense. And that’s,

I can’t fix her sense of humor.

It’s kind of one of those funny once things.

Maybe giggle the second time and the third time you just roll your eyes.

But the thing is, so there is minimal confusion here.

She knows that you can’t fly.

You don’t have a Nimbus 2000, right?

No jet pack.

You’re not actually going over the house, like looking down into the chimney or anything.

So she chooses to misunderstand.

And do you think there is a little bit of evidence here that you may have picked something up in Boston in your idiolect?

You may have picked this naturally from your environment because it’s not uncommon anywhere in the English-speaking world to hear this.

It’s not that common, but it’s on the record.

We have records of it.

People do it.

It’s in the dialect handbooks.

They say, oh, it happens.

So it’s not just me being sloppy.

No, no.

I don’t think so.

Are you sloppy?

The thing is just the speech that you have with us right now sounds fine.

You don’t sound like a sloppy speaker.

So this is advice we could give to everybody.

Liven up your marriage with some locative prepositional deletion.

And I have a feeling that that’s what she does to keep things spiced up a little bit.

You know, it’s been 14 years.

I have a feeling that we’re going to stay together for quite a long time.

You should add prepositions that they don’t belong to.

I love to you.

I love to you.

I love on you.

Well, I think it sounds like you have a very healthy relationship and a rosy future.

Well, thank you. I appreciate that.

And thanks for all your help with that.

I’ll make sure to let her know that I’m right and she’s wrong.

Thanks, Jeff.

Now, wait a minute.

Okay, thanks, Jeff.

Have a great day, guys.

Take care. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org, on Twitter as Wayword, and all over Facebook.

Something I recorded in my commonplace book a long time ago came from a Singapore newspaper.

And their website doesn’t exist anymore, but I still have this clipping on my computer.

And I wanted to share this with you.

This is a fictional report about a Japanese banking crisis, okay?

Okay.

Following last week’s news that the origami bank had folded,

We are hearing that Sumo Bank has gone belly up,

And Bonsai Bank plans to cut back some of its branches.

Karaoke Bank is up for sale and is going for a song.

Meanwhile, shares in Kamikaze Bank have nosedived and 500 back office staff at Karate Bank got the chop.

Analysts report fishy going-ons at Sushi Bank and staff fear they may get a raw deal.

So, I don’t like puns, but that was quite nice.

That was terrific.

We’d love to hear your wacky stories, your weird tales, your odd jokes.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Shannon calling from Cardiff, California, just north of San Diego.

Hey, Shannon.

Welcome to the show.

Hi, Shannon.

What’s up?

Well, I have a question for you guys.

Okay.

I work at a large public university near here, and I was at a recent staff meeting, and our boss said that every campus unit should be a tub on its own bottom.

And I understood the context, but I was curious about the origin of that phrase.

What did you take it to mean?

Well, I assumed it meant being self-sufficient and that we were expected to pay our own way.

Right.

But I don’t know where it came from.

And Shannon, what are you picturing?

Well, I thought it had something to do with a boat because I thought of a tub and a boat.

But my colleague thought it had maybe was the claws on a bathtub.

So I thought, I know where to go with this question.

Interesting.

So each tub should stand on its own bottom.

Yes.

So what kind of person was this?

Was a history professor, somebody who had a little bit of background in literature or religion?

Anybody special?

Well, she’s a sociology professor, but also one of the vice chancellors at the university.

Okay.

Okay.

Well, there’s at least 400 years of history behind this term, it turns out.

Yeah.

And what the tub refers to is not a boat and not a bathtub, but the kind of cask or barrel that you might put wine or vinegar in or liquid in.

And so that used to be called a tub.

And I don’t understand why each tub has to stand on its own bottom.

Perhaps when they’re on top of one another in the back of a wagon, they would fall over or the weight would be too much.

I don’t really know.

But that has been the expression for a long time.

But a more general form of this, that each person should stand on their own bottom.

Each one should stand on their own bottom.

Because bottom has historically meant foundation or base or the underpinnings of something.

Huh. Okay.

So this was a reference to the university and different units in the university standing independently of each other?

Yes, or bringing in enough revenue to support their function.

Right. So you’ve got to raise all your own grant money for your department and your programs, and you’re not going to siphon off a little bit from another department somewhere else.

That’s correct. We prefer we not do that.

Yeah, and it’s interesting that you’re using it in an academic setting because it was popularized in the early 1800s by the president of Harvard.

Oh, really?

Yeah, who used that expression.

And indeed, these days at Harvard, they have the acronym ETOB, which is each tub on its own bottom.

Well, that explains a lot.

Yeah, yeah.

So I think it got picked up by academics all over the country.

