Qi, Qat, and Za: Great Scrabble Words

Hey, podcast listener. Even though you’re hearing this recorded show, you can still call us whenever you want.

1-877-929-9673. Our voicemail will take your call. Later, we’ll listen to it just as we listen to all of them.

And then there’s always a chance that we’ll decide to have you on the show to ask your question or share your story.

On with the show.

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

And I’m Grant Barrett. These days I’m spending a lot of time playing games on my mobile phone, Martha.

I noticed that.

A couple of episodes ago I invited our listeners to play me on the game Word Feud.

This is a Scrabble-like game for Android. And boy, howdy. I play a lot of games.

But it occurs to me that there’s a kind of language that’s becoming reinforced in my vocabulary.

I’m playing words that I wouldn’t really use in my normal writing.

Such as?

Well, QI, which is qi, right?

This is an idea for a Chinese life force, right?

Right, right.

I play that all the time because I got to get rid of the q.

Why don’t you just play IQ?

Can you do that?

No, because it’s an initialism.

It’s not actually accepted in the dictionaries.

Oh, darn.

Because it’s this closed vocabulary.

Okay.

And so there’s other words like qat, which is a kind of narcotic leaf chewed in the Middle East.

Cut, right?

And these words let me get rid of that Q because I don’t want to be stuck with that Q.

It’s hard to get rid of a Q, right?

No, who wants a Q?

Occasionally, you can play aqua.

Z’s got the same problem.

Z-A is probably the word most often played with Z.

Z-A.

Yeah, short for pizza, za.

Do you want a slice of za, right?

That’s legitimate for Scrabble, huh?

It is, yeah.

So occasionally, they’ll allow these odd words in that you really don’t use or you don’t use anymore.

Like, have people said za since the 80s?

Probably not.

In any case, the thing that I wanted to tell you, Martha, is that I now have a second Scrabble-like game on my phone.

Oh, no.

This is a bigger one.

It’s Words with Friends, which is also found on the iPhone as well as now on Android.

And I’m not pimping for them.

I’m just saying that I’m on there under the username Grant Barrett, two R’s, two T’s, and you can play me if you like.

I promise to play at least once every three days.

Okay, I’ll take my turn.

Oh, my gosh.

Grant, do you realize what you’re asking for?

You’re telling hundreds of thousands of word nerds.

Yes, but I will be the champion.

I will win.

No, actually, I lose enough to keep me humble, really.

I mean, sometimes I get…

Really?

Yeah.

My wife is currently beating me about 250 points in a game.

But she’s a linguist and lexicographer, too.

Well, Grant, I don’t know what you’re asking for because I know we have a lot of really smart listeners out there and a lot of really wired ones.

So we’ll have to check back with you pretty soon.

Sure.

But, you know, this is a great excuse to mention that we now have apps for Away With Words on Blackberry, iPhone, and Androids.

That’s right.

Yeah, just look for Away With Words in the App Store and any one of these platforms, and you will find us.

You can download our shows and our minicast and whatever else we include there.

Listen on your phone.

And if you have a question about language, you can always call us, 877-929-9673, or email us.

The address is words@waywordradio.org.

And how do they find you on Word Feud?

Look for me on Words with Friends under the username Grant Barrett, 2-Rs-2-Ts,

Or the email address grantbarrett at gmail.com.

Oh, boy.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Tracy Sherbrook calling from Kirby, Vermont.

Hi, Tracy. Welcome to the program.

Hi, Tracy.

Hi. Hi, Grant. Hi, Martha.

Assuming that I have any matter left in my mind or that what I have left in my mind matters,

I have a question for you.

My husband and I, he very often used interesting little euphemisms,

And we were talking about the slow service at a local business.

They were very nice, but we were discussing the fact that if such service continued,

They were going to go belly up before long.

And belly up got me to thinking, and he and I started discussing the origins of belly up.

And obviously there’s a visual that goes along with that that’s very graphic.

A dead fish, a boat that’s turned over, a submissive dog.

But we wondered what the actual origin of the phrase is,

Where it came from, what the actual visual attachment would be.

I mean, how can you not think of dead fish?

You know, when you hear that expression,

I mean, didn’t we all bring home a little goldfish in a baggie?

Didn’t make it home.

Yeah, either didn’t make it home or the next morning you go in

And it’s belly up.

I mean, I’m traumatized.

Well, you were supposed to take it out of the bag.

Well, no, but you played the $2 ping pong toss at the county fair, right?

And they give you a 10 cent fish for your $2, right?

And you bring it home and maybe it makes it, maybe it doesn’t.

But the fish is held vertical, you know, dorsal fin up, right?

By his little fins.

And when he stops moving those fins, he kind of flops on his side and you can see his belly, right?

Yeah.

He is not literally belly straight up, but belly more up.

Yeah. And I think those are the earliest examples we see.

Yeah, that’s right.

They’re in the most common.

Hundreds of years. This is a metaphor that’s existed in English for hundreds of years.

And so it’s the fish when we talk about belly up. It’s not about a submissive dog.

Bugs occasionally do end up with their bellies up.

But fish, like consistently when they’re dead, you can see their bellies in a way that you can’t when they’re alive.

Well, the belly up is interesting, too. You mentioned as a verb, right?

Belly up to the bar, certainly. That came up in our conversation.

Oh, really?

I mentioned that too.

Now, that’s interesting because I’ve seen belly used as a word for crawl, like to crawl on your belly in the past.

Oh, to belly down a hallway or something?

Well, you know, an animal bellying through the grass or something.

