Scat Cat (episode #1434)

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

And I’m Martha Barnette. And the emails about the word dilemma are still coming in.

Oh boy, how many years running is this?

Oh man, so many. We had this discussion, right, about dilemma.

Several times.

Yes, and there were a lot of people who spelled the word dilemma.

Right. Not M-M in the middle, but M-N as in Nancy or not right.

Not right. Yeah, and we’ve had a strong suspicion all along that there’s a Catholic connection.

Yeah, we did.

And that’s what we keep hearing. We heard from Hazel Huntsinger in Kildare, North Dakota,

Who said she’s always been an excellent speller, but she’s always spelled the word with an N.

And she said, I was baffled to learn as an adult with spellcheck that I had been spelling it wrong

My whole life. I still double check on the rare occasion that I use the word because it’s hardwired

In there now. And then we also heard from Maxine Leary in Montpelier, Vermont. And she writes,

Finally, I realized I didn’t make up Dilemma. I’m almost 86 years old, and I’ve always spelled it

Dilemma until just a few years ago. Had never thought anything about it. And she said, and yes,

I went to Catholic school. And then she was a sister of Mercy for 20 years, and she taught

Dilemma. Oh, interesting. She said, why? I didn’t think it was weird, but that’s the English language,

I figured. I changed about five or ten years ago, got with the program, as it were, and started using

Dilemma. I can’t tell you how happy I am in my elder years to find, yes, there was a reason,

And no, I wasn’t stranded alone on a misspelling reef out in an illiterate ocean.

Well, so dilemma, just to be clear, some people are spelling dilemma with an N.

Yes.

N as in North Korea, N as in nuclear missile, N as in no way.

Oh, no, no.

Instead of the double M.

Right.

Isn’t that interesting?

Yeah.

And so our theory had been that there was some textbook preferred by Catholic schools.

Yep.

And I still wonder, is there somewhere out there a school primer that continues to use the spelling of an N?

Oh, wouldn’t it be great if we could find one?

I have looked.

I actually have looked.

Have you?

Yes.

Somebody has that book in their attic.

I’ve looked on numerous full-text resources like Google Books and HathiTrust and ProQuest Historical, whatever, as well as in thrift stores.

Really?

Yes.

Every time you go to a thrift store, you look for a book that says Dilemna?

Yes.

First I look for strange slang books I’ve never heard of, and then I look for textbooks.

Is that right?

Yes.

How interesting.

And I’ve never found it.

So it’s weird.

It’s really interesting.

But it’s got to be out there.

Somebody has lessons, plans, or a textbook or something.

Take a photograph and send it to us, please.

We’re looking for the ur-source of the spelling Dilemna.

The ur-text.

The ur-text, right.

What stone tablet?

I don’t know.

Oh, that could be, right?

It’s in Linear Inn somewhere.

I don’t know.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org and talk to us on Twitter @wayword.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Jane Coyle.

I’m calling for Vero Beach, Florida.

Vero Beach, Florida.

They’re on the Atlantic, right?

Yeah, right?

Yes.

Nice.

Welcome to the show.

What’s up?

What can we help with?

Thank you very much.

I was playing tennis with some friends of mine a few weeks ago, and my opponent hit the ball out, and I said, out.

And she said, oh, come on, it was close, wasn’t it?

And I said, close but no cigar.

And it got me thinking, where did that expression come from?

And so I was thinking about it, talking with some people, and thinking, was it W.C. Fields?

Because of the way people always kind of say, close but no cigar.

Or, I don’t know, was it Mae West?

But then I remembered that that was more of a banana that she was talking about and not a cigar.

Yeah, a whole different thing.

It’s even farther back in time than that.

Really?

Yep.

It refers to the old carnival game of strength where you’ve seen it in cartoons, at least I’m sure,

Where the contestant hits a lever with a sledgehammer and tries to make this weight go up high enough to ring a bell.

And it was called highball or high striker.

And if you did that in the old-fashioned carnivals around the turn of the 20th century, then you got a cigar.

Cigars were often given out as prizes in carnivals.

That is amazing.

You know, I talked to my husband about this, too, and he said, I think it had something to do with a carnival.

There you go.

Okay, he’s going to be right again.

So you’ve got to remember, though, there’s all this chatter happening.

