Rubber Match

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

And I’m Grant Barrett.

Martha, when I got to California, I thought I was going insane. People were talking about beanies, but I’ll be darned if I saw anybody wearing a propeller cap.

You didn’t like mine?

No, I was envisioning a beanie being this little kind of skullcap thing with maybe having a propeller, not like multicolored with like a triangular panel.

Sure, that’s what I think of when I think of a beanie. But here in California and on the West Coast, beanie refers to a knit sock hat.

I think it’s a younger term.

That’s probably. I mean, younger than me anyway.

Okay. In your 20s and younger. And so there are regional terms for this throughout North America.

Who knew? In the South, maybe you know this, being a nice Southern lady. Did you call them toboggans?

No, we use toboggan to mean sled.

Which you wouldn’t put on your head.

Not often, no. So toboggan is a term mainly in the American South for a sock hat. I call them sock hats in Missouri or a stocking hat or a cap.

Toboggan is often shorted toboggan. In Canada, they’re called a toque or a toque.

Really? Yeah, which is interesting because it comes from a French word. And in cooking, it’s that particular chef’s hat, the tall white one on the puppy top.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, right, right. But they use it for a wide variety of hats. Just any, but a lot of times it’s the knitted cap.

The other thing that I found that the sock hat and stocking hat that I use are primarily in the Midwest, around the Great Lakes, and in the Northeast. And so I was just really interested to find that there was this difference that I didn’t know anything about.

So I made a survey.

Online?

Online. You can find it at waywordradio.org slash hats. It’s called, what’s that on your head?

No, it’s called the Great Knitted Hat Survey, I believe.

Oh, that sounds so august. And I’ve got three pictures with a variety of terms that you might describe this hat with. It takes just a minute to fill out.

You record your location, and I’m compiling the data in a spreadsheet, and I’ll put that out for everyone so we can see exactly where in the country people are calling this hat a beanie, where they’re calling it a toboggan, where they’re calling it a sock hat or a stocking cap.

I know this kind of thing gets you all hot and bothered.

I know my face is flush. I’m sweating. Sorry for that.

Well, go take the survey, and you can always call us about any other aspect of language. Call us and tell us about it, 877-929-9673, or send it an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Jill calling from Fishers, Indiana.

Hi, Jill, welcome.

Hi, Jill.

Hi, how are you?

Super. What’s going on in Fishers?

Well, not too much. I’m sitting in my classroom where I’m a high school English teacher, and my husband’s joined me to ask the question of you.

Your husband came to school?

Wow.

Yes, he came into school, came to and graced the high school with his presence so that we could be on the show.

Oh, wow. That’s fantastic. Well, let’s get to it. What’s on your mind?

Well, my husband and I come from two different parts of the country. I’m originally from Buffalo, New York, and he is from Carmel, Indiana. And ever since we got together, we’ve been having the same debate about what to call the things that you put on your feet when you go to do something athletic.

Socks?

Well, the actual shoes.

Oh, I see.

The shoes themselves, yes. And I have always said that they are called sneakers, and he makes fun of me in the way that I say it and that there’s no sneaking going on. He doesn’t understand why it’s sneakers.

And he always says that it’s tennis shoes. And this has been just kind of a funny debate along the way, but then now we have a two-year-old son, and whenever I tell him to go get his sneakers, he gets one thing, but then my husband seems to confuse him, at least I think, when he says the term tennis shoes.

So we’ve been having this continuous debate, and finally we just decided one day that we needed to have you solve it.

Well, Jill, how about if we hear from your husband?

Okay, hold on one second.

Hello?

Hi, who’s this?

This is Joe McGrath.

So, Joe, what’s the deal with tennis shoes?

Oh, that’s just what they’re called. I don’t know what these East Coast people are calling them. Sneakers, I don’t really understand that.

Yeah, Buffalo’s basically Canada. It’s pretty darn close.

Oh, so this is good. So you’ve got a two-year-old son. You’ve got two different words for the same thing. And your wife is concerned that there’s confusion. Do you think he’s really confused?

No, I think she’s confused.

Oh, I see.

Aha. Is this a marital rift? Is this a symptom of a larger problem?

No, I think we’re okay.

And the poor kid’s in the middle, right?

Yeah.

Well, I don’t know if you can both hear us talk about this, but I can help a little bit with this. I can at least explain why she says sneakers.

Oh, okay, good. There’s two things at play here. First, when this kind of shoe, it’s like a canvas shoe with a soft rubber sole, came about, people noticed that it was quiet because shoes prior to that often had wooden soles or they had heavy, very heavy leather soles with hobnails and nails in them, and they were noisy.

They clattered when you walked on the cobblestones or plank sidewalks or plank roads or wooden floors and that sort of thing. I mean, think of a time when most floors weren’t carpeted and you might have had a rug or something, but shoes clattered.

So by the time that rubber-soled shoes came along, a silent shoe was an interesting thing. And people literally called them sneakers because you could sneak around in them. I mean, it’s kind of a tongue-in-cheek joke, but that’s why they called them sneakers. Actually, because it was about sneaking.

That said, in the United States today, many, many years later, sneakers, interestingly enough, is most common in the northeast of the United States. And it is less common in the whole rest of the country. In the whole rest of the country, tennis shoe is more common than sneaker.