And so I’ve never been clear if belly up to the bar means you stick your fat belly up against the bar or you’re just crawling for one last drink.

I think you’re just putting your belly up to the bar.

That’s what I think.

Well, I hope we’ve helped.

You have been wonderful.

All right.

It’s been a joy talking to both of you.

I actually came up with a word to describe the two of you because you’re such a great team.

-oh.

It is fast-scentulating.

It’s fascinating and scintillating.

Oh, it reminds me of scrumtralescent.

Fascintillating.

I like that.

Tracy, thanks for calling.

Thank you very much, Grant.

Oh, pleasure.

It’s been wonderful.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Our email address is words@waywordradio.org.

Our phone number is 877-929-9673.

Send us your questions about words and language and anything that you’ve thought of that you think we might feel is funny.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi there.

This is Roberto from San Diego.

Hi, Roberto.

Hello.

Hi there.

So my question to you guys is the following.

There’s a word.

Well, actually, it’s two words.

And I’d like to understand where it comes from.

It’s hubba hubba.

Why, thank you.

I don’t think he was directing that at you, Grant. Maybe.

No, not really.

Especially since now I know what it means, which is…

Okay, this came to me because my girlfriend calls me this sometimes.

And I guess I was told it means kind of like sexy or good-looking or that kind of thing for a guy or a girl.

But to me, because of the sound of the word, it kind of reminded me more of like, you know,

Some large person making funny sounds or that kind of thing.

So let’s just set the picture here, set the stage.

You’re getting ready to go out for the night.

You put on your silk shirt and your spats or whatever you wear when you go out.

Thanks a lot.

No, I don’t think I use a silk shirt.

But okay, let’s imagine I’m looking, you know, nice.

You’re looking fine, right?

You’re looking great.

You’re kind of foxy, right?

And she knows it.

You’re fierce.

You’re fierce.

And she’s looking at you and she goes, hubba, hubba, right?

Because you look great.

That’s what you’re talking about.

Exactly.

Okay.

You know, I had not heard of this term when she said it a couple times.

And I went and asked like five or six different people, and everyone knew what it meant except me.

Now, some of my friends are a little younger than I am.

You know, I won’t say exactly how old I am, but let’s say I’m around my 40s, and they’re probably their 20s.

And I don’t know if that has anything to do with it or not, but everyone said the same thing.

Everyone said, you know, what she thought it is.

I’m surprised that the younger generation knew it better than you.

But maybe you’re an anomaly because this term goes back at least to the 1940s.

Really?

Yeah.

It was particularly big during World War II,

And it was the kind of thing that soldiers would say when they saw an attractive girl walking by.

And you can find it in all of the mythology of the period.

I say mythology knowingly because there’s always a certain amount of backstory and jokes

And kind of like just kind of the running gags of the military life

And the kind of stuff that Bob Hope might have talked about on his USO tours.

I can totally hear him saying that.

Hubba hubba.

Yeah, so there’s all this kind of joking environment, and it’s the kind of thing a guy would say when a pretty lady would go by, right?

What’s really interesting about this is not only was it popular during World War II, but there’s a possibility that’s older than that.

I’m going to give you just a tiny tangent.

Okay.

Dr. John Leiter is probably the preeminent American slang lexicographer, and I learned from him.

He taught me a great deal.

And he uncovered some evidence last year that it might come from a man they called the Monkey Man, Kiki the Habba Habba Man, who in the early 1900s was something of a figure of, I don’t know, entertainment?

Well, it’s something that would never go over today because P.T. Barnum enlisted him to dress up like a Zulu.

I’m putting that in quotes.

Basically, it was a racist display.

He pretended to be a savage.

Okay.

And he was called Kiki, or I’m pretty sure it’s Kiki, or it might have been Kai Kai, K-I-K-I, the Habba Habba Man.

And he would shout, Habba Habba, that was his thing.

And people would shout it back at him in his public appearances.

Yes.

And so Dr. Leiter has spent a little bit of time, and he thinks there may be a strong case for Habba Habba coming from the Habba Habba shout that this Kiki the Wild Man would make and that people would make back at him.

He would stand outside attractions at carnivals and fairs and say,

Habba, Habba, Habba, Habba, Habba, Habba, trying to get everybody to come in.

And at one point he says, he quotes one of the sources, Dr. Leiter does,

Thousands of children were shouting Habba, Habba in the city of Seattle in 1909.

And so, I mean, if you’ve got thousands of people shouting this.

Now, the question is, how do we go from this Kiki the Wild Man to soldiers and a pretty lady?

I don’t know, but language is strange.

Slang does move from place to place.

Yeah, it got picked up in baseball, too.

It moves from meaning to meaning.

It’s possible.

It’s possible.

But we do know it was very solid in slangy English in the 1940s.

And I guess it’s interesting, too, that it goes the other way, right?

I mean, in this case, it’s not the guy calling the girl.

It’s the girl calling the guy.

Yeah.

I don’t know if that happens in other terms often or not, but I think that’s interesting, too.

Well, in your case, obviously.

Well, Roberto, I hope we’ve helped a little bit.

Origin is indistinct, as is often the case with slang, but it’s got a long history.

And I love the fact that it’s still being used today because that kind of interjection with a kind of fairly solid meaning is kind of rare in English.

Yeah, yeah.

I still associate it with World War II and, you know, sailors on leave and that kind of thing.

For me, I think it’s a – I imagine that there’s a Warner Brothers cartoon somewhere with Bugs Bunny doing this.

Actually, with Elmer Fudd doing this to Bugs Bunny, who’s in drag.