And the way you bring in more customers, you’ve got this barker doing this nonstop patter.

And so part of their patter was, close but no cigar.

No cigar.

Who’s up next?

Yeah.

That is so cool.

And so you’re just watching, thinking, oh, I can do that.

That guy is puny.

Look at me.

I’m strong.

Exactly.

Yeah, I could do that.

Ring that bell.

So now we all say it.

It’s weird, though, that that carnival culture word should penetrate so far that we don’t know where it comes from without calling a radio show, right?

I know.

A tennis match.

It comes all the way to the tennis court in Vero Beach, Florida.

That’s exactly what I was going to say.

Well, thank you very much.

Yeah, sure.

That was fun.

Our pleasure.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

So we’re talking about more than 100 years for that expression, right?

Yeah.

That’s cool.

Close, but no cigar.

You can just see it in your, I mean.

Oh, absolutely.

To me, it’s always the Bugs Bunny cartoons where that.

Right.

Exactly.

Right.

Or Popeye and Brutus.

Mel Blanc with his particular New York accents that he does.

Yeah.

Close, but no cigar.

This is a show about all aspects of language.

We’d love to take your call.

877-929-9673.

Or tell us something in email to words@waywordradio.org.

Also, we have a really active Facebook group,

And you can talk to us on Twitter @wayword.

I have a riddle.

I can take it.

Shields up.

What seven-letter word becomes longer when the third letter is removed?

It’s longer with one extra letter added.

Lounger.

Lounger.

It is a bad pun.

Lounger, you take out the U and you got longer.

But I’ve always liked those jokes and riddles and the wordplay where you treat a word as a word or you treat it as just a collection of characters.

Yeah.

Or as an object, right?

As an idea or a thing.

There’s all these different ways to look at it.

We love these kinds of things, especially Martha because she likes puns.

Because I like springing them on you.

877-929-9673.

Send them all to words@waywordradio.org or tell us about them on Twitter at the handle W-A-Y-W-O-R-D.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Patty.

Hey, Patty, where are you calling from?

St. Simons Island, Georgia.

Oh, that sounds nice.

Is it really an island?

It really is.

Oh, nice.

What’s on your mind, Patty?

Got a language question?

Yes.

Well, my question is I’m a school-based occupational therapist.

And not too long ago, we were setting up a computer for a child that had special needs.

And we had a small bank of computers, and we’re talking about the different aspects of the computers.

And one of my colleagues, who actually is in a supervisory position, referred to the saying, you move with your right hand, as mice.

And we were talking about more than one computer mouse.

And I thought she was kidding and looked at her quizzically, and she said, well, it’s more than one mouse, so it’s mice.

And she was dead serious.

I have always referred to the plural of mouse as mouses, like you would do a monitor or a speaker or any other aspect of the computer.

So my question is, what is the plural of a computer mouse?

So you did that.

You say mouse is only for the computer mouse, though, right?

You wouldn’t say it for the mammal.

I guess I think of a computer mouse as a different entity than a living being.

Yeah.

These are two coexisting plurals for this.

When the computer mouse became a thing, it was first invented in the 1960s and didn’t really kind of hit public notice and well into the 80s.

The tech community, how can I put this?

These are the kind of people who don’t respect traditions.

And they tend to love to goof around with language like most humans do.

And they’re in a position to do something permanent about it.

Put it in their manuals or write a jocular column in Mac world or PC world or whatever the computer publications were of the era.

And so you will find many people in the tech world using mouses.

And there’s always, to me, a hint of humor or irony or fun about what they’re doing.

You’re not going to find mouses usually in these super dense technical manuals with not a trace of humor.

But, yeah, both have existed.

You know, I worked in IT for a really long time, decades, and I heard both and used both.

Really?

Yeah.

And you think mouses is funnier than mice?

Yeah, I do, actually.

Yeah, mouses.

Well, it’s kind of in the tradition.

I think it’s the other way around.

You know, I don’t know, Patty, I don’t know what you know about the tech world, but there’s a term that they use, for example, where a PC will have a tower, you know, the box part that the keyboard and the monitor plug into.

And so in the tech world, people jokingly pluralize that as boxin’.

You don’t have boxes.

You don’t have like lots of PC boxes.