Yeah, I grew up calling it tennis shoe.

Yeah, and so what you’ve encountered here is this cross-cultural, I’d say intracultural difference, where two different Americans grew up with this subtle difference in their language tradition. Just because of accidents of history.

So I think what you and Jill should do is teach your son to call the right one the tennis shoe and the left shoe the sneaker.

Oh, yeah. What about that?

I think that’ll clear…

He wasn’t confused before.

Yeah.

That’ll clear things up. You know, I want to talk to Jill in a second, but I’ll tell you this, too. It’s not really up to you guys, by the way. His friends are going to decide what he calls those things after a while.

This is true. Once he gets old enough, whatever you’ve taught him is just going to go right out the window.

Or you could just get Crocs.

Hopefully the good stuff stays.

He’s going to call them kicks or something like that, right?

His nikes.

His nikes.

His nikes.

Yeah, something like that. Thanks so much for talking to us.

Thank you. Here’s Jill.

Okay, thanks.

Well, I didn’t get to hear the whole explanation.

Well, basically, we told him that you were always right and he should always do what you say.

Perfect.

No. That’s exactly what I wanted to hear.

No. What we told him was a lot of jokey things, but the serious things were in the Northeast, where you come from, sneaker is more common.

That’s, yeah. In the whole rest of the country, they mostly say tennis shoe.

Okay. And the name literally does come from the fact that rubber-soled shoes, when they first came about, were noticed to be very quiet. And so people said, oh, hey, you can sneak around in those. They’re sneakers.

All right. Well, thank you so much.

It’s our pleasure. And I just want to say, as we always say to teachers, you’re doing a good thing there.

Salute.

Thank you very much. I really enjoy my job. I told all of my kids about this today.

They were getting a big kick out of it.

Oh, fantastic.

Excellent.

Well, have them drop us a line.

We love to hear from students as well.

That’s a great idea.

I will.

Take care, Jill.

All right, thank you.

Say thanks to your husband.

Okay, thanks.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

If you have a dispute about language, let us know about it, 877-929-9673, or send it an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello there.

Hi, who’s this?

This is Cynthia Light.

This must be Grant.

It is Grant.

Hi, Cynthia.

Where are you calling from?

I am calling from beautiful La Crosse, Wisconsin, on the eastern shore of the Mississippi River.

Well, tell us about your language question. What do you got on your mind?

I love your show, first of all, and I really appreciate listening to it.

And one of the things that got stuck in my head as I was pondering my language questions was something that my father used to say.

And that was, it was an exclamation if you were startled or surprised by something.

He would say, jumpin’ G. Hossifat.

Jumpin’ G. Hossifat.

I have no idea what that means.

None whatsoever.

The only thing that I had some, like, possible speculation about was for some reason, Hossifat, and I don’t know why I think this, but that there’s some portion of it that has some kind of devilish connotation.

What gives you that idea?

I have no idea. I don’t know.

Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat.

Well, yes, the actual root of that is the name of an ancient king of Judah who’s mentioned in the Old Testament.

And his name was Jehoshaphat, actually.

Jehoshaphat.

And this got popularized back in the 19th century when you had words like this that were used as sort of mild oaths, you know, instead of saying the Lord’s name in vain or something, you say gee whiz or something.

And jumping Jehoshaphat is another version of that.

And it really got popularized by Yosemite Sam, the old cartoons.

That’s where I know it.

He said Jehoshaphat, right?

Yeah, he said jumping Jehoshaphat.

But both of those pronunciations, if you go back to the original Hebrew, are wrong.

It’s Jehoshaphat.

I was just going to ask you, Cynthia, it sounds like you’re saying it as if G is a middle initial.

Is that what you’re saying?

Oh!

Yes, like how I would spell it.

It would be jumping, you know.

G period space H-O-S-A-P-H-A-T or something like that.

Oh, how funny.

How funny.

Now, if you go back to the name of the ancient king of Judah, his name was spelled J-E-H-O-S-H-A-P-H-A-T.

Okay.

Okay.

Jehoshaphat.

But why the jumping?

Is it just because of the alliteration?

Yeah, I think so.

Or was he known as a great jumper?

No, he was known as a good king, but I don’t think there was any jumping involved.

Just because he was a handy J name, right?

Yeah, yeah.

It’s kind of funny to say, actually, because it’s so unusual in our language.

Yeah, yeah, so it’s sort of like suffering succotash, you know, kind of the same idea.

Okay.

That’s hilarious that your father said it that way.

And I was wondering, too, Martha, is there any kind of regional aspect to it?

Because we were all Midwesterners and German Methodists in Michigan with a pretty strong German heritage.

Does that have any influence?

I don’t think it has so much to do with German.

It’s just a good old Americanism.

I think it’s aged at this point.

I think you’re far less likely to encounter it among the younger generations, but not least because they don’t watch Yosemite Sam anymore.

So how did we do, Cynthia?

Fantastic.

Thank you so much for your help.

Now I’m going to go look up the real person and find out more about them.

Super.

One of these days we’re going to get to beautiful lacrosse, you know.

Oh, well, let me know.

Bye-bye.

Thanks for calling.

Much appreciated.

Thank you.

All right.

Our pleasure.