That’s how – I don’t know that there was an episode, but that in my mind that could have taken place.

That would work for me, I guess.

All right.

Roberto, thanks for calling.

Well, thank you, guys.

Appreciate your time.

Yeah, send a picture.

All right.

We’ll talk to you later.

Bye-bye.

Great.

Have a nice day.

Bye-bye.

Okay.

Bye-bye.

Hubba Hubba.

If I said Hubba Hubba to a random person on the street, do you think they’d smack me?

Yes.

Oh, okay.

Send your questions to words@waywordradio.org or give us a call.

But try it.

Ow!

Why are they just smacking me?

877-929-9673.

Hey, Grant.

Hey, Martha.

What do you say we go get Joe with cow and sand?

So coffee with milk and sugar?

Excellent.

That’s it.

Oh, diner speak.

Well, yeah, I read about that in an old American speech article about naval slang.

Oh, cool.

Isn’t that great?

Joe with cow and sand.

Yeah, yeah.

Coffee with milk and sugar.

Yeah, maybe a little hen fruit on the side.

I don’t think you need any more caffeine, though.

That’s probably true.

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

That address, words@waywordradio.org.

More linguistic gymnastics coming up.

Stick around.

You’re listening to A Way with Words.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

And we’re joined once again by our quiz guy, John Chainsaw.

No, not him.

That’s me.

Sorry, John Chinesky.

The nice one.

Thank you.

You’re the nice one.

Chainsaw is my nom in the National Puzzlers League.

Yes, as you know, we all have puzzling names.

Right, right.

You’re sharp wit.

My handle, yeah.

Do either of you remember a headline that is often quoted as like the most classic headline from the entertainment newspaper Variety?

No, but I always liked the New York Post’s Headless, Body Found, and Topless Bar.

That is a classic.

The one from Variety goes, Sticks, Nicks, Hick Picks.

Oh, yeah.

Remember that one?

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, it’s one of those famous headlines in journalism actually.

What it means is – now, sticks, nicks, hick picks.

Sticks, meaning people in rural areas.

Nicks, reject.

Hick, again, people in rural areas, picks or movies.

So they’re saying that people in rural areas would not like movies about people in rural areas.

It turns out actually the headline actually turned out to be false.

They actually loved movies about people in the hills and whatnot.

Yeah, I was going to say.

But it’s a very famous headline and I’ve created a few of my own rhyming headlines.

-oh.

I’ll describe the story to you.

You give me four rhyming words that would make a headline for that story.

Okay.

Yeah.

Okay.

For example, female deer are familiar with a TV program about tailors.

Oh, boy.

So does.

Do.

Do.

Female deer are familiar with a TV show.

No.

And it’s about tailors.

So show.

Do.

Dono so show.

Dono so show.

Very good.

Yes.

Good job, Martha.

I loved hearing you work that one out.

So that’s the way this puzzle works out.

All of the ones that I’m going to do at the beginning here are all one-syllable words,

And I said there are four of them, okay?

Let’s try a few more.

Oh, boy.

Okay.

Here’s a story about a wayward mallard that hit a tractor trailer wedged in an overpass.

A wayward…

Duck, struck, truck.

Stuck?

Stuck, struck, stuck, truck.

You know what?

I’ll take the words in whatever order you throw them out.

It’s okay.

You’ll put them all back together, right?

Yeah.

How about this story about rough-hewn Scandinavians drag a palomino from his barn against his wishes?

Is it Swedes or?

Or Danes?

Danes.

Danes is better.

Danes?

No.

Think about the palomino.

Horse?

Pony?

No, horse is right.

Oh, Norse horse.

Say the clue again, please.

Rough-hewn Scandinavians.

Course Norse.

Drag a palomino from his barn.

Force horse, but Norse.

You got it.

Course Norse, force horse.

Course Norse, force horse.

Oh, God.

Course Norse, force horse.

That’s all we need at this point.

Oh, boy.

Yeah, the barn, I’ll use just a little extra in there.

Oh, John, you’ve been busy.

Yeah, yeah.

Wow.

Let’s try this one.

A study finds that if your dinner companion doesn’t show up on time, they will be a terrific marriage partner.

Late date something mate.

Mate’s great mate.

Great mate.

Late date comment great.

Late date great mate.

Very good.

Here’s a story about an Englishman whose friends on a lark poured a bucket of cola on him while he’s sleeping.

Blokes.

Oh.

Coke.

Blokes Coke joke.

Something.

Coke Joke.

Coke Joke.

By Blokes.

Woke.

Yes.

Coke Joke Woke Bloke.

Coke Joke Woke Bloke.

Very good.

Breaking news from whatever.

Newcastle.

Good.

Here’s another one.

A local femme fatale has some rude opinions about a football player’s hair.

What rhymes with quarterback?

Let’s try more general.

Instead, don’t look at football precisely, just the more general.

Something jocks locks.

Oh, jocks locks.

Fox.

Yes.

Oh, fox mocks jocks locks.

Good.

I had fox knocks jocks locks, but fox mocks jocks locks works just as much.

On a plane, in a train.

Yes.

Okay, let’s try one more.

It seems that an overweight macaque makes for an assistant with real get-up-and-go.

Okay, so Funky Monkey.

No, Monkey.

Donkey Monkey.

He’s overweight.

He’s a little heavy.

Chunky Monkey.

Yeah.

Oh, ice cream.

Chunky Monkey.

Spunky.

Flunky.

Yes.

Chunky Monkey.

Spunky Flunky.

Chunky Monkey.

Spunky Flunky.

Well, that’s all the news that’s not quite fit to print or even to go out over the radio.