One interesting aspect to this you might appreciate, Shannon, is that in the 1600s, this was used in religious texts.

And you can find examples on Google Books.

But the meaning there was just a little different.

And what they meant was each tub on its own bottom meant that when you have a religious perspective and beliefs, then you should adhere to them and not try to disavow parts of your religion or disavow what your church is telling you to do.

If you are a Catholic, you are a Catholic.

If you are something else, you are something else.

And in this way, you depend upon the basis and the foundation of those who have come before you in your religion.

So it’s just a slight variation on the meaning there.

But in general, each one should stand on their own bottom.

Well, thank you. I appreciate that.

Yeah, sure.

Who knew it went all the way back to Pilgrim’s Progress?

I know, and wine barrels.

Yeah.

All right, well, thank you both. I appreciate it.

Sure. Thanks, Shannon. Bye-bye.

Have a good day.

Bye, Shannon.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

You remember when we were talking about that expression, order in the court, the monkey wants to speak, that thing that parents would use to make their kids be quiet?

We heard from Deanna Smith-Willis, who lives in Natchitoches, Louisiana.

She learned one from her grandfather in the 1940s.

He was chief justice of the Court of Civil Appeals in San Antonio, Texas.

And she says, my grandmother was horrified when she heard him teaching me, order in the court, the judge wants to spit, all who can’t swim better get.

That would clear a room, wouldn’t it?

I wonder if he actually said it from the bench.

Do you think he did?

I don’t know.

We can look at the records.

You never know.

Some people.

Share your family language stories with us, 877-929-9673.

Send them an email to words@waywordradio.org.

And you can find us anytime on Facebook and Twitter.

More words on Parade as A Way with Words continues.

You’re listening to A Way with Words.

I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

And joining us is John Chaneski, our quiz guy.

Hello, John.

Hi, Grant.

Hi, Martha.

Hiya, John.

What’s up?

I’m back for some more puzzles.

What do you think?

Should we do?

Please.

Yes.

Let’s do.

Let’s do.

Easy ones, right?

Hard ones?

Well, this one is, let me put it this way.

This one is just okay.

Okay.

In fact, that’s what I call it.

I call it just okay.

Okay.

This is a puzzle that I adapted from an idea by Will Shorts.

His puzzle is great.

Mine is just okay.

In fact, okay is the key to the puzzle.

I’ll give you a word.

You add O and K to the letters of the word and transpose them to get the answer.

Okay.

So a little bit of anagramming here.

A little bit of anagramming.

So get your pencils out if you need to.

Okay.

Okay.

Got it.

For example, if I said car, C-A-R, you would add okay to that, transpose the letters, and get what word?

Croak.

Croak.

Perfect.

Very well done.

Let’s try some more.

We’ll start with five-letter words.

The word sun, S-O-N.

Knock.

No.

No.

Nooks.

Nooks.

Very good.

Very good.

Let’s try the word dry, D-R-Y.

It’s an adjective describing someone who’s rather socially inept.

Dorky.

Dorky is right.

I didn’t get that first.

I’m used to it.

Let’s try the word rep, R-E-P.

Plus OK equals?

Poker.

Poker, yes, very good.

The word now is net, N-E-T, net.

Token.

Token is correct.

Very nice.

Finally, for the five letters, we have sly, S-L-Y.

Yolks, as in egg yolk.

Yolks is correct.

I can hear the gears turning.

It’s wonderful.

Sorky?

What?

Let’s move on to the six-letter words.

Get ready.

Okay.

Wean, W-E-A-N, plus okay.

Is…

No.

It describes someone in the morning.

Awaken.

No, awoken.

Awoken is right. Very good.

How about the award known as the OBIE?

O-B-I-E.

O-B-I-E.

Plus OK equals…

A bookie?

Bookie. Very good.

Someone who might take bets on the OBs.

Very good.

The word deco, D-E-C-O, plus OK equals?

Cooked.

Cooked.

Very good.

Veer, V-E-E-R, plus OK.

Revoke?

Revoke is right.

Let’s do another place name on the six letters.

Tape, T-A-P-E, plus OK equals?

Equals.

Topeka.

Topeka is correct.

Good.

Okay, we’re going to do one last one.

I like this one because it’s very, well, it’s very funny.

I think you should get it pretty quickly.

The word jester plus okay equals?

Jokester.

Jokester, yes.

Very good.

A lot of change.

All right, you jokesters.

I’m finished.

I’m done.

You guys were great.

Thanks, John.

Really appreciate it.

We’ll see you next week, right?

Great stuff.

See you then.

Bye-bye.

All right.

Take care now.

Call us if you’d like to talk about language, 877-929-9673, or send us an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Liz Whittle.