Love your show.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

We do talk a lot about the things our parents used to say, but you know what, Martha?

I think the kids are saying cool stuff, too.

If you want to talk about either ends of the spectrum, give us a call, 877-929-9673, or write it all up in email, words@waywordradio.org.

Grant, you know what a zarf is.

You’ve played enough words with friends to know that Z-A-R-F.

It’s a cup.

It comes from Arabic.

A kind of cup holder.

But it’s the cup holder itself that’s the zarf.

Do you know what the thing in the cup that goes in the zarf is?

I don’t.

It’s a fingen.

F-I-N-J-A-N.

Ooh, nice.

Learn that from listener Julia Gaydon.

Yeah, zarf, it’s a great scrabble word, or words with friends word, right?

Yeah, and now you have fingen.

Fingen, moon, lovely.

What’s your scrabble treasure?

What’s the word that you pull out when times are desperate on the scrabble tiles?

877-929-9673, words@waywordradio.org.

All aboard for the language train.

There’s more coming up.

Support for A Way with Words comes from the University of San Diego, whose mission since 1949 has been to prepare students for the world as well as to change it.

More about the college and five schools of this independent Catholic university at sandiego.edu.

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

And I’m Martha Barnette, and we’re joined now by our quiz guide, John Chaneski.

John, what’s the hap?

It’s a nice, clear, cold day here in New York. Loving it. It’s really nice out.

How are you guys?

Great. Super. Wonderful.

We’ve been jonesing for a quiz, though.

Good. That’s terrific. I happen to have one in front of me here.

You guys have seen those little wordplay puzzles that are just a bunch of letters in a box?

Do you know what I’m talking about?

No.

Well, they’re like, you’ll see like a little box on a piece of paper and it’ll say the letters M-E over the letters A-L.

And the answer is square meal.

Oh, nice.

What are those called?

I forget what those little brain teasers are called.

I’m sure the games magazine people have a name for them, but it escapes me right now.

It occurred to me that I could try to do something like that for you guys.

On the radio. Great idea, John.

You know, I’m always trying to, you know, outside the box, that kind of stuff.

For example, what common word or phrase is suggested by the following?

Five.

High five.

High five, right.

I like to think that if you want to congratulate someone, you can’t physically high five them, you can just say, five.

And that would do it.

I like it.

Good. Let’s try some more.

I’ll give you the answer’s definition if you really need it.

Okay.

Here’s the first one.

Decision.

Indecision?

No.

Split decision.

Split decision, yes.

Okay, we’re off to a good start.

Here’s the second one.

Spot.

Low spot, down spot?

No.

Spot.

Say it again.

Spot.

Spot.

Faint spot.

I don’t know.

Like in the laundry?

Don’t know.

That one’s hard.

It’s the point in a system.

Weak spot.

Weak spot.

Yes.

Weak spot.

Very good.

Okay.

Here’s the next one.

Money.

Mad money?

Mad money.

Yes.

Good.

Here goes the next one.

Babies.

Baby’s breath?

Yes.

Oh, Lord.

Okay.

Okay, let’s try this one.

This is going to take a little work.

Here we go.

Ready?

Cousins.

Distant cousins.

Yes, distant cousins.

I hope that sounded good.

Yeah, that was great.

It did.

Good.

I love this.

Cousins, cousins, cousins.

Here’s the next one.

Yeah.

O-U-T.

Spelled out.

Spelled out, yes.

Very good.

Okay.

Here’s another one.

Cavani.

Nasal cavity.

Nasal cavity, good.

Here’s another.

Pockets.

Deep pockets.

Yes, deep pockets.

Deep pockets.

This one’s similar.

I’ve got to step back a little bit.

Here we go.

Twenties!

Roaring twenties!

Yes, roaring twenties.

All right, I’ve been practicing this one.

Here we go.

Forward!

Fast forward.

Yes.

Here’s the last one.

Some people sing in the shower.

I know.

Forward.

I yell words.

Say them quickly.

Here’s the last one.

Susan.

Lazy Susan.

Lazy Susan.

Yes, Lazy Susan.

Yay.

Wow.

That was very good.

And scene.

Encore.

Thank you guys.

Oh my gosh.

That is really impressive.

It worked.

Hooray.

I loved it.

It was truly amazing, John.

Save that for the clips at the end of the year.

Yeah, that’s good.

Thanks.

If you guys got a question about language, give us a call.

We’ll take just about anything, 877-929-9673, or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Don’t forget, we’ve got a discussion forum on our website at waywordradio.org, and we’re on Facebook and Twitter.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Gabby from Decorah, Iowa.

And I had a question for you regarding a phrase that my partner says.

Okay, fire away.

So we play a lot of cribbage, and when there’s a tie to be settled,

Something like the best two out of three,

He says that we’re going to play the rubber match.

And that was something that I never grew up hearing.

A lot of his friends who have played sports know the term.

And so I looked it up a bit on the web and didn’t really find a whole lot

And was hoping you guys would have an answer to share.

Well, Gabi, first of all, where did you grow up and where did he grow up?

I grew up in Pennsylvania, and he grew up in West Iowa.

Okay.

Okay.

So he was quite familiar with this term.

I learned it watching game shows when I was a kid.

Really?

Yeah.