Oh, my goodness, John.

That was a lot of work on both ends.

Thank you so much for putting that together.

What does it take out of you to do one of these quizzes, John?

I know it’s a lot of Cheetos and Coca-Cola, I guess.

Okay.

I need them good.

Thank you, John.

Thanks, Mark.

Thanks, Martha.

Send your clever rhyming headlines to words@waywordradio.org.

And you can call us to talk about any aspect of language, anyone at all, grammar, slang, punctuation, etc.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Grant. This is Ellen in Peninsula, Ohio.

Hi, Ellen. Welcome to the program.

A while back, I was watching an old black and white comedy, Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn.

I think it’s called Bringing Up Baby.

But anyway, it’s one of those that’s billed as a madcap or screwball comedy.

And I just got to thinking, you know, where did madcap come from?

I didn’t know if it was the Mad Hatter or just what it was.

Or was Cary Grant wearing some kind of weird hat with that fluffy robe that he wears in the movie?

Yeah, madcap.

So how would you compare a madcap comedy to some other kind of comedy?

Just frenetic and probably kind of silly, not really meant to be very deep, but just very entertaining and lots of goofy situations.

And that’s fast-paced, I should say.

And that particular movie was definitely one of those.

Okay, so sort of like our show, kind of a madcap radio program.

Non-stop riot of laughs, yeah.

That would be us.

Yeah, well, madcap is a really interesting word. The mad in there is like crazy, you know, like you’re mad.

And the cap is a really interesting instance where the word cap for a long time meant a covering for your head.

It still does, right?

But hundreds of years ago, the word cap also applied to the head in a kind of playful way.

So, for example, to fuddle one’s cap was to get drunk.

If you fuddle your cap.

And you see the cap in various compounds like that, meaning head.

And one of those is madcap, meaning, you know, reckless or wildly impulsive, that kind of thing.

And now, as you suggested, I think that the best synonym for madcap is screwball.

Good.

Okay.

Okay.

Very interesting.

And, of course, we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention the use of madcap in Shakespeare.

That’s right.

Why don’t you mention that, Grant?

I think it’s Shakespeare used it.

Like we said, madcap, laugh a minute on this show.

Henry IV, where is his son, the nimble-footed madcap prince of Wales,

And his comrades that daft the world aside and bid it pass?

I think he’s getting married soon.

Or is that a different one?

Oh, yeah, the madcap prince of Wales.

Yeah, that one.

So, Ellen, you have an answer.

Did you like the movie?

Oh, yeah, I love all those.

I love, like, the old arsenic and old lace and, you know, all those ones.

I love them.

I think Turner Classic Movie has them on all the time.

Okay, so between Away With Words and Madcap Comedies, you have it covered, right?

Yeah, keep me laughing, yeah.

All right, well, thanks for calling, Nellon.

Thank you.

Okay, take care.

Bye-bye.

If you were watching a movie and it made you think of a word and now you’re curious about it,

This is the place to find out about it, 877-929-9673,

Or email the madcap word nerds at words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name’s Ron from Escondido.

Ron from Escondido.

Hi, Martha. Hi, Grant.

Greetings.

Hi. What’s up, Ron?

Well, I’m wondering.

Every once in a while when I talk with someone and we’re giving directions

And they’ll go straight down that street.

Mm—

And I wonder where that extra H is coming from.

Ron, so you’re saying street with that S-H at the beginning.

That’s right.

Oh, right, because it wasn’t completely clear on the line.

Yeah, I wasn’t hearing it either.

But we know what you’re talking about because you’re not the first person to notice this.

Oh, absolutely not.

For decades, people have been commenting on this, the S-T-R sound becoming something like an S-H-T-R sound.

Yes, exactly.

It requires the S and the T and the R. It’s not just the S-T alone that will do it.

Really interesting stuff. Drives a bunch of people crazy. I’m not sure if you’re one of those.

Yeah, it bothers me a little bit.

I try looking it up on the web, and it’s a hard thing to try to do detective work on.

It’s extremely hard.

Yeah, but if you just Google the spelling, just search for S-H-T-R-E-E-T,

You’ll find a lot of people talking about it because people use that to describe what they’re hearing.

Yeah.

And you’ll also find it used in some, I mentioned in some style guides and pronunciation guides

And a lot of different books about changing language and so on and so forth.

And it is a thing.

It is something that people do.

That’s what we call in the trade a thing.

Well, that’s Hollywood language speaking.

I’m too close to…

Is this the way people are going to speak 10 years from now?

Well, they’ve been speaking this way for decades.

Here’s the thing.

It’s because that S-T and that R are next to each other.

It is always going to happen to somebody somewhere in the English-speaking world at any given time.

But it’s not so common yet where we can say it’s a transition that’s inevitable.

And it’s not so common where we can say this is something to be remarked upon in the pronunciation guides of dictionaries.

We find examples of it in the UK, in Australia, in New Zealand, in Canada, in the United States.

Pretty much anywhere English is spoken, somebody’s doing this and somebody else is commenting on it.

A lot of people say, oh, I hear it more and more in the news media.

I do.

Yeah, but it’s because you watch a lot more news media maybe than…

Well, in traffic reports, you know, people are always talking about this and that streak.

Yeah. Michelle Obama talks this way, too.

Yeah. It appears in the language of black Americans and white Americans, young and old.

There’s no particular… It’s not regional.

Right.

And it’s because it’s a feature of English.

It’s possible that something called assimilation is happening,

Where that S-T and the R next to each other sometimes causes to say shh instead of s.

