Pumpkin Floater

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

I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

And looking through some old papers, I came across some notes that I made in 2007 for a documentary called The Joy of Lex.

Great title.

It aired on the Discovery Channel at the time.

It was super fun.

But the assignment that they gave me was to go to New York City and look at the F line on the subway and follow all the stops in the F line and gather up language from each stop, from the history of each neighborhood and borough.

And so I’ve got these notes, and I figured in the spirit of recycling that I could share some of this with you.

This is a very green show.

Yes, I’d love to hear some.

It’s an incredibly rich history.

I mean, we are talking about one of the major world cities, right?

Sure, yeah.

With millions of people.

Yeah.

For example, Gridlock comes from New York City.

Is that right?

Yeah, Gridlock Sam wrote for one of the newspapers and coined the term to refer to cars being stuck in the middle of an intersection.

Oh, no kidding.

Dude, of course, you probably knew that, comes from New York City in the 1800s.

Rotisserie baseball.

Rotisserie baseball.

I don’t know what that is.

It’s kind of like fantasy baseball.

Okay.

Kind of like that.

All right.

Hatchet man.

So the term for the political guy who goes out and deals with your political enemies, kind of behind the scenes, comes from New York City.

Panhandler.

Yeah.

Another term for somebody asking for money.

Yeah.

Bag lady probably comes from New York City.

And best of all, Waldorf salad.

Yes, I knew that from the hotel.

But I wanted to tell you my favorite New Yorkism that came from this work that I did along the F line in New York City.

And it’s a joke that waiters and bartenders would say when they handed you a glass of water, as if they were handing you, say, two fingers of rye neat in a glass.

They would say, here, have one on the city.

It’s just this dumb joke that lasted for the longest time in New York City.

I like it.

I don’t know if anyone’s still using it, but there we go.

A little bit of the color of New York City.

Wherever you are and whatever you’re doing, we know that there’s language particular to the place and the time that you’re in.

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

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hey, this is Mark. I’m from Panama City, Florida.

Hey, Mark.

Home of the world’s most beautiful beaches.

Oh, really? You mean after San Diego?

That’s right.

Well, Mark, what’s on your mind linguistically?

You know, there’s so much on my mind linguistically, but I know I only have a little bit of time with you guys.

I’m going to try to throw two out for you.

My boss hits us with these a lot.

One day he was told that someone shouldn’t have to kowtow to him.

Ooh, nice.

And then his question was, what does kowtow mean?

And none of us could tell him.

So I don’t know if we kowtowed to him in the process of not being able to tell him, but that was one.

That we have literally no idea.

I couldn’t even come up with anywhere to go on it.

And then one day I told him I was waiting with bated breath, and he asked me what, you know, we all know kind of what that means, but where in the world did it come from?

And it just got uglier from there.

All I could think of was fish, and I don’t know.

It was just really, really a conversation dwindled, and we went on to other things.

So those are my two.

That’s totally what I think of.

When I think of bated breath, I think somebody’s been into the fishing worms.

Yeah, I mean, I’m waiting with bated breath.

Yeah, I always think of that coming out of a sushi restaurant.

We can help you with both of these.

We’ll knock them down one right after the other.

Kowtow is interesting.

It came into English in the early 1800s, and it relates to some Chinese words from a Beijing dialect that mean to knock your head, because when you bend over to show respect for somebody, your head may actually touch the floor.

You’re literally knocking your head on the floor.

So that is kowtowing.

And so when the Europeans started showing up in China, they learned the word, brought it back, and it was kind of reduced in its potency, but now it just kind of means to defer to somebody or show them deference or show them respect.

I see. Wonderful.

Well, next time I see him, I will literally kowtow to him.

That’s a good idea.

Don’t hurt yourself.

And bated breath is one that is really interesting because a lot of things are happening to this.

One of them in the written form. Baited is spelled not with an I. It’s not like fishing bait. It’s B-A-T-E-D, baited.

And it’s related to a French word, abattre, A-B-A-T-T-R-E, which means to diminish or to knock down or to beat down.

And we only find a few words in English that come from this French word, like to abate or abatement, like you might have a rent abatement, which means a reduction in the rent.

And abattoir, actually, is a French word that still maintains its Frenchness to refer to a butchery or a place where animals are slaughtered for food.

Or debate. Debate. That was originally a quarrel.

There we go.

So what happened with the word A-B-A-T-T-R-E when it showed up in English, that first syllable, the A, is unstressed.

And unstressed syllables at the beginning of the words tend to drop away and stop being pronounced.

And that’s exactly what happened.

We only have abated breath to mean stopped breath now.

That’s the only form that we really have of that, again, outside abate or abatement.

So it literally means you’re stopping your breath.

You’re like, huh.

I see.

I’m holding my breath.

Yeah, you’re holding your breath.

Waiting for the answer.

In fear or anticipation or something like that.

Wow.

Well, I certainly was waiting for these answers with abated breath.

That’s just a wonderful show.

Go ahead and breathe.

You’ll get a headache.

And now you’re counting.

I was glad to get answers to my questions.

Mark, thank you for calling, and go to the beach for us, will you?

Oh, I sure will.

Absolutely.

For both of you.

All right.