I’m calling from Grand Prairie, Texas.

Hiya, Liz.

I have a question for y’all.

Hey, what’s up?

How you doing?

Welcome to the show.

Thanks.

So, growing up in, like, north-central west Texas, my mom, when she was telling a story, and I do the same thing, she’d be telling this story, and it’s a long-involved, all the details and everything, just like this.

And then at some point, she would, you know, in the story, and she didn’t say, and that’s how it went.

She’d say, anywho, and go on to the next topic.

So I’ve always wondered, why does she do that?

And the other day, I actually heard somebody, either on TV or on the radio, do the same thing.

And I thought, there’s got to be an origin for this.

It started out somewhere.

Where did it originate?

I love it.

It’s good.

I use it myself.

Oh, good.

And you framed it exactly right.

These days we use anywho when we kind of want to either just kind of sum up what we’ve just said and kind of just give the quick line that kind of ends the whole conversation or when we want to change the topic.

So particularly if somebody has an awkward moment, right?

You know, they’re talking about your ex and you’re like, anywho, as I was saying about the rule.

So it started out as a dialect representation of Irish speech.

There was people would write it in print as if people in Ireland were saying it that way.

And maybe they were, maybe they weren’t.

But it was like, anywho, it was supposedly a dialect pronunciation.

But now, mostly in the United States, North America, Canada included, we use it as a falsely sophisticated way to say anyhow.

We are intentionally mispronouncing the word.

You’ll even see sometimes people get a little prim look on their face when they say it.

Kind of like a school teacher’s kind of, I don’t know, looking down their nose at you sort of appearance.

Look for that next time you see someone say it.

Yeah.

So it’s a little bit self-conscious then?

You’re like aware that you’ve been telling a story?

Yeah, yeah.

You’re going on and on.

And anywho, back to you, Liz.

So your mother…

That’s exactly how she would do it.

Your mother says this.

Right, right.

Well, I know all of us say it, of course.

Yeah, it’s incredibly widespread.

It’s very common throughout the United States.

So if you don’t mind, I have another question for you.

A twofer from Liz.

Bring it on.

Okay, so I grew up in a little bitty town.

And what I didn’t realize, you know, until you leave that town, is that my family especially, we call them Glassfordism.

So my maiden name is Glassford, and we would just say this stuff, and so some of it we knew was a Glassfordism.

But when I left town, I would say if I was looking at something and it was shoddy or not well-made or whatever, I’d say that’s such a cheap John deal.

And I didn’t realize it, of course, until I left town, that I think, I don’t know if that is a common phrase, and my friends just weren’t aware of it, or if that really was one of our family things, that we were the only ones that said that.

So, what do you think?

You are not alone.

It’s actually fairly widespread.

And it’s well known enough that it’s in the slang dictionaries, dating back from the late 1800s, when it can refer to a pawnbroker shop or it can refer to any kind of cheap store, what we might call a 99 cent store today.

Or it could just refer to the kind of person who shops in those places who is miserly and spends their money unwisely on really cheap things just because they’re too cheap to buy the proper quality.

So just a generic guy named John.

Yeah, I believe that’s what it is.

Yeah, yeah.

Just John is kind of like your stand in for buddy, Mac pal, guy, dude, whatever.

Just John is just your throwaway default person.

Cheap John.

I’ve never heard that.

Yeah, me neither.

I’m surprised.

You still use this.

I only know it from the dictionaries.

Well, it’s in my family because nobody else seems to be aware of it, but when we say it, we all know what we mean.

You know how that goes.

Yeah, sure.

Yes, indeed.

No, but it’s widespread.

It shows up.

It’s mainly in the United States, but it shows up again and again in recorded history over the last 200 years.

You know what?

Just telling folks that I was going to call in, it’s amazing what nice little phrases and stuff that everybody had that we all had to talk about it.

So I love your show.

Thank you, Liz.

And I’m so glad I got to call in.

You know, you should have everyone that you’ve been talking to about the show send in their questions, too.

Maybe we’ll get them on.

Okay, I will do that.

All right.

I’d be happy to do it.

Take care now, Liz.

Best of luck to you.

Okay, thanks, guys.

Bye-bye.

Appreciate it.

Bye-bye.

Anywho, so call us and goof with us about language, 877-929-9673.

Or you can send an email to words@waywordradio.org and find us on Facebook and Twitter.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Mary.

Hi, Mary, where are you calling from?

I’m calling from Dallas.

Dallas, well, welcome to the show.

I had noticed a new word showing up at work.

We had some changes where new people were coming in, and this buzzword that I call buzzword started showing up called cadence, and it seemed a very odd word to me, and they were talking about business cadence, organization cadence, and I didn’t know what it meant.