You have boxin’ to take this kind of old.

Oh, I never heard that.

Yeah.

So it’s kind of on the line of children.

Children, oxen.

We have these really old-fashioned plurals that we don’t use anymore, really, except in a few holdovers.

And so it’s just one of the long lines of that sort of—it’s kind of like the debate over GIF versus GIF.

Like, nobody really wants that debate to be settled because it’s kind of fun to argue about it.

And I think technically-oriented people are the kind of people who really, really, really love to kind of get jokingly under the skin of other people and are delighted if you’re irritated by mouses.

Oh, I think mousin is funnier than any of those.

What is?

They should have said mousen.

Mousen.

I think that’s funnier than any of those.

That would totally work.

Computer mice sounds like an infestation to me.

Oh.

I don’t know.

What do you think, Patty?

I kind of agree with you, Martha.

I thought it was funny, and I thought it was a joke.

And since then, I’ve asked a number of people, and it seems, in my experience, maybe it’s in the southeast, that the IT people I’ve talked to have said mouses.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

And more of the teacher clinicians have said mice.

Oh, that’s interesting.

So I don’t know.

It kind of goes both ways.

I’ve even had some people say meese.

But then they laugh.

Oh, really?

But then that’s an extension of the funniness, the humor that people try to bring to something otherwise is really boring, right?

True.

True.

Computer.

Well, that’s very interesting.

But there is a, just to get linguisticky about it for a second, there is a tradition when a word is borrowed into a very different field to recompose it.

For example, in baseball, when somebody hits a pop fly and it gets caught, they didn’t flew out.

They flied out.

Right?

We don’t use the normal past tense for that.

And there’s a few other places that aren’t worth mentioning here.

But I think this is along the lines of that, where once something moves from field A to field B, and they’re very different from each other, people feel fine with just saying, all right, I’m just going to do this differently because I can.

The other thing is that English is weird.

I mean, if you’re a Spanish speaker, then you have it easy because a mouse is a raton and the plural is ratones.

Right. So, Patty, you’re fine with either one.

I will say looking at analyzing the data, if you get more serious about it for a second, mice is far more common in the computer field than mouses.

Really?

Yeah.

I’m surprised.

Yeah.

Well, Patty, we appreciate the question.

Okay. Thank you so much for your input.

I appreciate it.

All right.

Call us again sometime with one of these. All right?

Okay, thank you so much.

Take care now.

Okay, bye-bye.

Well, what word in your workplace has caught your ear?

Call us and talk about it, 877-929-9673,

Or if you’d like to describe it in email,

That address is words@waywordradio.org.

Join us for more discussion about language

As A Way with Words continues.

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

I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

And here’s John Chaneski, our quiz guy.

Hi, John.

Here I am.

Hi, Grant.

Hi, Martha.

Hi, John.

How are you doing?

You got quizzes for us?

Fun stuff?

I have something sitting in front of me, I think.

I hope you’ll like.

We all know Muhammad Ali was the greatest,

And the Austrian oak was a nickname for former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

But lots of things that are not people have nicknames.

Some have great slogans or mottos, too.

Let’s see if you know some of these.

Oh, boy.

For example, I know this is a little trivia-esque,

But I think you guys will do it because a lot of it involves wordplay and such like that.

Okay, so we can guess.

For example, yeah.

For example, the Mother of Exiles is a nickname for what popular New York landmark?

The Statue of Liberty?

Yes, the Statue of Liberty.

She’s not just Lady Liberty.

She’s also Mother of Exiles.

I didn’t know that.

Popular New York landmark pretty much narrows it right down.

Pretty much does it.

Yeah.

I was going to see if you could get it from the first, but I was just like, it just kept going.

All right.

Let’s try these and see how you do.

Okay.

What university has the motto, Lux et Veritas?

Light and truth.

Is it Harvard?

No, Harvard’s just Veritas.

It is Yale, yes.

It is Yale.

Now, everybody knows be prepared is the motto of the Boy Scouts,

But to make the best better is the rather grand slogan of what group?

Well, I assume, is it the Girl Scouts?

Not the Girl Scouts.

Camp Power Girls.

Camp Power Boys and Girls?

No, no, no.

Boy Scouts.

So it’s not Eagle Scouts.

The Seals?