Take care now.

Thanks, Mark.

Bye-bye.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

You do have this happen all day long, right?

A word pops up.

You’re like, why is that word in English?

That doesn’t sound like a kowtow.

It doesn’t sound like an English word.

You know there’s something not quite right about it.

There’s a story behind it, right?

There’s a story, and we have those stories.

Right.

As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, language is fossil poetry.

There’s a little poem in there, you know, a little image of somebody bowing down to the earth.

So let us write a fossil poem for you, 877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

Grant, do you know what a slam clicker is?

No, it sounds like something in a county fair where you win the goldfish.

I don’t know. What is it?

That’s a pretty good guess.

This is from the slang of flight attendants.

This is somebody who goes to the layover hotel and just goes into the hotel room, closes the door, slams the door shut, clicks it locked, and then doesn’t emerge until it’s time to go.

A slam clicker.

Or you might say, oh, I’m just so tired.

I’m just going to slam click.

Slam clicking.

Don’t wait up for me.

That’s a great one.

I know.

I’m a slam clicker at conferences and a lot of times.

Yeah, you’re not the one just like going downstairs looking for somebody to chat with, right?

That’s you.

All right.

I’m done with the papers and presentations.

I am going up to HBO and room service.

Slam click.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Megan Hopley calling from Tallahassee.

Hi, Megan. Welcome to the show.

Hello, Megan.

Well, I have a question about addressing wedding invitations.

So I’m getting married in the fall.

Congratulations. Nice.

I’m having a bit of a dilemma.

So I’m generally considered to be sort of a stickler for proper language usage and etiquette amongst friends and coworkers.

But there’s no living up to my mother’s expectations, and apparently she thinks I’m way off the mark.

Well, there’s never any living up to your mother’s expectations, right?

Very hard to live up to.

Yeah.

So my question is one of addressing the envelope, and specifically, I guess, according to, you know, Emily Post and tradition in general, it would be, for example, Mr. And Mrs. Patrick Hinchy.

And I’m just not comfortable with the woman being robbed of her given name.

So I would suggest, you know, Mr. Patrick and Mrs. Catherine Hinchy or some such, but my mother thinks I’m being terribly gauche, so maybe you can help.

She thinks you’re being gauche.

Well, I think she’s concerned that I’m, you know, just completely ambivalent of rules and society and tradition.

And what does she think will happen if you address them that way?

That’s a good question.

Perhaps she’s concerned about the signals that would be sent to our guests who are older or just more traditional and might somehow take a front at a usage that’s not traditional.

The gifts will be smaller.

Instead of a four-slot toaster, it will be a two-slot toaster.

But in the end, I want to make sure, of course, that my dear mom is happy as well.

Is she paying for the wedding?

So that’s a little bit tricky.

I know it’s prying.

She and my mother very generously pay for a large portion of the wedding.

Okay.

It matters.

That’s part of the formula.

It’s part of the calculus.

But Martha and I are giving each other this eye that says our ESP is working, and I think we’re in agreement here, Megan.

I think we are.

You are a 38-year-old intelligent woman who can do what she likes, and you should.

Okay.

You’re not a Vanderbilt.

It’s not 1870.

People aren’t coming to your wedding in horse-drawn carriages.

I mean, this is the modern age.

Modern wedding address envelope etiquette is that everybody gets equal billing.

Well, okay.

I mean, I completely agree with you, but I’m thinking about the people who are expecting old-fangled invitations.

Will they really be offended?

I mean, I would be glad to be invited to your wedding.

There’s another thing.

Megan, I have an idea.

It is the modern age.

This means we have data.

Can you just go down your wedding list and say everyone over the age of, say, 60 gets the old fangle style and everyone under the age of 60 gets your style?

I guess I like the idea of sort of making a case-by-case decision instead of a writ large decision.

So we can look at the guest list and make a decision about who gets which type of label or dressing on the label.

Yeah, Megan, I think that’s really smart.

I mean, Emily Post has said that etiquette is about treating people with consideration, respect, and honesty.

And it’s all in the service of building relationships.

And so I think you’ve really keyed in on the answer there.

Do us a favor.

We’d love to hear how you and your mother resolve this together and find that mutually acceptable solution.

All right?

Well, I’m going to send you both an invitation, and I’m going to have to wrestle with how to address it.

That’s great.

I’ll have the chicken.

Please do.

Thank you, Megan.

And congratulations and good luck with this, all right?

I don’t think you’re supposed to congratulate the bride.

You congratulate the groom.

Remember, I threw out my etiquette books.

I don’t know any of these things.

Megan, thanks for calling, all right?

Best of luck to you.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

Here’s another bit of airline slang.

Feather, leather, fin.

Feather, leather, fin.

Mm—

Don’t know.

Is this like code for rules about animals?

You’re close.

About the animals, it’s about the food.

Oh.

Feather, leather, fin.

Chicken, beef, or fish.

Chicken, beef, or fish.

Right, feather, leather, fin.

Do they actually use that?

I think they do.

Maybe not with the passengers, but among themselves.

877-929-9673.

We’ll be back with more about language in just a minute.

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

I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

And look who it is.

It’s John Chaneski, our quiz guy.

Hello, John.