And so I was just really curious as to where it came from and how these things come out.

So the word is cadence, C-A-D-E-N-C-E, cadence.

Yes.

This is a buzzword that’s catching on in business, referring to, say, scheduling or the regular release of products.

It has that sort of rhythmic cadence like a drum.

And it may have been popularized by IBM, which was using this term back in the 90s.

They wrote a big paper, in fact, called About Chaos to Cadence.

And it had to do with taking the world of sales, which can be sort of like the Wild West of business because you have to be very nimble and innovative and resourceful.

And sales was kind of regarded as unruly and not very disciplined.

And so there was a movement within IBM to go from chaos to cadence, and that is making things much more regularized, developing metrics for reporting the results of sales and that kind of thing.

And it seems like cadence has caught on in the business world.

It’s caught on enough that people are grumbling about it on the Internet as being overused jargon.

I had never heard it before, and not in our company.

And it was just something that seems to have popped up, and now everybody’s trying to use it.

And are people rolling their eyes there?

Are they grumbling about it, or are they embracing it?

A couple of us have looked at each other to say, like, what is this?

I actually like the word cadence.

There’s something very comfortable to me about it.

It feels very secure.

It’s like you could just sort of lean back into it and have it support you somehow.

To me, I guess it’s about getting organized and doing something on a regular basis.

It sounds like one of those things.

It’s not about an offbeat drum.

It’s more about a steady drum.

Right, right.

And it’s about everybody marching to the same drummer, for sure.

And having the same targets.

Everybody knows where they need to be.

They know what the next step is, what the next note is.

Yeah, their focus.

Yeah.

So instead of all these different silo operations operating on their own terms, their own time.

Yeah.

Very interesting.

Well, Mary, thanks for calling about this.

I bet there are going to be all these people who, you know how when you hear a word for the first time and then you start hearing it everywhere, there’s going to be this steady cadence of cadence out there in the world for them.

So thank you for calling.

Thank you.

Thanks, Mary.

Take care now.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

What business jargon is buzzing around your office?

Call us about it, 877-929-9673.

Grant, here’s a linguistic mystery that came to us from Sam Moore from Salem, Ohio.

He writes, my wife was reading a Conan Doyle book, and it described a man as, quote, wearing a gray suit and carrying a brown wide awake.

I looked it up and found that a wide awake is a soft, low-crowned, wide-brimmed hat, also known as a Quaker hat.

But why is it called a wide awake?

A wide awake.

Yeah.

And if you want to picture this hat, picture the guy on the Quaker oatmeal box.

You know how his hat looks?

Kind of floppy?

Is it floppy?

Or is it firm?

It’s kind of firm, and it’s got kind of a flat top and a brim.

But the key here, it’s really, really smooth, and therefore it doesn’t have a nap.

It doesn’t have a nap, so it’s a wide-awake hat.

That’s really the origin.

Are you sure?

Yes, that’s it.

I was imagining that it had something to do with sitting in Quaker meetings where everyone is silent.

Is napping.

Yeah, well, the hat somehow pokes you or cuts you if you start leaning over.

It has little thorns in it or something.

A wide-awake hat.

Very interesting.

Yeah, you can find references in literature to Whiteoway.

And which Conan Doyle story was that?

Was that one of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries?

I don’t remember that.

I don’t know.

Another mystery.

Maybe I’ve got to go reread them.

Yeah, Sam, let us know.

And let us know your language questions, 877-929-9673, or you can send him an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hey there, this is Tyson from Seattle.

Hi, Tyson.

Welcome.

What can we help you with?

Well, I’m in grad school studying to become a counselor, and I’m taking this class on Introduction to Counseling Children and Adolescents.

And since I’m in school, all of our assignments are at least 10 years out of date as far as readings are concerned.

So they use some terms that are a little outdated.

And since we’re reading about teenagers, we came across the marijuana use.

And the thing that I noticed was that a lot of the authors would call it smoking dope.

And I’m 24, but all my life, whenever I’ve heard someone use that term, smoking dope, it was always an indicator that they were like old and out of touch and had no idea what they were talking about.

And maybe they were phronic, you know, maybe they were faking it.

So that got me thinking.

First of all, is this a regional thing or is this a generational thing?

Second, when did that change?

When did smoking dope become not marijuana?

And also, is this a common phenomenon where older slang terms aren’t just out of date?

They’re also indicators of sort of being out of touch.

So Tyson, this is really interesting.

So if I talked about kids smoking dope, you would think that I was an old fogey.

I wouldn’t be credible.

Are you certain that it’s all about marijuana and not also about opium or something else?

Yeah, yeah.