No, this is a group for both boys and girls.

Oh.

To make the best better, 4-H.

Yes, 4-H.

Oh, really?

Good, Martha.

That’s you.

That’s it.

Now, what newspaper, which no longer exists in hard copy but can be found in an online version, has the motto,

It Shines for All?

Is it the New York Sun?

It is the New York Sun.

Very good, Grant.

Nicely done.

That’s rich is the hilarious slogan of what comestible?

That’s rich.

Whipped cream.

Lots of things are rich.

Something sweet, probably.

Is it sweet?

Yeah, it’s a candy bar.

Oh.

Oh, is it the $100,000 bar?

Oh, yeah.

It’s actually now called the 100 Grand Bar.

The 100 Grand Bar, yeah.

Formerly known as the $100,000 bar.

Okay, right.

What product’s original slogan famously claimed it was,

Stronger Than Dirt?

Possibly referencing a mythological character.

Ajax.

Ajax is right.

Nice.

Laundry detergent.

Stronger than dirt.

With the classical training coming into play.

No, it’s just remembering commercials from the 60s.

Shh.

I’m building up your legend.

Oh, thank you.

What famous piece of clothing was briefly marketed in the 1990s with the slogan,

Gravity Schmavity?

The Wonderbra.

The Wonderbra is right.

Nicely done, Grant.

See, I was thinking of the butt-lifting pants I wrote about for a beauty magazine.

There are butt-lifting pants?

There were, yeah.

This is the thing that I’m going to put in the fresh riff for you, Martha.

It’s my ode to your article on butt-lifting pants.

I got the word calipigian into a glossy magazine.

Nice.

Very nice.

Did they call it out in a quote because that would have been double good?

They did, actually.

What product adopted the slogan, Vermont’s Finest,

When it was discovered that no other company in Vermont made the same product?

Ben & Jerry’s?

Ben & Jerry’s is right.

I love that.

Again, decide if it’s genius or cynical.

Little of both.

Maybe.

Finally, what company is famous for the slogan, don’t be evil?

Google.

Google, that’s right.

And you guys were not evil.

You were, in fact, good.

You were very, very good at this puzzle.

Nicely done.

Thanks, John.

Yes, thank you.

As always, we appreciate it.

Well, if you have a question for us or you’d like to discuss something on the air that has to do with language,

Call us 877-929-9673 or send your question to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name’s Michelle. I’m calling from Nashville, Tennessee.

Hey, Michelle.

Hi, Michelle. What’s up?

Hi, Grant. Hi, Martha.

Hi.

I was hoping you could settle a bet for me.

I was at the bar a couple weeks ago,

And I got into a little bicker with my boyfriend over the implication of a word.

What’s on the line?

The penalty for him, he’s never wrong.

So his penalty would be he has to make a public apology on Facebook to me.

And he also has to wear out a T-shirt that says,

Michelle was right and I was wrong on a Saturday night.

Wow.

I like it. I like it. And you, what if you’re wrong?

My penalty, and I really don’t want to have to do it,

Is I will campaign for Donald Trump for one day.

Oh, boy.

Oh, boy. That’s a lot on the line.

I think that’s a perfectly balanced bet there.

All right, so what’s the bickering about?

We both believe the word worse has different implications.

I was talking about something like, oh, I’m thinking about cutting my hair.

And he said, well, if you want to make it worse, I’m fine with that.

Whoa!

So what I’m saying is worse to me implies that it was bad to begin with.

And his example was it just means it’s less good.

Like if you took a pristine car and put a dent in it, then it would be worse than it was before.

But, you know, when someone’s talking about how they were feeling, how were you feeling worse than yesterday,

You kind of assume that they were feeling bad the day before, don’t you?

Yeah, you do.

And the funny thing is, if they were saying, oh, I’m feeling better than yesterday,

You also feel that they were probably sick yesterday.

Right.

Or not necessarily.

Well, we’ll get into that, right?

Because I’m hearing what you’re saying here, Michelle,

And I suspect that both sides have really strong cases.

Okay, good.

Wait, so when he said that about something about making your hair worse,

What was your response to him?

I, it was, hold on, wait a minute.

And he said, oh, no, I didn’t mean it was bad.

I like it how it is, but I don’t want you to make it worse.