So we’re saying an S-H sound instead of an S sound.

It’s kind of like the consonant equivalent of a diphthong.

Ooh, I like that.

A diphthong is when two vowels collide and kind of make a third sound, right?

So this assimilation is kind of when two consonant sounds collide and kind of make a third sound.

So, Ron, you’re not alone.

You’re not imagining things.

And linguists are on the case.

Well, thank you.

I knew you guys would know about it.

Appreciate it.

Thanks so much.

Okay.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

I see one Australian commentator remarks upon it as sloppy, which is really misguided.

It’s not necessarily sloppy because it’s just something that’s happening.

Yeah, and I think people are picking it up from each other.

They could be, yeah.

That’s my sense.

It’s one of those things that’s hard to test for because you need to catch people using it when they’re not aware that you were judging their speech.

Exactly.

And that’s very difficult to do.

Very difficult to do.

Yeah.

Well, when words collide, A Way with Words results.

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

Here’s a found word I didn’t know.

Okay.

It’s got two pronunciations, paraff or paraff.

Do you know this?

How do you spell it?

P-A-R-A-P-H.

Does it have to do with books?

No, with signatures.

You know the gigantic flourish that people used to add at the end of their signatures, like with weird hash marks and curly keys?

Oh, yeah, and John Hancock.

Yeah, it has nothing to do with the letters.

It’s just like a decoration at the end.

That’s a paraff or a paraff.

And it was used in olden days as a precaution against forgery.

Oh, really?

Yeah, and it comes from, of course, you could guess, the Latin word related to paragraph.

Oh, okay.

It’s just like a contraction or a reduction.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

So it was interesting to me to find there was a name for this particular flourish at the end of a six-year-old.

I just thought it was like people showing off, but there was actually a use for it and a name for it.

Yeah, who knew?

P-A-R-A-P-H.

Well, now we all do.

Yeah.

Share your found words with us, words@waywordradio.org or 877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Christine from Fitchburg, Wisconsin.

Hi, Christine.

Welcome to the program.

Hi.

Thank you very much.

What can we help you with?

I was in my car listening to Garrison Keillor, Prairie Home Companion,

And he was introducing his musical guest, and he said he has a mandolin in his hands.

And in my mind’s eye, I pictured someone holding a woman named Amanda Lynn.

And it took me a few seconds to realize that he didn’t say he had Amanda Lynn, the person, in his hands,

But Amanda Lynn, the instrument.

And I wondered if there was a word for that phenomenon.

I mean, I heard it correctly.

It kind of made grammatical sense.

So is there a word for something, a mandolin and a mandolin?

Yes, we can definitely help you with that.

It is weird when you get a mental picture from words that sort of run together like that.

I remember not too long ago hearing about a prima donna, and I was thinking, oh, this is somebody before the material girl.

Aretha Franklin, a prima donna.

Exactly.

Yes, the word for this is mondegreen.

That’s M-O-N-D-E-G-R-E-E-N.

And the etymology of this word is very clear.

It was made up by a writer in 1954 who published an article in Harper’s Magazine, I believe it was.

And it was an essay called The Death of Lady Mondegreen.

Now, Lady Mondegreen sounds like a noble woman, right?

Yes.

But here’s the story.

When Sylvia Wright, the author, was young, she heard an old Scottish ballad about a nobleman named the Earl of Moray.

And the first stanza is something that she misheard as a child.

It goes, ye highlands and ye lowlands, oh, where have you been?

They have slain the Earl of Moray and laid him on the green.

Oh.

Meaning laid him on the grass.

Yeah.

I think we’ve all done that as children.

Yes.

Yeah, exactly.

Yes, yes.

When we were visiting out west, my sister kept saying we were going to see the big orange sheep.

And she thought we said big orange sheep.

She was so disappointed.

They’re not orange.

Yeah, yeah, that’s great.

And there have been countless kids who have misheard the Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer song,

Thinking that there’s another reindeer called Olive.

Olive the other reindeer.

Oh, all of the other reindeer.

Right, right, right.

So the term for this is Mondegreen, and if you want to see a great collection of them, there’s one.

I don’t know if you are a Jimi Hendrix fan.

You don’t exactly sound like one.

No, not really.

Okay, okay.

Well, he had this song that had the line in it, excuse me while I kiss the sky, you know, the heavens.

Yeah, I do remember that.

Okay, all right.

Well, there’s a book called Excuse Me While I Kiss This Guy.

Oh.

And it’s a collection of Mondegreens like that.

Oh, wonderful.

So now you have a word for it, and if you just Google Mondegreen, you’ll find lots and lots of examples of it.

Okay.

Thank you so much.

Okay.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

You know, another great one, Grant, was done by the, you know that comedy duo in Britain called The Two Ronnies?

Love them.

There’s one about this guy comes into a store and he asks for fork candles.

And so the guy brings him four candles, but he wanted fork handles for his forks.

Or maybe it’s the other way around.

I can’t remember, but I love Mondegreens.

Share your favorite misunderstandings with us.

Words at waywordradio.org or call us and tell us about them, 877-929-9673.

Martha, you read a lovely poem by Pablo Neruda a few episodes ago.

Yeah, yeah, we get a lot of responses to that.

People have been looking for it, and we linked to it on our website, so you can find it there.

Stephanie Soros wrote with a favorite poem of hers.

It’s Why We Tell Stories by Liesl Mueller.

And there’s a bit in the middle that I particularly like because it reminds me of books that I’ve read.

It goes,

We sat by the fire in our caves, and because we were poor,

We made up a tale about a treasure mountain that would open only for us.