Hi, guys.

Look, it’s me.

I hope you like the beard.

Do you like the beard, the new beard?

I do like the beard.

Beard-alicious.

I have this great little quiz for you guys.

You know, at the Museum of Mathematics, where I work, we have this in-house code that we use when we refer to our exhibits.

Rather than use the exhibit’s full title, which are typically two words, we use the first two letters of each word.

For example, if we had an exhibit called, say, Jolly Integers, we’d call it Join.

That’s the first two letters of jolly and the first two letters of integers.

Okay.

Joint.

Get it?

Okay.

Now, it occurred to me that you could use a shorthand for people.

Sometimes you’d get a nonsense word like Abraham Lincoln would be ably, right?

But sometimes you get a real word like Paul Newman would be pain.

Pain, right, like a pain of glass.

Now, I’ll read you a short sentence about a famous person.

In that sentence will be a four-letter word made from the first two letters of that person’s first and last names, and you tell me who they are.

Oh, wow. Okay.

Wow.

At least you’re giving us the answer in the sentence, right?

Yeah, it’s right in there.

Okay.

Yeah.

Okay.

And speaking of math, I wonder if you need to know math to be the prime minister of the United Kingdom.

Oh, Margaret Thatcher.

Yes, very good, Margaret Thatcher.

Oh, math.

Get it? Math, that’s the word.

It would probably help if you tell people what the word is that is your clue.

Some people, it might go right by some people.

Okay, will do.

Good.

I’ll bet you wish you had as good A Way with Words as this playwright.

So four letters.

Wish.

It’s wish.

William Shakespeare.

Yes, William Shakespeare.

Nicely done.

200 years ago, pianos got used pretty hard.

I hope this famous composer had some lube ready to keep his working smoothly.

Famous composer.

Lube.

Lube.

Ludwig van Beethoven.

Yes.

Yes, Ludwig Beethoven.

Very nice.

I love it when you punch the word.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I try.

Thank you.

By the way, I make no guarantees if there was actually lube, piano lube, back in, like, 200 years ago.

Probably was like a whale fat or something, right?

Probably, sure.

Now, this president was no joke.

He won a Pulitzer Prize and created the Peace Corps.

John Kennedy.

John Kennedy.

Very good.

Hola, papi.

Did you know this influential 20th century artist was born in Spain?

Hola, papi.

Pablo Picasso.

Papi.

Papi.

Si, si.

Pablo Picasso.

Now, he’s been the host of a show on SiriusXM for eight years, but he’s been in the business a lot longer than that.

Howard Stern?

Yes, Howard Stern from the word.

I don’t know.

Host.

I’m still figuring out this game.

She’s working by gut alone, man.

Gut alone.

This is the subconscious just connected directly to her mouth.

And Grant comes in and just sweeps up.

That’s good.

Nicely done, Grant.

We make a great team, don’t we?

Yes.

Now, this astronaut didn’t just get near the moon.

He walked right on it.

Neil Armstrong.

Near.

Neil Armstrong, yeah.

Nice.

It has not just come near.

I would travel over Hill and Dale to see this talk show host.

I’d better hurry.

David Letterman.

David Letterman.

Now I get it.

Dale.

Yes, Dale.

David Letterman.

This is the last one.

Here we go.

If you mash together a bunch of different things, the result is sometimes likened to this author’s most famous character.

Mary Shelley.

Yes, Mary Shelley.

Frankenstein.

Right.

And the word is?

Mash.

Mash.

Mash.

Right.

Nicely done, you guys.

That was great.

That’s a good one.

That’s a good one.

That’s really good.

John, thank you very much.

Fun times as always.

And we will talk to you next week, all right?

See you then.

Bye-bye.

Thanks, John.

Bye-bye.

And if you’d like to talk about any aspect of language whatsoever, call us, 877-929-9673, or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

And we are all over Facebook and Twitter.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

I sure do.

Hi.

Well, she’s been saving that one up.

Yeah.

Has anyone ever said that?

Yes.

I’ve always wanted to say that, so I did.

You get points, though.

This is Nina Lyons, and I’m calling from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Pittsburgh.

Go Stillers.

Yeah, and at day, dawn, time, cheer for the stores.

Yeah.

So, you know, maybe I’ll call you someday about Pittsburghese.

Oh, yes, please.

Please do.

Sounds like you had a damn pet.

Yin’s always welcome to call us.

What’s on your mind now, though?

This is just something that always interests me. The word orama and, you know, where that came from and who started using that as a marketing piece.

I mean, I just really think that that word has always been very interesting.

We have a lot of these things like, you know, we have a candy-rama in Pittsburgh.

We have a parts-o-rama where they sell car parts.

How did this all start?

How did the…

I mean, it sounds kind of Greek or whatever, but I don’t know.

Ooh.

Parts-o-rama.

Parts-o-rama.

Okay, we’ve got a history here, and I’m going to make this as brief as I can, although it could be long, all right?

-oh.

Word-o-rama.

There’s a really great section of a book by Michael Picone, published in 1996.

The book is called Anglicisms, Neologisms, and Dynamic French.

And the reason this book is important is because he’s done a great job of tracing orama from the word panorama, which we got from the French.