They would say the rubber match of the show is, yeah, like playing Password and stuff like that.

Okay, sure.

Mm—

Yeah.

So, Cribbage, this is the game with the pegboard?

Correct.

Okay.

Okay.

Okay.

You’re playing cribbage, and in order to win, how many games do you have to win out of how many?

Well, you know, you can stop whenever you want.

Okay, so it could be best out of three, best out of five, some odd number, right?

Right.

But if he’s won one and you’ve won one, then the tiebreaker is what he calls the rubber match, right?

Exactly.

Okay.

Well, Gabi, I can tell you what we do know, which is that it goes all the way back to the late 16th century.

Yeah.

Oh, my gosh.

Yes, in England in the game of lawn bowling, which I’ve never played, but I think it involves rolling balls, which they call bowls, across the green.

And you try to get as close as you can to a certain ball without hitting it.

So it could be that maybe it rubs up against that ball, but I don’t think so.

I suspect it has to do with rubber being an eraser, that this is the one that either erases your hopes or your opponent’s hopes.

Interesting.

But it does appear in English after rubber was introduced from the New World, right?

Yes.

Right.

Okay.

Didn’t rubber come from Central America and South America?

I think it did, yeah.

And by the 1600s, it was well established as a product in a variety of uses.

Yeah, so first it was in lawn bowling, and then you see it a lot in card playing, in bridge, and that kind of thing.

Okay.

So the short answer is we don’t know why it’s called the rubber match, but it has a long history.

And it appears in sport after sport.

Baseball uses it, right?

Yes, and game shows.

Tennis sometimes, right?

Cricket?

Yeah, sure, sure.

Okay.

And cribbage, obviously.

Let me ask you a question, Gabby, while we’ve got you on the phone.

Is cribbage a thing now?

I didn’t know that it was still something that people were playing.

Yeah, is it like knitting and craft beer?

Are we behind?

Yeah, Iowa, there in the town that we live in,

There are quite a few folks that gather and play cribbage together.

That’s fantastic.

How about that?

Well, I’ve got to take it up.

Yeah.

Yeah, you should.

I would encourage that.

Cool.

Thanks, Gabby, for giving us a call.

Thank you so much.

All right, have fun.

Take care.

Thanks, you too.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

877-929-9673, words@waywordradio.org.

Find us on pretty much every major social media network.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Matthew calling from Dallas, Texas.

Hi, Matthew.

Hi.

So my question really has less to do with any one specific word and more to do with how words are defined in print in dictionaries.

Because obviously a word like dog has, you know, we have a cultural understanding of what a dog is.

And the dictionary definitions of those words are going to have to mirror each other very substantially.

My question really had to do with how dictionarians and people who deal with words deal with the prospect of plagiarism and copyright infringement in coming up with these definitions.

Well, you know, I don’t know if you know this, Matthew, but that’s my background.

I’m a dictionary editor specializing in slang and new words.

Let me just kind of restate your question.

What you’re asking is how do they avoid plagiarizing each other, right?

Because the odds are pretty good that their entries are going to sound very much alike.

Exactly.

Right.

It’s messy.

I will say this.

There are cases of known plagiarism between dictionaries, and it used to be far more common.

Theft of whole dictionaries used to be fairly ordinary in the 1700s and even well into the 1800s.

The entire dictionary, not just the entry for dog?

Yeah, they would steal whole sections of it.

And they’d change the front a little bit and some other stuff or do very light revisions because it’s expensive and always has been to make a dictionary.

But that’s just one kind of plagiarism.

It doesn’t really represent your question, answer your question, because you’re asking about independent derivation of entries.

So the entry for dog and I don’t have I won’t read the dictionary entries that I could call up right now.

First, you have to look at the whole entry.

Is the whole entry identical?

If it is, then you’ve got a problem.

If it’s just the definition, every lexicographer who works in any language would tell you,

Because of the way that good lexicography is practiced,

You are going to be constrained into a certain kind of language, a certain kind of brevity.

And if it’s the same as somebody else’s dictionary, nobody really is going to have a problem with that

Unless every single one of your entries in your dictionary, or most of them, are identical.

Now, case by case, it’s totally fine. Nobody’s going to bother you for that.

So independent, yeah, it’s going to be fine.

But what’s really interesting, I don’t know if you know this,

But a lot of your modern dictionaries share common roots.

They go back, for example, to the Merriam-Webster’s unabridged dictionaries

That are now in the public domain.

And a lot of times they have entries for these common words

That are basically unchanged for more than 100 years.

And so you can look at Australian, Canadian, British, and American dictionaries

And see identical entries except for the pronunciation for certain entries.

Would the lexicographers for different companies who write dictionaries collaborate at all these days?

Because I would imagine that certain, you know, there are even further uses for coming up with some common definitions for new words that might arise.

They don’t collaborate, but they use identical methods, and they do what most industries do.

They do a competitive review.

So if I work for publisher A and publisher B comes out with a dictionary that’s similar to the one that I’m working on, I will go through their dictionary page by page and find their new entries if they don’t already point them out to me and figure out which of those entries are good and that I need to do my own research on.

And I will completely do all my own research.

I will not steal from them.

And I will reprove and redefine based upon their inclusion of that word.

And you’ll find sometimes that you need all their words.