Right.

Or if you want to make it worse, that’s, you know, on you.

But you took that as an insult to your hair as it currently is.

Yes.

Yeah, I did too.

Yeah, I heard your sharp intake of breath.

Yes.

I would not like to be told that.

No.

And probably the only diplomatic thing, though, he could have said,

Because Better has a similar problem, is he probably could have said,

I love your hair the way it is.

Well, like I said, we were at the bar.

Or even better, he could have no opinion at all and say,

Whatever you want, I’m behind you 100%.

Oh, that’s not him at all.

So what you’re looking for is some mediation here.

I need some mediation.

No, what she’s looking for is for him to have to endure the penalty.

I think that’s what she’s looking for.

Don’t make me wrong here.

I think Martha’s intake of breath is a really strong indicator that though what he said could be taken both ways,

I think Martha and I both believe that in colloquial speech,

The assumption with the way that he phrased it or the way that you repeated back what he said

Does really, really suggest that there is something currently wrong with your hair.

Yeah.

Okay.

And then what about his example?

If you put a dent in a car, is it worse or is it just not as pristine as it was before?

Well, let’s talk about that a second.

A car isn’t the kind of thing where you have regular conversations about what to do with it.

A haircut is very much a style feature of a human being.

We invest a huge amount of energy into our hair and it shows whether or not we belong to certain peer groups.

It shows whether or not we care about our health, which shows a lot of things about us.

And a car isn’t quite that.

I mean, I know that people are obsessed about their automobiles,

But a haircut is a thing that you discuss regularly with your friends and family about,

What am I going to do with this?

Should I get it curled?

Should I get it cut?

Should I go bald?

Well, I think besides the subject matter,

I think what we’re talking about is an adjective and then the comparative form of the adjective

And then the superlative.

I mean, we learn good, better, and best.

Bad, worse, worse.

And so I think if you say worse, then the implied original form of that adjective would be bad.

Yeah, that it’s currently bad.

Yeah, I think what he should have said is that would make your hair look bad.

Right.

That’s a great point.

And the context matters.

It’s not the words alone.

It’s who said it, to whom, and where, and about what.

And that’s where I think it comes down in your favor.

Okay.

Right?

But it could in another situation.

He could be.

Yeah.

It’s super easy to get distracted by all these possible parallel universes

Where a different thing was said in a different circumstance

About an automobile or something else.

But that isn’t what happened.

Right?

We have to talk about the very thing that happened.

So I think we’re talking about printing up a T-shirt.

Yeah, I think you are.

I think it needs to be bright pink.

Maybe.

Yeah, do we get a say in what color it is?

I think it needs a sailor neck and cap sleeves.

And it needs to be one of those bi-level things that women are wearing where it’s longer in the back and has slits on the sides.

Oh, my goodness.

Right?

Because you didn’t specify, like, the canonical male T-shirt, did you?

I was thinking bright red to draw attention to it.

Okay.

That would work.

And I think glitter letters.

Oh, glitter.

Oh, that would be nice.

Get out the spangler, man.

Spangle that thing.

Yeah.

And so I have one more question.

Did you get your hair cut?

Oh, no.

No, I wasn’t actually going to.

Oh.

Oh.

And I was going to say, and how does it look?

You were just needling him.

Okay.

Well, this sounds like it’s going to be ongoing for a while.

So, Michelle, will you call us back and let us know how it goes?

I suspect that when you go back to him and tell him what we said, he’s going to say, yeah, but what do they know?

Yeah.

Yeah, he is.

So, I guess, thank you very much.

And I’m sure it’ll keep going on.

Yeah.

So, in my opinion, you should not only tell him what we said, but when you tell him, have the T-shirt already in hand and already made and go, here you go.

If you don’t want to make our relationship worse, you will put this on.

This is for you.

You lost.

Oh, thank you so much.

Okay.

Take care, Michelle.

Thank you, Michelle.

Yeah.

Have a good day.

Okay.

You too.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

That’s a tough one.

It is a tough one.

But again, like I say, you know, when you have arguments with people, you take semantic outs

And you do the thesaurus defense.

Well, like it could also mean X, right?

Yeah, yeah.

But I think the case is really clear here that he poorly chose his words and they are opened up to there’s possible other interpretations.