Now, why it came into English is interesting.

A panorama, you might not remember, isn’t just a wide vista.

It’s not just a view of, say, a canyon or an open plain where everything is amazing and the sun is setting.

A panorama far back in the 1700s was a huge painting, sometimes painted in the Trompe-Loye style,

You know, meant to fool the eye, make you believe that it was real.

A huge painting rolled up on vertical cylinders, kind of like imagine a scroll or a Torah, for example, but vertical.

And you would stand there or sit there in the audience in front of this panorama,

And it would be slowly cranked, and the scene would go past you as if you were, say,

Riding in a carriage across the real landscape. And you would view this beautiful scene. Sometimes

It was the jungle and the animals of Africa. Sometimes it was a battle scene. Sometimes it was

An imagining of what Israel looked like in the time of Jesus. There was all this interesting

Stuff that you couldn’t otherwise encounter. We’re talking pre-television, pre-movies,

Pre-photographs, right? Oh, it must have been thrilling. Yeah. And so that was called a panorama.

The French got this from Greek, so your instincts are good there, Nina.

The pan means all or across.

Right, all.

And the orama or the horama means a view, right?

Right, right.

Yeah, so it’s a whole view.

Well, what happened was much later, I mean, these lasted for a while, and they had a kind of a few different names.

Much later, when film became a real thing, people were casting about looking for terms to describe different kinds of ways of viewing film.

And they came up with a number of different terms that didn’t borrow the panorama,

Although a couple did. You have panoramic cameras, for example.

But they borrowed the orama suffix to indicate what they thought it meant,

Which was something amazing or spectacular or astonishing.

They started attaching orama.

But now, keep in mind, this is all still only happening in French

And it hasn’t shown up in English yet.

So it’s not until the late 1800s, early 1900s

That the English speakers start borrowing this from the French

And we do exactly what they did.

We borrow the word panorama and the suffix,

And we start attaching it to tons of stuff.

We have celorama, scoutorama.

Always had to do with a bit of a spectacle,

Always having to do with something phenomenal.

So it’s like an orama-orama, right?

Yeah, yeah.

So it starts in Greek.

It’s a manufactured word in French,

Borrowed by the English speakers from French,

And we both, both languages still use the rama or the orama suffix.

I learned so much from you guys.

I keep you on all the time.

I podcast you.

Thank you very much.

We’re glad to be here for you.

And give us another call sometime, all right?

I will.

Thanks a lot.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Okay, bye-bye.

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

You can also send them an email to words@waywordradio.org

And find us on Facebook and Twitter.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is AJ.

I’m a firefighter out of Bozeman, Montana.

Hi, AJ.

Welcome to the show.

How can we help?

Well, for years I’ve been told to don my gear or doff my gear,

And I realized that, well, I know what the words mean.

I don’t know where they came from or why they are don and doff.

Don and doff.

And you use this how?

What’s the environment?

In the fire station, as we’re putting on our bunker gear and our SEBAs

And getting ready to go on to a call or in trainings, we don our gear,

And after the call, when we’re taking everything off, we doff it.

So it’s just like on and off with a D in front of it.

Yeah, it’s interesting.

They come from on and off.

They originally were both do on is two words, D-O space O-N, and do off, D-O space O-F-F.

And then over time, they just kind of turned into a contraction without an apostrophe.

So we say don and doff now.

And what’s interesting about this is the do actually didn’t mean make.

It meant more of put.

So you were putting on your gear when you were donning your gear.

We never use, at least in American English, to put off our clothes, but it also basically meant to put off your clothes as well.

You used an expression that I learned when I was doing some linguistic research, your bunker gear.

That’s your turnout gear, right?

That’s our turnout gear, yeah.

That’s the heavy-duty stuff that supposedly protects us from the heat and the fire.

And what was the other expression that you mentioned, some kind of acronym?

Contained breathing apparatus.

It’s just like a scuba, but you drop the underwater part.

So instead of scuba, it’s S-C-B-A.

There we go.

Interesting.

I’ve never heard of that one.

I haven’t either.

That’s super cool.

You would think it would be scuba.

So it’s designed for the fire and the heat, and it’s the exact same thing.

It’s our mask and our hoses and our air pack and all the safety equipment that lets us know what we’re running and how hard we’re running.

Cool.

So, AJ, these are words that you don’t use in the rest of your life then?

No, not at all.

It’s strictly for the department.

It’s lingo in the department.

-huh.

That’s very interesting.

At Christmas time, do you don your gay apparel?

No.

You know the song, right?

Don, we now are gay apparel.

It’s the same don.

Yeah, and I would think of doffing your hat to somebody, just lifting your hat.

You do off your hat.

But I didn’t realize it was more of a technical term for firefighters.

Well, there you go.

AJ, thanks so much for your call, and thanks for your work as a fireman.

Really appreciate it.

Hey, thanks for answering our questions.

All right, take care now.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Have a wonderful day.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

One of my favorite fireman-related terms, though, is the word buff.

Yes.

And there’s a couple things happening.

First of all, buff is the color of your skin, comes from the word buffalo, more or less, and refers to this oxide color.

So if you have something other than a pure white, kind of lily white skin, you might have buff-colored skin, right?