Sometimes you’ll find that you need three quarters of their words.

That said, there are a few lexicographers in recent years, and I won’t get too specific.

We’ve gotten into trouble.

And there was one person who was fired for stealing from a dictionary.

She was caught by what we call a ghost word or a mount weasel.

That’s with a Z.

It’s a fake word included in the dictionary to trap people who are stealing your content.

And she just stole the stuff, supposedly.

And was caught and fired and, you know, it’s not done these days.

Have you heard of those? Mount weasels?

No, that’s totally new to me.

It’s just really interesting that dictionaries would include fake words

That no one but they are going to know are actually fake.

Sometimes they come out, look for a New Yorker article about Mount weasels,

That’s M-O-U-N-T-W-E-A-Z-E-L-S,

And just look for New Yorker Mount weasels,

And you’ll come across an article by Henry Alford where he talks about this and about how one of these words, he figured out one of these words for the New Oxford American Dictionary.

Awesome. Well, I never knew that the world of dictionaries was so cloak and dagger and smoke and mirrors.

Well, it’s a small, insular world. It’s kind of like the Roman Senate. There’s poison and knife fights.

Who knew? Well, you have brought out some really interesting information that I didn’t know about. So we appreciate your calling.

Well, thank you so much for taking my call.

Yeah, our pleasure, Matthew.

Give us a call another time, all right?

Will do.

Y’all have a good day.

You too.

Bye-bye.

Thanks.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673 is our phone number here, or you can always email us, words@waywordradio.org.

We got an email from Jean Ritzema in Indianapolis, who wrote to tell us about a conversation she had with a dear friend.

He was telling her about a road trip that he and college classmates made from New Hampshire to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, way back in the 1930s during spring break.

She writes, driving along the coast in Georgia, they began to wonder if they were on the right road.

They stopped to ask an old farmer if it was the road to Savannah.

The farmer confirmed it was.

When asked how far it was, the farmer replied, about three C’s.

Puzzled, they asked what that meant.

The farmer said, you drive as far as you can see, and then you do that twice again.

Isn’t that great?

Three C’s.

I love it.

I can picture it.

It could work.

Yeah.

Share your language stories with us, 877-929-9673, or send them an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello.

Hi, who’s this?

This is Bill Boyle in Dallas.

Hi, Bill. Welcome to the program.

Hi, Bill.

Well, I was wondering if you had any background information on the word larapin.

It’s a description of it tastes good, you know, it’s good.

And I grew up with that word being used around.

And as a matter of fact, this afternoon I had coffee with a guy, and he recognized the word.

And he said, yeah, he grew up with it to age 20 anyway.

He was wondering what the background to that word is.

So, Bill, did you have pie with that coffee and said, boy, that’s larapin good pie?

No, I just had coffee.

Well, how was the coffee?

It was ordinary.

Okay.

It wasn’t larapin.

No, as a matter of fact, that wasn’t.

-huh. And so this is a word you’ve used all your life. Any idea how to spell it?

L-A-R-A-B-I-N, as far as I can tell.

You know, that’s a phonetic interpretation.

Yeah, this word’s been around for a while, and it has lots of different spellings.

But the idea is that larap goes back to an old word that means to beat or to thrash.

So it’s sort of spanking good whatever, spanking good pie.

Yeah, whopping good pie or whopping bad coffee.

Larapin bad coffee.

I don’t know, you can’t even really say that.

It’s always positive, right?

Yeah, I think it’s always positive.

Isn’t that the way you’ve always used to think?

Yeah, that’s all I’ve ever heard is it’s always positive.

Or we had a thumping good time at the wedding or something like that.

It’s funny.

There’s all these terms for beating or striking that can be used in a figurative way to mean excellent or great.

So I don’t know if you ever were larripped as a child for being bad, but that’s another use of it.

Oh, did they have that in North Carolina, Martha?

Well, I would never have deserved any chastisement when I was growing up.

Okay.

Okay, so you never heard Larrape use word.

That’s a lie, of course.

Martha, you shouldn’t cast aversion on people.

But you’re from, so you’re from Dallas area originally, somewhere in Texas.

You sound like pure Texas.

No, I was raised in Mission, home of the grapefruit, just three miles north of the lazy Rio Grande River.

Okay.

70 miles upstream from where it flows into the calm and serene Gulf of Mexico.

I’ll put that on my list of places to go.

I love me some good grapefruit.

So, yeah, larapin means, well, larap means to beat or thrash.

And, yeah, parents used to say, I’m going to larap you.

And then it became, somehow it became a positive.

This has been in English, American English for a while.

Yeah, and especially in that area.

Oh, that’s right.

Texas, Oklahoma.

Oklahoma, Louisiana.

Yeah.

Pops up now and again in Tennessee and nearby states.

Yeah, I never heard it growing up in Kentucky.

You didn’t hear it growing up in…

No, I learned it from reading, that’s all.

Yeah, yeah.

All right, well, that’s excellent.

Bill, you’ve provided us with great information, and you’ve added to my life list of places I’m going to go visit.

Yeah, you need to come to Texas.

We’d love to come to Texas.

It’s moving up the list every time I talk to another Texan.

You have a guest room?

Yeah.

Okay.

All right. Thanks, Bill. I really appreciate it.