In the readings, it’s always in reference to marijuana.

And in my life, dope is pretty much exclusively a reference to steroids.

Okay.

Very good.

Well, dope has got a long and complicated history here.

And it’s not easy to dispense with it, no pun intended.

But it has met a variety of drugs over the long history of the word.

It has met hash.

It’s met opium.

It’s met heroin.

It’s met marijuana.

It’s met just plain old medicine.

It’s met butter.

It’s met coffee.

It’s met the kind of drugs that you might give a racehorse.

It has met steroids.

Dope is used for any kind of substance that somehow affects the recipient in a noticeable or excitable way.

That’s it.

Some way that you get a positive or enthusiastic response from the person.

And dope has been used for the chemicals that you use on canvas airplanes.

It’s been used to apply to any kind of substance that gets smeared on anything else.

Dope is one of the incredibly diverse words.

It began to be used in marijuana in probably the 1940s and has been used for marijuana ever since.

But as you say, it’s a little bit marked now.

And because of the diverse meanings of dope, it depends completely upon who you are, what you think the primary meaning of dope is.

And so it might be intergenerational, but because you come from a world where steroids maybe are something that people talk about or that you read about, then maybe for you, dope is primarily meaning steroids.

But somebody in their 50s, my father, who is a cop, he’s actually in his 70s, he would say dope.

He wouldn’t say pot when he was talking about marijuana.

And maybe it’s intergenerational, but it’s also because he’s a cop and that’s part of their lingo.

I would say dope.

Yeah.

Whoops.

No, but so it could be intergenerational, but it might be the opposite of what you think as well.

People who are using dope for marijuana might have a deeper kind of repository of the variety of meanings of dope and not just the one.

Gotcha.

It’s kind of complicated.

You know, there is one really great example of another word that’s made a transformation, and this one is even a more thorough transformation than dope, and this is the word stoned.

For you, what does stoned mean?

High.

High as a kite.

High on what?

Gosh.

Yeah, marijuana.

Marijuana, right.

But to people primarily born before 1970, it meant drunk.

Really?

Yeah, stoned used to mainly mean drunk.

And somewhere in the late 60s, early 70s, it started transforming.

Now stoned mainly means high on marijuana.

And so we do find this is really common with slang words.

They do transform.

They’re not as sticky.

Their meanings tend to be more flexible.

They tend to pass through the brain and take on new nuance depending on the group, depending on the person.

Tyson, I’m curious, what do you call marijuana?

Weed or pot.

Weed or pot.

Mostly weed.

Weed or pot.

What about grass?

Yeah, no, not really.

What about trees?

Well, only on the Internet.

Only on the Internet, okay.

Trees?

Wait, fill me in here.

Trees, marijuana, trees.

Do you smoke trees or do you?

It’s a lot.

It’s kind of like 420.

It’s a little bit of a code for marijuana.

Oh, okay.

So you can use it in a variety of contexts.

Okay.

We’re going to get some trees.

You might not say I smoke trees.

We might talk about having trees.

My new girlfriend is an arborist.

No.

Something like that.

No.

Okay.

Just wondered.

But it is one of the ways to circle this conversation around and try to wrap this up.

What we’re really talking about here is how we use language to decide who is included in our group and who is excluded.

And in your mind, people who say dope and mean marijuana are kind of not a part of your group.

And you found a way to distinguish that.

We do this with so many words, and slang in particular is prone to this.

This is how we decide who belongs and who doesn’t, who’s in, who’s out, who’s cool, who’s square.

Who’s high, who’s not.

You don’t sound high, Tyson.

Thanks for calling straight instead of high.

Thank you so much.

All right.

Appreciate it.

Take care.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

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

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

Amanda Kruel of Knoxville, Tennessee, wrote us to say that she has a weird thing happening and she wonders if she’s the only one.

Amanda learned French about 10 years ago, and now she’s learning German.

But here’s the weird part.

She will start a sentence in German, but if she gets stuck and can’t think of the German words, then her brain’s natural tendency is to go to French, not English.

She says, when grasping for the German words that aren’t on that top shelf in my mind, French filler feels more appropriate than English.

In other words, if she can’t think of a German phrase, it’s as if her brain knows that it’s supposed to be looking for a language that isn’t English, and so it reaches for French.

And it turns out that she’s not alone, and that linguists talk about what they call faulty language selection.

It’s not that polyglots don’t know the correct words.

They just can’t produce them.

And it almost always happens while they’re speaking, not while they’re writing.

It’s pretty common.

Interesting.

Do you have this problem?

Not so much.

I mean, I don’t speak three languages actively, but I’ve talked to friends who have this problem, people who speak more than one language.