But the other thing is, the term buff, meaning a fan of something or somebody who’s a real diehard, who’s really into it,

Comes from the color, the buff color of the New York City firefighter uniforms,

Because people who followed them kind of as avid fans would then call themselves after the color of the uniform.

So if you’re a buff, it’s because of the color of the New York City firefighter’s uniform.

Yeah, very cool, right?

Right?

Yeah.

Two weird things, all related to the term buffalo somehow.

877-929-9673.

We’ve talked before on the show, Grant, about heavy rains and all the different terms there are for heavy rains.

Like gully washer, toad strangler, raining cats and dogs.

We heard from Addie Bedford who suggested another one that she’s used, which is pumpkin floater.

Pumpkin floater.

Pumpkin floater, as in it fell so hard so fast that the ground couldn’t absorb it and your pumpkin crop floated away.

It was a real pumpkin floater.

I like that.

I do, too.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, it’s Kate Hunter from Burlington, Vermont.

Hi, Kate.

Welcome to the show.

Hello, Kate.

What can we do for you?

Well, I love your show.

Thank you.

I travel all the time and I fly.

And I noticed a change in the past couple of months that felt like a virus had taken over the flight attendants.

And they all went over a very short period of time from saying things like, put your overhead or your carry-on in the overhead bin and make sure your tray table is in a full upright and locked position,

to saying put that carry-on in that overhead container

and make sure that tray table is in the full upright and locked position.

And it started out just a few of them, and then all of a sudden all of them were saying it.

And I keep sitting there thinking, am I the only person that’s noticed that this virus has taken over the airplane?

That’s so interesting. Do you fly just one airline, or is it more than one?

I fly predominantly one airline because if you do that, they treat you really well.

And I noticed it first on, you know, it’s an airline that has both the regional flights and the cross-country flights.

And so I noticed it first on the regional flights, and then it seemed to take over the national flights.

I wouldn’t be surprised if that was dictated from on high.

You know, I thought that, but it sounds so much like an idiomatic expression.

So I sort of wondered if anybody studies how idiomatic expressions get adopted by the population.

Yes, they do study that, but I don’t know of any, except for one thesis,

I don’t know of any work that’s been done to study how language travels among airline workers.

Martha, you seem to be hinting at what I’m thinking here, which is there is an incredible amount of training behind the scenes for flight attendants.

And a lot of what they say is pre-scripted, even down to the language that they need to use when they ask you, say, to turn off your phone or to get back to your seat and so forth.

And a lot of it is distancing language.

They kind of they want to try to not address you directly because it’s more deferential to you and you will feel more respect from them if they’re not.

Oh, you think that’s it?

Well, that’s that is something that is actually regulated by some of the airlines.

They if you feel like if you feel like you’re somebody’s deferential to you, you’re more likely to obey them.

And so that would make sense.

And if there’s not a mock kind of over familiarity there, you’re less likely to take liberties as well as a passenger with what’s happening on the plane.

Yeah, I mean, basically you’re talking about a customer service script, right?

Yes, it’s padding. It’s couching language.

Yeah, and I’m wondering if it’s language that makes your ears perk up somehow

because it’s a set of rote instructions again and again,

and it gives you a little bit of time to process the fact that they’re giving you an order.

But that thing, that pronoun use, that demonstrative that, I believe is what that is,

I haven’t quite encountered it on airlines.

Yeah, the only other thing I can think of is that maybe there’s some subtle difference if you ask somebody to move that laptop if it’s not yours.

Good point.

You know, if you said, I want you to move your laptop, and then the passenger says, well, it’s not my laptop.

You know, and then it slows things down because they’re all about efficiency.

They’re all about making things happen quickly.

And particularly with bags.

Kate, have you been in a position where you’ve been helping somebody else put their bag in the overhead?

I mean, they don’t know that it’s yours.

They haven’t matched your face to that bag.

Right.

Right.

That may be it.

We have more than a few people who work in the airline industry who listen to this show.

I know we do.

Guys, gals, if you have an opinion on this, give us a call, 877-929-9673,

or tell us about it in an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Kate, thank you so much for your call.

We’re going to try to get to the bottom of this.

No promises, though, all right?

Terrific.

Thanks very much.

Yeah, thanks for listening.

Keep listening, and let us know if you hear anything else.

I’m really curious about this now.

If you find out more about it, all right?

I sure will.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

That thesis that I mentioned is pretty interesting.

It’s very academic, but it was by Barbara Clark at the University of London in 2013.

And it’s called Flight Attendant Discourse in Commercial Aviation.

Yeah, but she’s not only talking about the language between flight attendants and the passengers.

She’s also talking about the language between the pilots and the flight attendants.

And then the behind-the-scenes language used by the airlines to communicate in their private forums online.

Really interesting stuff.

Because a lot of that stilted language that you hear as a passenger also shows up behind the scenes.

It is the language of their institution.

Right, right.

And it’s all about efficiency, right?

It’s all about moving people from one place to another.

I have a friend who’s a flight attendant, and she told me that they even noticed right down to the fact that,

well, do you know which soft drink takes the most time for the fizz to go down?

Oh, wow, no.

That’s awesome.

I didn’t know that.