Thanks for sharing your story and telling us all about what this word means in your world.

All right?

Thank you very much.

All right. Bye-bye.

Bye, Bill.

Bye.

877-929-9673 to share your language stories or send them to words@waywordradio.org.

Grant, we were talking about similes a few shows ago, and I found a great collection of them from Maine.

And a lot of them are familiar, like uneasy as a fish out of water.

But there were some that I really liked, including dry as a contribution box.

Isn’t that brilliant?

Isn’t that brilliant?

And poor as a crow in springtime.

Or plump as a partridge.

I love all of those.

Those are nice.

Yeah.

877-929-9673.

words@waywordradio.org.

More of your stories about language and the beauty of lengthy prose.

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

More at nu.edu.

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

And I’m Martha Barnette.

Soundbites. Bumper stickers. Email. Texting. Facebook. Twitter.

Do you ever get the feeling that your days are increasingly filled up with very, very short sentences?

When’s the last time you had the pleasure of watching a long sentence simply unspool?

I’m talking about the kind of sentence that invites you to come in and wander around and just luxuriate in it.

The writer Pico Iyer did that recently in an essay in the Los Angeles Times.

He was celebrating the joy of the long sentence.

And it’s the kind of sentence he writes that, quote, has so much room for near contradiction and ambiguity, and those places in memory or imagination that can’t be simplified or put into easy words, that it allows the reader to keep many things in her head and heart at the same time, and to descend as if by a spiral staircase deeper into herself and those things that won’t be squeezed into an either or.

And then he goes on, when I read the great exemplar of this, Herman Melville, and when I feel the building tension as Martin Luther King’s letter from Birmingham jail swells with clause after biblical clause of all the things people of his skin color cannot do, I feel as if I’m stepping out of the crowded, over-lighted, fluorescent culture of my local convenience store and being taken up to a very high place from which I can see across time and space in myself and in the world.

Grant, I just love that. I mean, that kind of sentence really does take you to a different place, doesn’t it?

I mean, for me, it’s like finally going on vacation.

You know, you stop, you turn off, and you really focus on something else.

Yeah, I agree with that.

And there’s the immersion.

That’s the important part of it.

You need to not only be immersed in it while you’re reading it, but you need that time afterward to mull it over, to consider it.

Yes, and the essay itself by Pico Iyer in the Los Angeles Times is that kind of essay with those kinds of luxurious sentences, you know, winding down like a spiral staircase.

So we will put a link to that essay on our website, which is at waywordradio.org.

And in the meantime, if you want to talk with us about language, the number is 877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha.

Hi, Grant.

This is Kim from Omaha.

Hi, Kim.

Welcome.

Hi, Kim.

Welcome to the program.

Thank you.

What would you like to talk with us about?

Well, I’m an avid listener, and a couple of months ago, I noticed where you two were talking about the concept of consonant flapping.

And you started something because I am so fascinated with that whole concept, and so I have noticed it a lot in my own speech.

And I’ve been keeping track of those kinds of words when I do it.

And it made me wonder what it’s called if you don’t flap the consonant, if you don’t say the consonant at all.

And I think there’s some great examples in like hip-hop culture where sometimes you hear people say getting paid or representing.

One of my favorite examples is from the television show Martin Lawrence, where the theme song was Martin.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it’s a catchy song, so you find yourself humming it while you’re doing the dishes, right?

Right. So I was wondering, is that called something?

Well, let’s review what the consonant flap is.

Okay, yeah, we’ll just talk about it. The word B-U-T-T-E-R, it’s written with T’s, but most Americans say butter as if it was written with D’s.

That is flapping, where instead of saying butter, which sounds fake to almost every American, most of us say butter.

And it’s the same with words like better. We say better, better butter, instead of better butter.

We are flapping those T’s so they turn into D’s.

This is a very normal dialect thing.

It happens across a number of different dialects of English in a variety of countries.

Kind of ordinary.

And it’s actually kind of one of those things that people who are learning English as a second language have a problem with.

They’re like, wait, it’s written with a T.

It’s sometimes pronounced as a T, but sometimes it’s a D.

How do I know?

So that’s flapping, consonant flapping.

But the other thing that you’re talking about, let’s just talk about didn’t.

D-I-D-N apostrophe T.

Yes.

No, you just didn’t.

I mean, that’s almost the catchphrase where it’s like it’s now being used as a joke in a variety of different…

Everywhere. I hear it everywhere. Oh, no, you didn’t.

Yeah, I hear it on the radio in the morning when they’re doing the gossip section on the hip-hop stations and on the pop stations.

It comes from African-American culture, and that particular thing, there’s two things happening in didn’t.

I’m going to teach them to you.

One is the second D in didn’t is becoming glottalized.

Wow. Okay.

We don’t actually say it.

Now, we know glottalization from cockney, right?

People know bottle, right, instead of bottle.

I’m drinking from my bottle, right?

Bottle.

So by glottal, I’m hearing the Greek word for tongue here.

That’s right.

It’s happening instead of the tongue touching the palate in the front of your mouth.

Your tongue is lightly, if at all, touching very far back in the roof of your mouth.

Okay, that’s glottalization.

The glottalization, yeah.

And the second thing that’s happening in the word like didn’t is that the T is dropping off.