And it makes me think of Aladdin or Aladdin and the 40 Thieves

And Open Sesame and the cave and all this classic story.

And the whole poem is evocative in that way.

I want to share this with our listeners.

We’ll put this online.

And if you have a poem that you’d like to share with us,

Send it to us an email, words@waywordradio.org,

Or give us a call, 877-929-9673, and tell us about it.

Word nerds on parade and more of your calls as A Way with Words continues.

Support for A Way with Words comes from National University, where flexible online classes let you earn your degree or credential on your schedule.

Learn more at nu.edu.

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

And I’m Martha Barnette.

A while back, we encouraged you to send stories of your favorite librarians.

And we received an email about this from Lois Teaslink of Vista, California.

She wrote to us about a librarian whom she knew back in the 1920s.

And she writes,

I thought I would tell you about my favorite librarian.

She volunteered, I’m sure, and appeared in the one-room lending library over the tailor shop at 7 o’clock each Saturday morning.

She dusted and rearranged the donated books and opened the door at the top of the rickety steps around 8,

Or when she thought we could wait no longer.

My friend Neafi and I, two out of our class of nine who read even when nothing had been assigned, were sitting on the landing.

She smiled, let us in, and started the process of writing the slip that let us take a precious book downstairs to read,

Lying on our stomachs in the shade, and then scurry upstairs for another one when we had finished.

Lois goes on to say,

The tailor donated the use of his upstairs during the only time that he would not be busy downstairs.

Lengthening the Sunday pants of the growing teens and widening the waistbands of their fathers.

The librarian patiently signed out and in the books that we found that we hadn’t read

Or knew were worth reading again until 1145. Then she said, choose a long one now because I have to

Go take care of my mother and closed the library until next Saturday. We called her Miss Beth and

She opened a door to a bigger world for me and my friend.

Well, Lois has written us several times about language.

She’s continued to love language all those years.

And recently we received an email from her daughter, Mary Claire, who wanted to let us

Know that Lois passed away this past week.

And so, as Mary Claire put it, won’t be pestering slash entertaining you anymore with the phrases

She remembers.

Well, it was all entertainment.

Thank you, Lois.

And that’s what a lovely story.

Libraries are important to a lot of us.

And if you have a story to share about somebody that moved you, it can even be from the 1920s.

We would love to hear about it.

Send it to words@waywordradio.org or call us 877-929-9673.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Steve from Milwaukee.

Hello, Steve.

Hi, Steve. Welcome to the program.

Hi there. Thanks.

I’ve got an interesting question for you.

A friend of mine is from Cuba and posted a question on Facebook that got a lot of attention.

Nobody really came up with a definitive answer.

So here’s the question.

The question is, where did the expression, no way Jose, come from?

And who in the world is Jose?

A lot of people thought that it came from the village voice back in the 1960s, but nobody was really sure.

So I thought, well, okay, I’m going to bring it to the ultimate and see if you can answer it.

Now the question is whether or not we can get our answer repeated as widely as the false answer about the village voice.

Well, I promise I’ll post it back on the Facebook site.

Because the thing is if you Google this question, you do find everybody quoting everybody else on this kind of pass it along telephone game about the village voice and some date that may or may not be in the 1960s.

And it’s just a big mishmash.

It’s like a perfect example of why the Internet will lead you astray, you know.

Here’s what we know for sure.

No Way Jose appeared at least as early as 1973.

I can find it in print in the newspaper from that year, guaranteed.

Now, instincts, as a slang lexicographer, tell me that it’s probably older than that,

Particularly because No Way really only came into English as a thing.

That is something that people say, kind of a lexicalized pat expression in the 1960s.

And so No Way and No Way Jose are basically contemporaneous as far as I’m concerned.

That means the thing is No Way kind of appears out of the blue.

It probably would have been understood before that, but it wasn’t a formal expression.

And then people immediately started reacting to No Way being heavily overused.

And some people going, oh, it’s on its way out.

I mean, even before the 1970s, people were going, No Way has had its day.

It’s finished.

It’s through.

Nobody’s using that anymore.

And here we are in 2011, and people are still using No Way.

So that said, the Village Voice thing may or may not have appeared early in the Village Voice,

But I would not be surprised if it’s much earlier than that anyway.

It’s just so slangy.

It’s hard to find.

So you think it’s just an add-on?

Yeah, it’s just an add-on.

No Way appears.

And then if you want to emphasize No Way, what are you going to say?

Very No Way?

No No Way?

I mean, it’s just kind of a way of being humorous and jocular, which is what slang is all about.

Well, it can be all about.

Yeah, and I think it has to do with rhythm, too.

I mean, you wouldn’t say, no way, Sergei.

Well, Jose is a far more common name anyway.

Jose is the Joe of Spanish, right?

The Joe of Spanish, yeah.

Well, Jose, I mean, that’s another interesting thing, isn’t it?

That it’s not really Spanish, Jose.

No, it’s an Americanized…

So Jose, in this case, is like Betsy as in Heavens, too.

Yeah, it’s just sort of…

Or as the Canadians say, a hokey dinah.

It’s just a name to attach on the end of it because it rhymes with no way.

So 1960s, probably 1970s for certain.

Just leave the village voice out of it and don’t go around quoting online sources promiscuously.

So there really is no Jose.

Nope.

As far as we can tell.

Or Santa.

No, I can post it and I can say, no way Jose is the Village Voice credible source for this.

Well, the thing is that – here’s the thing about the Village Voice citation that everyone’s using is that they don’t have a date.

They don’t have a page number.