If you order a Diet Coke on a plane.

You’re a bad guy.

Well, yeah, you’re less than, because Diet Coke takes the longest for the fizz to settle.

And so my friend said that a lot of times what flight attendants will do is just give you the whole can so that they don’t have to mess with it.

They’re not necessarily supposed to do that.

I can’t speak for her or anybody else, but that’s what she says.

It’s a no-no.

Like I said, if you work in the airline industry or you can talk about the language that flight attendants use to their passengers from behind the scenes, we’d love to hear from you.

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

Stick around. There’s lots more coming up right here on A Way with Words.

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.

I can remember as a teenager looking at the family telephone, just staring at it, waiting for it to ring.

And I can also remember a few years ago when a couple of friends of mine started doing this thing called texting.

And I thought that was just the dumbest thing in the world.

I couldn’t imagine who would want to send a text to anybody.

Why don’t you just pick up the phone and call?

But something has happened in the meantime.

And now, although, you know, I love talking to callers on the show and I talk on the phone for work.

Otherwise, I’m kind of notorious for being allergic to talking on the phone and I’m texting like crazy.

I feel like texting is a great way to stay in touch with friends.

I feel actually closer to them, I think, than when I talk to them on the phone because we just sort of pass notes all day.

Is there any kind of quality about the voice conversation that bothers you now?

Does that feel like too much of an imposition?

You know what it feels like to me is a handwritten thank you note.

Oh, that old fashioned.

It does.

It’s just, I mean, I have one friend who’s not on email at all, not on texting.

And it’s like this little special treat when we talk on the phone because it’s so unusual.

But otherwise, my communication is written.

And that’s quite different from how it used to be.

I think you’re part of a larger trend, Martha.

Oh, good.

If you go to, say, Twitter and you search for the words voicemail light or voicemail symbol or VM light or VM symbol, you will find an incredible number of people who do not want to be left to voicemail.

And I think this is an offshoot of what you’re talking about.

Why are you calling me and leaving me a message when you could just send me a text or an email?

Right, right.

I mean, if it’s really good news or really bad news, yeah, I’ll take a phone call.

But otherwise, in my leisure time, I just I feel like I can be doing other stuff with my time.

Yeah.

And there are a lot of people who say things like they just hate the voicemail light or the voicemail symbol. They’re like the only reason they check them is to get rid of the symbol because it bothers them.

Turn it off.

Turn it off.

Yeah.

I’m looking at a bunch of things here that I found on a search. Laura Cuno in Florida tweeted, the best present the universe gave me this morning was coming into work with no red voicemail light lit up on my phone. Rock on, world. Maybe her phone’s broken.

And there’s a guy named Chris Salter in the UK who put, conveniently placed my teacup to hide my voicemail light. But a lot of them, here’s my favorite one. Andrea Lavinthal in New York City. Sorry, red voicemail light on my office phone, but I don’t negotiate with terrorists. But that’s how bad it is.

Well, are you the same way?

It does bother me. I hate seeing that red light on my work phone. Because it’s a task. Well, also because it’s like 15 or 20 button presses and the voicemail is like, message received Tuesday, October 2nd, 2013 at 4.22 p.m. It’s like, oh, boy, the lady thought that you’re killing me.

This is why Google Voice was such an innovation, the fact that it arrives as an MP3 in your inbox. You’re like, yes. Yes, yes. With some approximate transcripts, which I’ll take any day over actually having to hear the whole message.

Yeah, yeah. Do you think I’m being high maintenance? I mean, you can glance at a text and get the gist of it. You can see how many exclamation marks there are. I mean, if that’s the way you’re oriented towards text, and you and I are, I can scan a page of text much faster and get the gist of it than listening to a whole message. Plus, people are repetitive when they speak in a way that they’re not when they write.

Right. That said, we listen to everything that we get from you, our listeners. We love talking to them. We read all of the emails. Probably five or six people read every email that comes in here, and several people listen to all the voicemails. And I wish we could answer every single one of them, but we wouldn’t do the show.

That’s the modern age, isn’t it? The burden of voicemail.

Yeah. What are your voice habits now? What do you use the phone for? Does it even need a speaker?

I use it for taking pictures. The phone is so far from a phone.

I know, right? Send us an email to words@waywordradio.org or jump on Facebook and Twitter and let us know what you think.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Yes, hi.

Hello, who is this?

This is Nancy Staples calling from Providence, Rhode Island.

Hi, Nancy. What’s up?

So something has been bothering me, and I wanted to call and ask if it’s been bothering you guys, too. I have lately noticed that newscasters seem to be afraid to use the term died on the air, and instead they opt for something like passed away. And sometimes, to me, this seems very inappropriate, especially in the case of like a tragic event or some kind of a violent death. And to me, it’s really very jarring, and it seems like a case of a euphemism gone wild. And it seems to be increasing. And I was wondering if you guys feel like this is the usage, this euphemism usage is increasing, and whether I’m right to be bothered by this.

You know, it’s weird. I have noticed it just lately in the last two or three months, but that doesn’t mean that it’s new. But, yeah, hearing people talk about passed away like in a bombing or a bus crash or something like that.

Exactly.

