Real Corker

Samantha Harvey’s novel Orbital is a sensuous, exhilarating meditation about the strangeness of life on a space station, with its mix of tedious tasks and jaw-dropping views. And: a musician who rode the rails in his youth shares the slang he picked up along the way. For example, the word spanging is a blend of the words spare and changing, and means “panhandling.” Plus, what does the doggie say? The sound of a dog barking is often written as bow wow. But why? Doesn’t barking sound more like ruff ruff? Plus, slang on the ski slopes, boodling, a jazzy pangram, larruping good food, avoir le moral dans les chaussettes, a quiz about puzzling store names, ride or die, a clever answer for when someone inquires as to how you’re doing, and lots more.

This episode first aired April 19, 2025.

Death Cookies and Escargot Among the Boilerplate

 A member of the ski patrol at Vermont’s Sugarbush Resort shares some workplace slang. Boilerplate denotes hard-packed snow with a ruffled pattern that makes skis chatter, death cookies are random chunks that could cause an accident, and escargot refers to slowpokes still on the mountain at the end of the day.

Boodle on Beaver Island

 A resident of Michigan’s scenic Beaver Island shares the term, boodling, which the locals use to denote the social activity of leisurely wandering the island, often with cold fermented beverages. There have been various proposed etymologies for this particular use of boodle as a verb, but boodle in this sense is most likely a nonce coinage, simply made up for the occasion, which then persisted among the islanders.

A Quality Jazz Pangram

 People might never know that quality jazz exists outside the city of Baton Rouge. Which may be true—but it’s also a pangram.

Larruping Is a Striking and Whopping Good Word

 The word larruping and its many variant spellings is often used to describe delicious food. The verb larrup means to “beat” or “strike,” and larruping (often spelled with the G dropped: larrupin’) is used as an intensifier, like whopping or striking. Woody Guthrie used it that way in his memoir Bound for Glory (Bookshop|Amazon).

Morale Down So Low it Stinks

 A Francophone who’s feeling low might say so with J’ai le moral dans les chaussettes. The idiom avoir le moral dans les chaussettes means “to have morale in your socks.”

And a Quiz Where the Answers Are Hard Is a Sweatshop

 Quiz Guy John Chaneski has been shopping at stores with misleading names. For example, he might buy baked goods from a bakery, but if he were to visit a store that sells flying mammals, he might assume it has something to do with power cells. What kind of “store” would that be?

Ride or Die Origins and Meaning

 Patrick in New York City is curious about the term ride or die, which describes a friend, fan, or romantic partner who is devoted to the end. The expression shows up in the mid-1990s in hip hop and the work of Tupac Shakur and The Lox, and often appears in such phrases as ride or die chick, ride or die woman, ride or die girl, or ride or die gal.

Couldn’t Be Better With Less

 A woman in Lincoln, Nebraska, says her father, a Missouri cattleman, would answer the question How are you? by replying Couldn’t be better with less in all my life!

Woof, Arf, Ruff, or Bow Wow?

 Why do we write the sound of a dog barking as bow wow? Isn’t that noise more like woof, woof or arf, arf or ruff ruff? Surprisingly, the oldest of these is bow wow, or as William Shakespeare wrote in The Tempest (Bookshop|Amazon), bowgh wawgh. It’s difficult to render these sounds in writing, but in Catalan, it’s bup bup; Italian bao bao; Greek, γαβ γαβ (gav gav); Spanish, guau guau; German, wuff wuff; Korean, 멍멍 (meong meong), Albanian ham ham.

Vogelheu, Bird’s Hay, a Swiss Dish and a Family Memory

 Vogelheu—literally, “Vogelheu”—is a Swiss dish with toasted bread, cubed and cooked with eggs and other ingredients for a tasty meal that makes efficient use of leftover bread.

A Book Lifting Your Spirits 250 Miles Above Earth

 Need a book to lift you out of this world? Try Orbital (Bookshop|Amazon). In it, Booker-winning novelist Samantha Harvey imagines the moment-to-moment experience of living on a space station, a mixture of the mundane and the majestic, 250 miles above the bright blue orb of earth amid the vast, black emptiness of space.

Slang Collected by the Railway Carload

 Steve, a singer-songwriter from Rock Springs, Wyoming, shares some slang he picked up while months riding the rails and busking. Spanging refers to panhandling, from asking for “spare change.” The term bull refers to a type of security guard. Riding junk refers to traveling on a slow train. The pusher engine is called the Cadillac. The book On the Fly!: Hobo Literature and Songs, 1879–1941 (Bookshop|Amazon) edited by Iain McIntyre is a fine collection of stories, poems, songs, and articles from and about that subculture.

Driver, Take the Bridge Over the D River

 In addition to all those towns with extremely short names, there’s the river in Oregon with a similarly tiny appellation. It’s known simply as the D River.

Wouldn’t That Just Cork You?

 Deb in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, says that when her mother was disappointed or annoyed she’d say Wouldn’t that just cork you? The idea here is that in the same way that a cork that stops up a bottle, an unexpected or irritating event metaphorically makes someone shut up. Similarly, the expression a real corker refers to something so exceptional it leaves people speechless. Deb’s mother also used to say You listen like a fish, particularly if she thought someone wasn’t listening. Perhaps they just sit there looking big-eyed, mouth agape, not doing much?

This episode is hosted by Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett, and produced by Stefanie Levine.

Books Mentioned in the Episode

Music Used in the Episode