They don’t have an author name, right?

They just say the Village Voice, the 1960s, which is absolutely useless as a reference.

There’s no value to that.

It’s like saying, oh, well, you know, the UK plus or minus 100 years.

That’s not a source, right?

When were you born?

I was born sometime in the last century.

It’s just like, no, that’s not really a date.

When’s your birthday?

March, more or less.

That doesn’t really work.

You know, when you’re tracking this stuff down, you have to be precise.

I want to know the column and the paragraph number.

So, Steve, how are you going to put all of that into 140 characters?

I think I’m simply going to put No Way Jose.

Perfect.

Perfect.

It works for me.

No evidence for No Way Jose from the Village Voice of the 1960s.

No evidence, Jose.

I like that.

However, there’s always the footnote, which is pending further data.

I like it.

I appreciate it.

Thanks, Steve.

Take care, Steve.

Bye-bye.

Language.

It’s fun and interesting.

Call us, 877-929-9673, or send us your questions and email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi.

My name is Conrad.

I’m in Indianapolis.

Hi, Conrad.

Hello.

Hi.

How are you?

Good.

How are you doing?

It’s fine. Pleasure to be on the show.

Great.

Thanks for coming. What can we help you with?

Well, I was talking with a British colleague of mine the other day,

And we were discussing business and trying to make sure that we weren’t making a hasty decision.

And he used the phrase, oh, yeah, we wouldn’t want to get into an act in haste, repent at leisure situation.

And I thought that was an interesting phrase.

I thought you guys might have some background on it for me.

And he said leisure, not leisure, huh?

He said leisure.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Right.

Interesting.

Yeah.

So act in haste, repent at leisure.

And what were you doing? What kind of mystique were you up to?

Well, we were doing risk management for our business.

Perfect.

We were trying to make sure we weren’t getting into a situation we’d regret later.

So, right, making sure, for example, you had enough insurance to cover yourselves in the event of flood or a hurricane or something like that.

There are no hurricanes in Indianapolis. Let’s say tornadoes.

Lots of tornadoes.

Lots of tornadoes here.

Okay, very good.

I’ve been lucky so far.

So you’ve got to read the legalese, make sure that you get the coverage that you think, and your deductible’s not too high and so forth, right?

Exactly.

I don’t use this phrase, but I’m very familiar with it probably from reading lots of old texts.

It feels old-fashioned to me, don’t you think, Martha?

Yeah, and the version I’ve seen of it is,

Marry in haste, repent at leisure.

Yes, it’s true.

I did a Google search, and there are a couple different variations,

But I was really interested in the word repent

Because it’s a word that carries a lot of religious overtones.

I didn’t know if maybe it originated as a part of a sermon somewhere

And then was used in colloquialisms after that or was?

Well, the marriage component here and the one that Martha knows,

The version that Martha knows is important.

Not personally, but…

Well, it’s important because divorce is kind of a relatively new phenomenon.

Many, at least in the Western world, many religions for many, many centuries

Did not allow divorce.

And so if you got married, you were hitched and you lived with that mistake, you know?

You had a long time.

And that’s kind of what we’re talking about.

We’re talking about living with your mistakes.

You can find variations of this going back to the 1600s.

Yeah.

And they are often in religious contexts.

You can find modern ones as well.

David Foster Wallace uses a variation of it in Infinite Jest.

Yeah.

Well, he says, the shopworn act in haste repentant leisure would seem to have been almost custom designed for the case of tattoos.

I mean, because you’re living with it.

I have several friends in that situation.

Yeah.

Because you’re living with it, right?

It’s a mistake that you can’t.

It’s very difficult to change.

You can’t get a divorce because your religion doesn’t allow it or your country doesn’t allow it.

Tattoos take expensive laser removal.

I mean, we’re talking about something that’s, you know, it’s really easy to sign your name to something that is incredibly difficult to get out of.

Yeah.

That’d make a great tip.

Is it a phrase that’s common in the U.S. Or is it just kind of brought over from the U.K. And European?

I don’t think it’s that common.

No.

No.

I think most people would figure it out pretty quickly just by context.

Yeah.

Sure.

Yeah.

So this is the only time you’ve ever heard a colleague over there use it.

Is that right?

Right.

But, you know, I’ve got some friends that use some pretty strange phrases over here, at least to my ears.

So, yeah, that one was great.

Well, hey, thanks a lot for the call, Conrad.

Well, I appreciate your answer.

Thanks for looking into it.

Thank you. Bye-bye.

Okay. Bye-bye.

Bye.

Bye.

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

Well, you know, I always love it when a word sends me running to the dictionary.

You know, I’m reading something and I either come across a word I don’t know at all or I come across a word that’s been used in a way that I’ve never seen before.

I’m sure you have the same experience, Grant.

Yep, all the time.

It’s really fun.

And that happened to me this week when I was reading an article about the hairstylist Vidal Sassoon.

I’m bug-eyed, wondering where this is going.

Or why I was reading about it.

Actually, there’s a new documentary coming out about him that sounds very interesting.

He was the guy who was famous for his Sassoon Bob, really short haircut.

And it turns out that he had a very interesting life.

He grew up very poor in England.

He spent time in a Jewish orphanage.

And in fact, later in his life, he fought in the Israeli army.

And I was reading his account of facing anti-Semitic abuse as a youngster.

And he describes these hooligans shouting insults and throwing things at the Jewish students as they walked to school.

And he said for that reason, he and his fellow students had to walk to school in a crocodile.

So this is like the turtle formation that the Romans used to use, right?

A turtle formation?