Yeah. Exactly. And I feel like maybe it’s motivated by something good, like they’re trying to be more respectful, but in a way it produces the opposite effect. It minimizes this event. And it just seems ironic that, you know, we’re more and more frank on the news, and the news gets gorier and gorier, but yet we can’t just say the word died, and we can’t say the word was, you know, the term was killed. You know, it just seems a little bit like, I don’t know, a crazy squeamishness about just using a perfectly normal word like died, you know? Which is actually what happened. If it’s a tragic event, it seems like you don’t want to minimize it. You don’t want to belittle it at all.

Nancy, are there cases in which you would use passed away? Is this like a total dislike of the term overall?

I would use passed away if someone died a very peaceful, expected death, maybe in their sleep. But I also don’t like it. It’s funny you should ask because I also don’t like it when people say that someone passed.

Interesting. That also strikes me a little odd, but that’s a little bit off the topic. Some of what you’re saying makes perfect sense to me. I agree with you. Passed away has got an extra little bit of information attached to it. It says the person died peacefully, maybe after a long illness. Yeah, surrounded by family and friends.

Do you remember this botched execution in Oklahoma? Where the guy, he didn’t actually die the way he was supposed to die. He was on death row and they gave him some chemicals and it didn’t work out and he struggled. And eventually he died of a heart attack. Well, CNN said, and then he passed away. I’m like, well, no, no.

Exactly. If he died after all that, he died. He died. Died to me is just, it’s a word without nuance. It just simply means no longer living and passed away. It’s got this extra bit of information that doesn’t apply to these violent situations. So I’m with you on that part. But as far as the data showing whether or not it’s more common, I think you might be having a little bit of the recency illusion happening here where because you’ve noticed it, it now is more obvious to you and it seems more common than it actually is.

But I think it’s very striking if CNN used that language. I mean, to me, it holds death, the reality of death at arm’s length. There’s a really fabulous woman named Merrill Perlman who writes for the Columbia Journalism Review. She was a copy editor, I believe, for the New York Times for a really long time. And she wrote a really nice piece last year about all these different terms for dying that journalists use. And her closing line is the best advice for a journalist. She says, if you’re tempted to use any of the soft-pedaled terms for death in ordinary news writing, let the temptation die. I mean, I’ll forgive her the little joke there. But she’s got a really good point. Just say that they died and let the story tell the details rather than trying to code it into the language that way.

That’s a great. I’ll have to hunt that one down. That sounds very interesting.

Nancy, thank you so much for your call. All right? It was really great to talk with you guys. I’m a huge fan. I feel like I’m part of a global community of word lovers, which is just great.

You are.

You are. I thought you were just going to say global conspiracy. I’m like, that too.

Yeah, yeah, right. Global conspiracy to make…

Well, thanks so much.

Yeah, call us again sometime.

Bye-bye.

Okay.

All right.

Bye-bye.

It’s the global conspiracy to make language better.

Yes, and conversation about language better. The subjects we cover on this show, Grant, it’s amazing. And you can do it with us, too. Call us 877-929-9673 or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Chris Miller from Harrisonburg, Virginia.

Hi, Chris. Welcome to the show.

Hello, Chris. How can we help you?

Well, I am originally from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. And growing up there, we had this term that we would always use, jagging around, to refer to goofing off or having fun. And I’ve always wondered where that term would originate.

This is a classic Pennsylvania term, right?

Yeah, it is. There’s probably a handful of others, like a gum band or a crek. There was one other that’s kind of similar. Like a rose bush, we would refer to that as a jagger bush. So I don’t know if that’s a jagger.

Relates to jagging around or not.

There we go.

Martha’s, the hair on the back of her neck just stood up because you clicked for her.

Indeed, right, because jag is an old word that means to prick or stab or jab.

And so if you’re jagging around, you’re kind of annoying and teasing, harassing each other, right?

Right.

I see.

Yeah, you’re playing tricks on them. You’re irritating them by sort of poking them metaphorically.

Very good.

I was wondering if those two are related, so I guess they are.

We think so.

There’s an interesting phonetic thing happening here where the words jack, jerk, and jag all tend to be kind of conflated and mixed up because the sounds are so similar in the mouth and easily corrupted into each other.

And so there’s a lot of, like, confluence there.

But in general, yeah, this is probably related to this, what is it, 200-year-old, 250-year-old term meaning to poke or to prick or to stick.

Very good. Okay, great.

But why it’s stuck in Pennsylvania, we don’t know.

But there is a little bit of what I call the chamber of commerce pride here, which is Pennsylvanians know that they’re known for it, so they’re kind of proud of being known for it, which makes them use it and talk about it more.

But you said you don’t live in Pennsylvania anymore. Is that right?

That’s right. I’m in Virginia.

Okay. And do folks in Virginia know what you’re talking about when you say jagging around?

No, I don’t really use it. Probably if I brought it up, I’m sure no one would have any idea what I’m talking about.

So you already know it as a Pennsylvania term then?

Oh, absolutely. Yeah.

I see.

Well, I left in 79 and I haven’t really been back any length of time.

But the funny thing is, one phrase that is attributed to Western Pennsylvania is yins, like y’all.

But I don’t remember saying that when I was growing up.

Oh, really? Interesting.