And this is called a consonant reduction or a consonant cluster reduction, where it’s just disappearing.

Martin, instead of Martin, is a glottalization as well.

And now what’s really interesting about American English, we glottalize words that we don’t even know.

And it’s hard to discern those differences in your own speech.

You know, that’s true.

And I’ve noticed a couple of times when I do it, if I say cotton or forgotten, I don’t pronounce the T.

Yeah, forgotten.

That’s a great example.

I hear a lot of young women say Manhattan.

Manhattan.

Yeah.

It’s interesting, right?

I love it.

I love it.

I’ve got to tell you something, Kim.

You mentioned hearing this in hip-hop and African-American television shows.

If you really want to get into how important this is to African-American English,

There’s a great book to recommend to you by John Rickford, African-American Vernacular English.

And I think you’ll find large parts of it are understandable to anybody,

Even if they don’t have an academic background.

Thank you so much.

Yeah, sure.

I’ll pick that up.

Okay, so glottalization and then consonant…

Cluster reduction.

Cluster reduction.

Yeah.

Yes.

I was talking about didn’t, but mostly we’re talking about glottalization here.

Okay, Kim, now you have names for it.

Thank you so much.

Drop us a line sometime when you find something new, all right?

Thank you, I will.

Our pleasure.

Thanks, Kim. Take care.

Bye-bye.

You too. Bye-bye.

If a word has caught your ear, call us, 877-929-9673,

Or send us an email.

The address is words@waywordradio.org.

Imagine you’re sitting at a table and you empty out all the pieces from a jigsaw puzzle box

And then you spread them across the table.

And then your friends come in and you invite them to join you in assembling those pieces.

What do you say?

Katie asked us that on our Facebook page recently.

And Grant, remember, there were so many different answers.

It was crazy.

Well, most people said, I’m puzzling or putting together a puzzle, right?

Well, she said, I’m going to make a puzzle.

But other people were talking about doing a puzzle or is doing a puzzle more like a crossword puzzle.

That was one of the longest discussions we’ve had on the Facebook page.

Put together a puzzle, right?

Yeah.

What do you say?

I put together a puzzle.

Put together a puzzle.

We did a lenticular puzzle in my house the other day.

This is the one where you shift the image and it’s two different pictures in one.

Ooh.

If you run your fingernails across the surface, it goes zzzz like that.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Very difficult.

That is fascinating.

Yeah.

Give us a call with your language comments and questions, 877-929-9673,

Or email them to words@waywordradio.org.

And as Martha mentioned, we’re on Facebook.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Alan Wood.

I live in Addison, Texas.

Okay.

Well, what’s on your mind?

My mom grew up on a farm in North Carolina.

She has quite a large family.

And I have one aunt in particular that used to use a phrase called you-ins when she was referring to myself or my siblings or cousins.

And I never got an explanation for the word, but we just always kind of assumed that she met you youngins.

And then occasionally my aunt would actually even reduce it to yins.

So I was just wondering, is there any history behind that?

Did she make this up, or what do you know about it?

Well, you know, it’s funny.

This is a nice confluence of events, Alan, because I had something happen to me a couple of weeks ago that got me really excited.

I got the fifth volume of the Dictionary of American Regional English.

And you probably have heard us talk about this on the show before.

This is this massive work about the way we talk in America and about the dialects and the way that different regions differ from each other.

And so I immediately turned, I swear, I immediately turned to the section on this particular word and the words that are like it.

I looked at you all, yuns, yous, you guys, and yins.

And these are all ways that different parts of America refer to a group of people.

It’s the second person plural pronoun.

The history of these is a little indistinct, but we do know that there are uses very similar to this in Scots English, in Irish English.

And some uses can even be traced back as far as Chaucer’s time, where he’d say ye ones, that’s Y-E-O-N-E-S.

And it’s kind of the same idea.

There has long been in English this desire, this instinctive desire, to find a way to distinguish the you singular and the you plural.

And so these kind of have come up naturally as a matter of course.

And U1s is pretty widespread across what’s called the Midlands in the United States.

That’s basically the Ohio River Valley as far east as Pennsylvania and as far west as Kansas,

Including a little bit of Missouri and a little bit of Illinois.

Well, I learned something. Thank you very much.

Well, cool, Alan. I’m glad we were able to help.

Well, thank you very much for having me, and have a great day.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673 or words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Sigrin Newell from Albany, New York.

Hi, Sigrin. Welcome to the show.

Hi, Sigrin.

Hi, nice to talk to you.

Yeah, you too. What can we do for you today?

Well, I have been listening to you for many, many years,

And I noticed that you almost never have anything from Iowa.

So I thought I would rectify that by calling you in with a word from Iowa.

Okay, please.

From Iowa.

I started thinking about this when I heard you talking about the Pennsylvania Dutch phrase,

What’s crawling on your liver?

Because my father used a word which is totally polar opposite from that for the same circumstance.

What he would say is, I think you’re feeling rather owly today.

Owly.

Owly.

And it means what exactly?

It means out of sorts, grumpy, grumbly, grouchy.

It’s just in a grumpy mood, awful mood.

And he’s an Iowan or was an Iowan?

He’s an Iowan.

Yeah, he was an Iowan.

Comes from Norwegian-American stock.

