Radiofreude

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Lisa from Palo Alto, California.

Well, hello Lisa, welcome to the program.

Thank you.

What can we do for you?

Well, I have been thinking, I’ve been talking to friends about this issue, and I finally decided that I think we need to coin a new word for, I don’t want to call it a phenomenon, let’s just call it the feeling that you get when you’ve been listening to someone on the radio for a long time, and then you accidentally, I say accidentally because I try not to see pictures of these people, see a picture of them and it’s nothing like you imagined.

Yeah, they’re not pretty, are they?

Well, no, it’s not necessarily even that. That’s not it. It’s not necessarily even that. It’s just that they don’t look at all like you imagined in the theater of your mind.

Yeah, yeah.

Oh, I get that completely. Oh, they have to say sometimes I’m joking that they’re not pretty. When I first saw Melissa Block from NPR the first time, I said, what a lovely woman. I was amazed because I just thought she was going to be an ordinary person like the rest of us. But actually, she’s very appealing in every way. And now when I hear her, I’m more interested in what she has to say.

Right. And that other MB, too. You had the same experience with that other MB, right, Grant?

Yeah, I don’t know who you’re talking about.

So who, Lisa, who are we talking about here?

Well, there have been a couple. But the most recent one, I think, has been Ira Glass from This American Life. You know, I mean, I’ve been listening to him for years, and he’s aged a little bit, but his voice hasn’t really aged at all. I’m going to tell him you said that. He sounds a little bit like a 17-year-old, and I don’t know, for some reason I’ve always envisioned him as, I mean, I knew he wasn’t 17, but I’ve always envisioned him as sort of a scruffy, kind of a hippie guy with kind of a shaggy hair and, you know, a T-shirt that says something clever.

Now that’s Grant.

No, I wear work shirts, not T-shirts.

So, Lisa, I agree with you. I think we have to have a word for this.

Oh. You got suggestions, Lisa?

That’s why I’m calling you. I needed a lexicographer for this.

That’s you, Grant.

Oh, radio Freude. I don’t know what you’d call it.

Radio Freude.

I’m afraid of my radio.

Well, I was struck by the fact that you said that it sounds like you go out of your way not to see pictures of these people. I actually do, especially if I’ve been listening to them and really liked them and been listening for a while. I’ve found that it’s just sort of as if you’ve read a novel and then they make it into a movie and you don’t agree with the casting.

That’s a great analogy.

And then once you see the movie, if you go back and reread the book, the movie characters stomp all over your imagery from the book.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

Well, if you’re talking specifically about radio hosts, the word that I’ve just made up for myself and used that way is hostbusters. It’s a hostbuster experience.

That’s good.

You know, because it just blows your image all to smithereens. But, you know, Lisa, the reverse is true. Radio people who take calls from the public, like Martha and I, we find sometimes that we have an impression of our callers, and then maybe we’ll see their personal website, and we’ll go, what? No. Particularly if they call us and say, you know, my main job is an English teacher, and we go to their website, and we find out that they walk on the high wire and breathe fire, you know? And some people, they do stuff like that. So a picture of them in tights that are performing them on a stage somewhere.

What should we call the experience of finding out that your favorite radio personalities don’t look like what you imagined? If you’ve got some suggestions for us, give us a call, 1-877-929-9673, or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hey, Lisa, thanks for calling.

Thank you.

All right. Bye-bye.

Thank you, Lisa. Bye-bye.

Well, if you’ve got a question about language, linguistics, grammar, punctuation, spelling, what to say, what not to say, the rules, and so forth, give us a call, 1-877-929-9673. That’s 1-877-WAYWORD. Or you can try us on our discussion forum at waywordradio.org/discussion.