Yeah, with the shields up so you’re all together in one body.

It’s about a legion walking together, right?

Well, sort of.

I mean, I went running to the Oxford English Dictionary and then learned what I suspected was the case, which is a crocodile in Britain is children walking two by two in a long file to school.

And the crocodiles go across the zebra crossing.

Right.

Right.

Or the zebra, as they say.

The zebra crossing.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The crosswalk that looks like, you know, with a black and white stripe.

So it was a great example of one of those words where it’s a perfectly commonplace word.

I mean, I don’t talk about crocodiles every day, but the fact that it was used in that way sent me running to the dictionary.

I love that kind of thing.

I’ve heard that called a walking bus here in the U.S.

A walking bus.

Two columns of kids, right?

Walking kind of a rectangular formation down the street together, usually holding hands.

That’s really cool.

A walking bus or a crocodile.

Interesting.

Crazy words.

Share what you find in your reading.

Words at waywordradio.org or call us and tell us about it.

877-929-9673.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Lawrence from San Diego.

Hi, Lawrence.

Hello, Lawrence. Welcome to the program.

Thank you.

Well, a couple weeks ago, I guess it was,

My girlfriend is a professor at California State Long Beach,

And she was writing an assignment for her class,

And I often look over her assignment.

She looks over my papers,

And the last line of the paper, or last line of the assignment,

Was write a paper telling me what you have learned.

And I looked at that, and I said, well, that’s not right.

It should be telling me what you have learned.

And she said, no, no, have learned is correct.

And I said, it doesn’t sound right to me.

So, of course, you know, being Internet people, we went to the Internet,

And I did some research, and I looked around,

And I couldn’t find a satisfactory answer.

We thought it might have to do with something, the fact that she’s Indian,

And so she was educated, you know, with the Queen’s English.

I’m American, so, you know, I was not.

And there seems to be some indication on the web that that might be the difference.

But, you know, I wasn’t so sure about what the rules were.

So was her usage correct?

Is it a British versus American thing, or is it something that we’re getting out of using?

Is it, you know, what’s the rule for using the P form as opposed to the ED form?

You’ve come close to the heart of the thing, Lawrence.

You’ve come really close to the heart of it.

Well, this is a long history, and I’ll point you to some books at the end of this call

That might help you with a little more detail.

But the short version is that in the 17th and 18th centuries, there was a movement to make the ED forms of a bunch of different sorts of words the most common one.

And that was to replace the T form.

So learned instead of learnt and spelled instead of spelt and so forth.

However, this movement lasted in the United States and we never really reverted, but it didn’t last in the UK.

And so in the UK, they still have retained a great number of those old T spelled forms.

And at the same time, they coexist in the UK with the ED forms.

And of course, they propagated those T forms, like learnt, to the Commonwealth countries, except for Canada for the most part, which in this case is more or less like American English.

So, for example, if you go to the Antipodes to New Zealand and Australia, you’ll find that Australians love the T forms.

New Zealanders use them a little less, but they’re very common there.

Of course, this is true in India as well.

The British had hundreds of years of history in India,

And the English spoken there hews very closely to the British model

With some of those wonderful Indian exceptions that people have written books about.

One of them is called Indian English by Pingali Salaja.

That’s S-A-I-L-A-J-A.

And there’s another one called Contemporary Indian English by Andreas.

I don’t know how to say this, but it’s S-E-D-L-A-T-S-C-H-E-K.

And we’ll link to those books on our website.

Oh, well, that’s really interesting.

You know, at first I suspected it was something having to do with Queen’s English versus, you know, the American English.

But then, you know, looking on the web, I got more confused with the past participles and all that other stuff and what was what.

But, you know, and of course the web is a notoriously bad place to get good information or at least clear information.

And the radio is a great one.

Thanks for calling.

It’s great.

I love the show, and you guys are great.

Awesome.

And so, I mean, I’ll have to start sending you more questions.

I have tons of them.

Oh, they will feel really spoiled.

Hey, we’ll talk with you later.

Don’t forget to tell everyone about what you learned today.

I will.

I will indeed.

All right, bye-bye.

Thanks so much.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

I love it when we hear from people about the language issues that come up in their relationships.

Yes.

Right?

Married couples, boyfriends and girlfriends, just sometimes even roommates.

Yeah.

You can tell us about yours, words@waywordradio.org, or call us, 877-929-9673.

We talk from time to time about proverbs, and in particular, modern proverbs that might be replacing the older ones.

I have a great one for you, Grant.

Oh, please.

Imitation is the sincerest form of television.

Nice.

And true.

I love that.

I love that.

I think that’s from Fred Allen, the radio comedian.

Came across that recently and loved it.

Wanted to tell you about that.

And if you have something you’d like to tell us about, call us 877-929-9673.

Or email us.

The address is words@waywordradio.org.

That’s our show for this week.

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

Call us 877-929-9673.

Or email us. The address is words@waywordradio.org.

Stay in touch with us all week on Facebook.

Look for us there under Wayword Radio.

Stephanie Levine is our senior producer.

Our technical director and editor is Tim Felton.

Tim also chooses our music.

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

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

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

Thanks for listening. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. Sayonara.

Ciao.

Support for A Way with Words comes from National University,

Where flexible online classes let you earn your degree or credential on your schedule.

Learn more at nu.edu.

Hi, it’s Martha.

Did you know that A Way with Words is independently produced by a small nonprofit?

To keep bringing you the show, we need your help.

We welcome your contributions of any size.

Go to waywordradio.org, click on membership.

Your donations do add up, and they make this program possible.

Thanks.