And so I wondered if it was a family word, a Scandinavian word, that is a Scandinavian-American word, or a Iowan word.

So I thought I would call and ask you about it.

Is he from the north of Iowa?

It does matter a little bit.

I would say so.

Okay.

-huh.

And so Owly in the place that he grew up meant irritable, peevish, cross, angry, that kind of thing?

Absolutely.

-huh.

That’s interesting.

Well, this fits perfectly with what we know about the word Owly.

It is chiefly in the Midwest and Canada.

Yeah, it’s far more common in Canada, as a matter of fact, and where it appears in the U.S. is mostly in those border states.

Yeah, so it’s not just a family word.

We didn’t use it in Iowa.

Oh, I never heard of it.

That’s why I asked about northern Iowa, because Missouri and Iowa abut each other.

No, I’d never heard it until it came up in my…

Actually, it came up first in a dictionary from Nova Scotia.

That’s where I first encountered it.

Yeah.

And then it’s also in a dictionary from Prince Edward Island, and then you’re in there.

But the idea of owly, why owly?

I suspect it has to do with the way an owl looks, just that unusual expression that those birds have.

I know in the 1700s, the expression to take owl meant to be offended.

Oh, I wonder about that.

Yeah, take owl or take the owl.

That suggests a connection.

Yeah.

Interesting.

I hadn’t thought about it that way.

I was thinking it was not the bird so much as the sound of the word.

Oh, really?

It does have a crabby sound about it when you say it.

Yeah, it’s kind of like growly without the G-R, right?

Yeah.

Owly.

That’s funny.

So would he use it in a joking way, or this was really a way to finesse being angry?

It was a scolding way.

A scolding way.

Saying that I wasn’t supposed to be grouchy or out of mood.

So you’re feeling rather owly today.

It was very much like, pull up your socks and stop feeling that way.

So a reprimand, that’s really interesting.

Yeah.

Although he would use it for himself, saying, I’m feeling owly.

So it wasn’t always necessarily that negative.

Right, right.

I’ve seen that too.

Well, thanks, Sigrun, for the question.

I hope we helped today, and I hope you’re feeling not owly about it.

Not at all.

Thank you very much.

My pleasure.

Bye-bye.

Okay, bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

There’s a great quote in one of the dictionaries here about somebody who saw something they didn’t like,

And they said, when he seen that, in dialect English, when he seen that, he was some owly.

Some owls.

I think owls are getting a bad rap here.

They are fierce looking.

And if you’ve ever had an owl screech at you or make that noise in the talons and the beak.

They look pretty intimidating.

They’re fluffed up and stuff.

Well, but when they’re real little in the owl cam here in San Diego County.

And the burrowing owls are kind of cute.

They’re kind of their little trotting walk like tiny fuzzy penguins.

Yeah, I think owly could be cute.

But I guess ducky is cuter.

Yeah.

Are you feeling ducky?

I’m feeling.

I’m not feeling owly.

I’m a little kitty right now.

Well, we want to hear about your language stories.

You can call us at 877-929-9673 or send them an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Grant, I’ve been rereading the poems of E.E. Cummings.

You remember we learned about him in high school, and the main thing that struck you was what?

The capitalization of the name.

Exactly.

But you know, it’s been really delicious to get reacquainted with the peculiar power of his poetry.

And before we go today, I just want to share a love poem by E.E. Cummings.

I carry your heart with me.

I carry it in my heart.

I am never without it.

Anywhere I go, you go, my dear.

And whatever is done by only me is your doing, my darling.

I fear no fate, for you are my fate, my sweet.

I want no world, for beautiful you are my world, my true, and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant, and whatever a sun will always sing is you.

Here is the deepest secret nobody knows.

Here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud and the sky of the sky of a tree called life, which grows higher than soul can hope or mind can hide.

And this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart.

I carry your heart.

I carry it in my heart.

And Grant, I just love that.

That’s beautiful, Martha.

You know, you don’t understand necessarily all of it.

It’s almost like listening to another language that you don’t quite know entirely.

And the other thing that I love about this poem is it can be a love poem to someone you’re in love with,

But it can also be a poem to someone you’ve lost.

That’s right.

I love that.

That is wonderful.

I think I’m going to read that myself.

We’ll put that on the website, right?

Great idea.

Give us a call, 877-929-9673.

Share your favorite poems with us and email words@waywordradio.org.

Things have come to a pretty path.

That’s all for today’s radio show, but you can always continue the conversation online.

Find us on Facebook and Twitter, and you can stay up to date on Language in the News by signing up for our weekly newsletter at waywordradio.org.

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The address is words@waywordradio.org.

A huge thanks to all of today’s callers.

If you’d like to share your stories about language, leave us a message anytime at 877-929-9673.

We listen to and read all of your messages.

We could pick yours to read on air, so keep them coming.

Stefanie Levine is our senior producer.

Tim Felten directs and edits the program.

He also chooses the music interludes you hear between segments.

And we have production help from James Ramsey and Josette Hurdell.

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

A nonprofit supported by listeners and organizations who believe in lifelong learning,

Better human communication, and the value of a thing well said or well written.

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

Thanks for listening.

I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

See ya.

Bye.

Let’s call the whole thing off.

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

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

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