And there’s actually a really interesting blog called Sarah on Sabbatical that’s run by Sarah Melanson, who’s a professor at Valencia Community College in Florida.

And she writes about how years ago she took a job at a hotel in Bavaria.

And at that time, her strongest foreign language was French.

And some tourists from France needed a translator.

So, of course, she goes running up to help.

And for the life of her, she couldn’t stop translating into German for them.

And she actually had to stop and just write down her answers in French.

And you hear this again and again that somehow the languages kind of short-circuit each other out.

And it may be because of where our brain stores extra languages.

You know, it’s different if you grow up bilingual.

If you’re a little kid and you’re learning two different languages at one time, it gets stored in one particular part of the brain. But if you learn a language later, the second language gets stored in a slightly different area of the brain. The brain is a strange organ, isn’t it?

Yes.

And I’m very curious to know if other listeners of ours have had those experiences. Yeah, I’d love to hear from the people who speak more than two languages. What’s it like to have four or five languages at the tip of your tongue and yet keep them sorted, keep them solved?

Yeah.

Particularly people who are professional translators. Mm— Yeah, a friend of mine describes it as flipping through a mental Rolodex, you know, when you’re looking for them. I wonder if there’s a gap there, a pause while you reconfigure, right?

A slight one, yeah. Tell us, we want to know, how are the languages working out for you? Three, four, five, however many it is. How’s that working out for you? 877-929-9673. Email words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Grant. Hi, Martha. Who is this?

Hi. This is Jolene Beanster calling from Hamilton, Ontario.

Hi, Jolene. Welcome to the show. Well, I have something that I’m hoping you can help with, because it’s kind of been driving me nuts. And I had to ask my husband about it, and we have the same issue. If there’s something that, let’s say it’s peanut butter or drugs or something, and you can’t stop enjoying it, you would say that it’s rather, I would say, addictive.

And my childhood and through both of my English degrees, I’ve never been corrected in using the word addictive. And one day I heard somebody say addicting. I thought, that’s silly. That’s the wrong word. And then I heard more people say it. And then I heard it on the news. And then I heard it on the radio. And now I hear it more than the word addictive. And I’m starting to think that maybe I was wrong all along and nobody ever corrected me.

And I don’t know if it’s a living in Florida versus Canada thing because I have moved. But I’m pretty sure I started hearing it in Florida.

No kidding. Interesting. Addictive versus addicting. And they use both of those words for both of the same kinds of things, whether it’s heroin or pill of butter?

Yeah, like I don’t know when I would use the word addicting, except maybe if somebody is trying to get you addicted to something, I guess they could be addicting you. But I’ve heard so many people, and I’ve heard on national and international news and on the radio and everything, say, oh, I love this. It’s just so addicting, you know.

How interesting. And it just doesn’t seem right. I’m not sure there’s much difference in the meaning. And you’re certainly not wrong to use addictive.

No, addictive is perfectly fine, but I think addicting is probably fine as well.

Okay. I don’t know if we’re all victim of the recency illusion, though, where it just feels more, a frequency illusion, where it feels more recent and more frequent than it actually is. I don’t know. I feel like I got to a certain point in my life when all of a sudden there is this switch, you know? There’s a little nuance there, at least for me, and I don’t know if I could ever prove this.

I really probably should spend some time looking into this. Addicting is more about the quality of the person who is being affected, and addictive is more about the thing that is in question, the substance or the drug, what have you. You can have addicting video games. I don’t know. And it’s more about the player being susceptible to it rather than the thing itself being inherently having that quality of causing addiction, where heroin has that quality of causing addiction.

Yeah, when you talk about it as an inherent quality, it seems like addictive is a stronger word to me. Like addicting, it might happen, it might not. It’s still, you know, but that’s just a gut feeling.

Right, right, like it might be used more flippantly. But morphologically and grammatically, there’s nothing wrong with addicting. You might prefer addictive for clarity purposes because it’s an older, more established term. It sounds more clinical to me, more pharmaceutical.

Interesting, interesting. Addicting sounds like you could use it for just about anything.

Yeah, but I don’t have a problem. Do you have a problem with addicting?

I mean, you said that your response is to say that it’s… The only problem I had with it was I didn’t realize it was a word. Like I hadn’t, because I hadn’t encountered it until I was at a certain point in university. And then all of a sudden it seemed ubiquitous, you know? English is just loaded with similar terms for similar things. I was thinking of instantly and instantaneously.

Oh, yeah, there’s another one. Just the subtle, the subtleties there.

Yeah. It’s morphologically sound. It is a normal way to make a word in English. Yeah. It’s just, you have a choice. If you prefer addictive, go for it. If you’re an editor, maybe you could strike addicting and use addictive instead in the stuff that you’re editing on behalf of other people.