You don’t remember that? Yeah, that’s highly associated with that part of the country.

Yins, the third person, person plural, meaning you all.

Second person plural.

Second person. I’m sorry, you all, you guys.

Right. Very good. I’m glad we straightened that out.

Yeah, so thanks for the call, Chris. Really appreciate it.

I know there’s a ton of great language happening in Virginia.

So if you come across something, drop us a line, all right?

Well, my wife’s a Southern belle. I’ll get her to call in.

Oh, yeah.

This is good.

The cross-cultural conflict, that’s what we want to hear.

Please do.

We almost didn’t get married because I was a Yankee.

I want to hear about that.

Just send me an email or send me your diary or whatever.

I’ll do that.

Take care now.

Thanks for calling.

Thanks for calling.

Thanks very much.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Well, we know there’s language where you live that belongs to you and your people.

Let us know about it.

877-929-9673.

Email us, words@waywordradio.org.

We have a fantastic Facebook page and a Facebook group, both with lots of lively conversation.

Grant, do you know what tweezer food is?

Rice? Millet? Salt?

That’s pretty good. Those are good guesses.

Tweezer food is what you get at really high-end restaurants where the ingredients are so painstakingly assembled that chefs actually use tweezers to do it.

To place it.

Yeah.

A tiny bit of saffron right there in the middle.

Exactly.

It’s on a plate the size of a wagon wheel.

And it’s tiny.

And they’ve made a squirt mandala out of the sauce, right, and painted a picture on top of it.

Yeah, I like that.

Tweezer food.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Ricky Fagan calling from San Diego, California.

Hi, Ricky. How are you doing?

Good. How are you guys doing?

Doing well.

What’s on your mind?

There was an interim newsletter at work, and it was talking about a work party, and it mentioned the word MC, and someone was an MC, but it was spelled E-M-C-E-E.

Now, from what I can understand, I mean, that sounds like it was being spelled out phonetically.

But when I asked other people, they said MC stands for, you know, Master of Ceremony.

So I thought it was really weird and I was kind of confused about it.

So I wanted to bring it to your guys’ attention and see what you guys could do.

So M-C-E-M-C-E-E?

That’s right.

It’s what we call a phoneticized initialism.

Really?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And there are other examples of it.

I mean, if you think of the MC at this event, and maybe there was a DJ, right?

Right.

D-E-E-J-A-Y.

Yeah.

What might surprise you, all of the letters of the alphabet can be spelled.

So they all actually have a way to spell the letter, which in turn, that letter actually spells other words.

You may have a member.

Yeah.

Maybe you have a member of your family who’s a member of the JCs.

J-A-Y-C-E-E.

The most common one, which most people know, is OK.

You can either spell it as the letters O and K, or you can spell it as the letter O-K-A-Y.

-huh.

So it’s just another way we do weird things with the language.

Oh, my favorite one.

My favorite?

Is it the restaurant?

No, but that’s a good one, too.

All right.

Arby’s.

Yes.

Mine is C-3PO.

Of course.

Yeah, that’s a good one, right?

Yeah, if you ever read the novelizations of the books, they spell it out, but they don’t spell it according to the traditional.

It’s S-E-E-T-H-R-E-E-P-I-O.

Yeah.

And if you’ve ever eaten at Arby’s, the restaurant, that’s another one.

It was founded by two guys whose last name was Raffle.

So they were the Raffle Brothers.

R-B.

And it’s Arby’s.

How about them apples?

Oh, my gosh.

Well, that’s kind of cool.

Yeah.

These are pronunciation spellings where the letters are phoneticized back into regular words, and they become words again.

Huh.

Pretty cool, right?

That is super neat.

Not very common in English, though.

And the morphology of English, the number of words that are created this way is really short.

It’s maybe 15 or 20.

Oh, very cool.

All right.

Thank you, sir.

Well, thank you, guys.

Good luck with your studies, Ricky.

All right.

Good talking with you.

Bye-bye.

This is the show about language.

This is the show about words.

This is the show about how we speak and write.

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

And, you know, we’re on Facebook.

We have a huge community on our Facebook page and our Facebook group.

And we follow everybody on Twitter.

Give us a shout out.

Out of all the New York language that I know, I think the street names referring to industries is probably my favorite.

Broadway means theater.

Wall Street means finance.

Madison Avenue means advertising.

Even though for the most part, those industries can be found elsewhere as well.

I mean, there still are theaters on Broadway, but the off-Broadway and the off-off-Broadway is even larger.

And finance, while there is still a lot of it in the tip of Manhattan, there’s still tons more elsewhere in the country and elsewhere in New York City.

Madison Avenue hasn’t really been the home to advertising in even longer.

Right.

So that’s pretty interesting, right?

I can’t think of other names, but perhaps the Bowery still calls to mind the rough and tumble years of the Great Depression, right?

Guys with a little too much to drink with their hands out for money and getting into scrapes and fights.

I don’t know.

Interesting.

The geography of language.

Yeah, the geography of language.

Anyway, the language in New York City is super interesting.

If there’s language that you believe is particular to the place that you live, let us know.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

Things have come to a pretty pass.

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Thanks for listening. I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett. So long.

Bye-bye.

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.

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