Yeah, I don’t think there’s a difference.

Well, not being an editor, I will try to stop being affronted by the word addicting. Thanks for calling, Jolene.

Thank you, guys. Have a great day. Take care.

Okay, bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye now.

877-929-9673. Email words@waywordradio.org. And you know you can find our show on iTunes and SoundCloud at no cost to you. Grant, here’s another made-up word from Emotionary.com. This word is fanderstand.

Pretend to understand?

Yes, to pretend you finally heard another person after asking them to repeat themselves three times. You know how you do that? You’re just like, oh, whatever. You just do a little giggle and a look and then turn away and hope you didn’t just agree to something that you don’t want to do.

Yeah, exactly. Call us with your language questions, 877-99-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha. Hi. Hey there, what’s up? Who is this?

This is Jerry Parrs calling from Hell’s Kitchen in New York City. Hell’s Kitchen in the 50s, Westside. Hey, baby, how you doing?

I’m doing great. It’s like old home week. I’m at the real health kitchen here.

Okay. What can we do for you?

Well, I, what was it? It was some shows ago. You had a librarian, and the librarian called in, and she was all going on about how she had patrons and didn’t have, I believe it was customers. And I found that was interesting, and I agreed with her. I thought that a person who patronized the library would be a patron.

And then I was standing in line at, well, our local, one of our local drugstores, Dwayne Reed. And the girl at the cash register said, next guest. And I went to myself, guest? I’m a customer. I’m not a guest. And then I went to Starbucks. At Starbucks, the person said, next guest? They were just throwing me off because I don’t believe that I’m a guest. And it reminded me of that other show, The Librarian.

Well, why aren’t you a guest?

Because to me, a guest is, there’s some amenities involved with a guest. If I’m paying for one particular product or something, like, you know, I want to buy a box of Kleenex, I go in and I buy a box of Kleenex. And there’s nothing else attached to it. There’s no other, you know. To me, I think as a guest, somebody’s going to say to me, well, would you like another towel? Or I could say, hey, can I have another towel, please? You know, I’m a guest in a hotel.

So you’re expecting amenities and coddling. This is all corporate speak, though. This is one of the things that comes down from on high, to call your customers guests to make them feel a little more welcome and take the transaction out of the relationship. Disney has been doing this since the 70s, calling the visitors guests.

Yeah, but I understand what Jerry is saying.

Since the 70s?

Since the 70s, yeah. To me it sounds sort of, I don’t know, overly familiar. You know, like a politician who says, my friends, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, it’s like a little bit contrived. At least that’s what I think I hear you saying, Jerry. Is that right?

Yeah, that’s pretty much it.

It’s just, yeah, I guess a little too familiar, a little too, yeah, I expect them to, like, you know, offer me a little chocolate or something.

Yeah, a turndown service.

But for me, it’s not just familiar and contrived. It’s also that it’s transparent to me what they’re trying to do.

I don’t like being manipulated by this obvious change of language where they want to make me feel more welcome by changing the word that they call me.

And there is a place for changing language in the workplace. But this one is one of those, again, obvious, contrived, ham-handed things.

Well, what should they say? I mean, I appreciate the effort on the one hand.

How about just next? Well, in New York, they should say, next online.

Right. Yeah, yeah.

The summary here is I think that we agree with you that guest isn’t really very useful. I don’t have a big problem with it. It’s kind of an eye roll thing.

I’ll still take my order and walk out. Boy, I’d just really love to talk to these people.

Certainly, but it just seems to link so closely to what your librarian is talking about.

Yeah, definitely. It’s a perfect bet.

Because she was a bit offended by having to call people customers. All of a sudden, you know, I’m wanting to be called the customer, please.

Jerry, we’re going to help who’s next, okay?

Okay. Thank you for calling.

All right. Thank you for having me on.

Thanks, buddy. Bye-bye.

Bye.

If you’ve got a problem with the way that you’re talked to in a business transaction, I think there’s a lot more mileage left in this topic.

So give us a call, 877-929-9673. Email words@waywordradio.org.

Grant, here’s another coined word involving emotion from Emotionary.com. This one is floptimism.

Floptimism. It’s when your optimism doesn’t help you succeed after all.

It’s something like that. It’s the futile advice or encouragement one offers for the sake of it, knowing the recipient’s situation might not pan out well in reality.

Come on, you can do it. You can make it across that chasm.

Exactly. Go ahead, jump. It’ll all work out.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Mike from St. Augustine, Florida.

Hi, Mike, right there on the coast. Welcome.

Hi, Mike, how are you doing?

Hey, I’m doing well, thanks. What can we help you with?

I have a phrase used by my mother-in-law. She’s from Lake City, Florida, which is up kind of north and central in Florida.

And she’ll often say something to the effect of, for instance, if you were driving to her house and you lived two hours away and you got there an hour and a half, she’d say, man, you got here quicker than Goody’s Moose.

And so my question to y’all is, what is Goody’s Moose? You got here quicker than Goody’s Moose?

How do you spell Goody? You know, it would have to be phonetic, but I would imagine kind of like G-O-O-D-Y or G-U with an umlaut.

Goody’s Moose. So it looks like goodies, but it rhymes with moose. That’s how I picture it.

Oh, this is interesting. So she’s American. Is there anything unusual about her background or her language or anything at all?

Nothing unusual. Like I said, she’s from Lake City. At least when she was growing up, it was kind of a very rural town.

And I asked her kind of where she picked it up, and she just said from her childhood. Like it wasn’t something her dad said necessarily, or maybe it was, but she doesn’t really know.

And so, you know, she doesn’t really have a clear line of where she learned it. This is a transposed version of the older version, which is Moody’s Goose.

The one that most people say is Moody’s or have said is Moody’s Goose. M-O-O-D apostrophe S-G-O-O-S-E, Moody’s Goose.

And what you would say is faster than Moody’s Goose or flew in like Moody’s Goose or ran off like Moody’s Goose, indicating speed and haste.

Like you’re not only moving fast, but you’re like a blur on the horizon.

But who was Moody and what was his goose doing? Well, there’s another interesting thing happening here.

That’s not even the oldest form of it. The oldest form of it is Mooney’s goose, M-O-O-N-E-Y apostrophe S.

Oh, really? And so if you do some digging on Mooney’s goose, you’re going to find it from 200 years ago in places like a collection of Irish proverbs from 1813, where the expression is, and I’ll read this to you, full of fun and fooster like Mooney’s goose.

Now, fooster is a word that you don’t know, and it’s really hard to look up, but it turns out if you look in the English dialect dictionary, it means full of bustling or fuss.

So full of fun and fuss, basically, is what you’re saying in there. So kind of active and lively and that sort of thing, like a lot of energy on display, right?

And so what we have here is a 200-year-old expression that’s kind of been modified at least twice. Went from Mooney’s goose to Moody’s goose to Goody’s moose.

That’s fantastic. Yeah, it’s fantastic, right? But we don’t know who Mooney or Moody were. We have no idea.

I’d love to think that there’s some great folklore character named Mooney out there who had like a remarkable goose about which people told tales. But I don’t have any evidence of it.

Well, that is interesting. So originally, or at least as far back as you can tell, it was Irish in origin.

Yes, and it comes up again and again in Irish collections of proverbs and folklore and that sort of thing.

And it’s not really until the early 1900s that it begins to transform and is almost always Moody’s goose. And frankly, Goody’s moose is really hard to find.

It’s almost never used, at least it’s not in the historical record as far as I can tell.

Well, next time I’m in Lake City, I will ask the family, anybody else uses it, if they have any memory of where it came from.

Yeah, like a grandparent or great aunt or like some well-known, you know, joke-telling, storytelling neighbor, that sort of thing.

Yeah, radio show.

Yeah. Right. Thanks, Mike, for the call. Let us know what she says, all right?

Thanks for the information. Sure, take care now. Bye-bye.

Thank you, guys. Love your show. Bye.

Thank you. Thanks. Bye-bye.

This collection of Irish proverbs is really rich, but one of the best ones in the whole book, and I’m not quite sure what it means, but it is, his eyes are like two burnt holes in a blanket.

Whoa! I assume that means you’re really tired and you have circles under your eye, right?

Whoa, what an image. His eyes are like two burnt holes in a blanket.

Oh, he needs some rest. So, white complexion, but, yeah, bags under your eyes, dark circles.

That is vivid. You don’t ever want to be that tired or that hungover, right?

Call us with your language question, 877-929-9673.

Here’s another one of the Irish Proverbs from 1813. This is about somebody who’s cheap, a miser.

He’d skin a louse and send the hide and fat to market.

Oh, that’s good. So cheap he would sell a louse’s hide.

Share your words and phrases with us, 877-929-9673.

Things have come to a pretty past. That’s all for today’s broadcast, but don’t wait until next week to chat with us.

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The show is recorded at Studio West in San Diego, California. Thanks for listening. I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett. Adios.

Ciao.

Potato and I like potato. You like tomato and I like tomato.

Potato, potato, tomato, tomato. Let’s call the whole thing off.

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

And oh, if we ever part, then that might break my heart.

So if you like pajamas and I like pajamas, I’ll wear pajamas.