But I think it’s pretty clear that the message received was negative.

And conversation has two people.

Yeah.

The speaker and the listener.

And if the listener doesn’t understand or understands differently than intended, that’s actually what matters more than what was intended.

Intention doesn’t rule.

Well, what about what I just said about, honey, you have to wear this shirt unless you want to make our relationship worse.

That’s another example.

That’s nice.

Yeah.

Did you say that on purpose that way?

Sure.

Yeah.

I’m brilliant.

That’s right.

But that’s a great example of that.

Yeah.

Maybe our listeners have different opinions.

I know they do.

And they’ll start, you know, thesaurus lawyering us all over the place.

Well, we want to hear it.

877-929-9673 or send your emails to words@waywordradio.org.

We have a very active group on Facebook and you can find us on Twitter at the handle WayWord.

Here’s an odd word I came across that I’m adopting into my vocabulary.

Okay.

Nook-schotten.

Okay, so I’m hearing some German in there?

That’s what I thought, too.

I mean, when you hear it, it sounds like Nook-schotten-Freude or something.

I don’t know. What is it?

No, no, it’s very Anglo-Saxon.

Nook-schotten, S-H-O-T-T-E-N.

So a nook is just like a nook as we know it today?

Like a corner?

Like a corner.

Yep, yep.

Something that’s nookshottin is something that has many corners, angles, or projections,

Having an irregular form.

Okay, interesting.

So lots of nooks.

Yes, yes.

In fact, Shakespeare talked about the nookshottin Isle of Albion.

Outstanding.

Oh, yeah, that’s great.

That’s perfect.

It certainly is nookshottin.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hey, this is William calling from Atlanta, Georgia.

Hi, William.

How are you doing?

How are you doing today?

All right.

Sounds like you’re doing well.

What’s going on?

Oh, I am.

Good.

Not much.

Not much.

I’m actually calling on a saying my great-grandmother used to tell us all the time instead of,

Bless you, and we sneezed.

She’d always say, scat, cat, your tail’s in the fire.

It’s probably the only thing that she ever said we never could make any sense of.

So you would go, achoo, and she’d say, scat cat, your tail’s in the fire.

Yes, sir. That’s exactly it.

And William, where did your grandmother grow up?

To the best of my knowledge, she grew up right where I did, which would be Atlanta, Georgia.

Oh, Atlanta, Georgia. Well, that makes sense, doesn’t it, Grant?

Yeah, it’s so thoroughly a Southern expression.

Yeah, yeah. And there are lots of variations about this, and you’re exactly right.

People use it when they sneeze, when somebody else sneezes, right?

And your version was scat cat, your tail’s in the fire?

Yes.

-huh.

That’s so interesting because other versions go like scat cat, get your tail out of the gravy, which I like a lot.

So your family is definitely not the only one who uses it, and it’s very widespread.

And there are a couple of theories about the origin of that.

One may be that the old belief that when you sneeze, like an evil spirit comes out of your body.

And maybe, especially in the South, you know, rather than referring to the devil, you might refer to a cat or something.

But maybe the other idea is just, you know, blame the sneeze on a cat.

Oh, because you might have allergies or something.

Yeah, yeah, not like blaming a dog for a smell or anything.

I mean, the dog eats the homework. You’ve got to blame the cat.

You’re exactly right.

Yeah, the dog eats the homework and other things.

But yeah, scat, cat, get your tail out of the butter.

There’s something about that cat being there when it shouldn’t be there.

Sort of like a sneeze shouldn’t be there.

So sometimes it’s just plain old scat, right?

Oh, yeah, scat.

Yeah, not the full expression.

You might say scat old yeller, which is not a cat at all.

That’s actually your hound, right?

Unless it’s a yeller cat.

Scat your old witch.

There’s a lot of other things to say.

Wide varieties, but scat’s in there somewhere.

Yeah.

But it’s in American South.

It’s like it almost, if you look at the map in the Dictionary of American Regional English, William, it almost like literally stops where the American South stops.

It’s just like beyond that, people just don’t say it.

That is hilarious.

It’s pretty much below the Mason-Dixon line is the only place it’s at.

It’s speckled here and there in parts of Texas, which don’t consider themselves Southern at all.

But other than that, yeah, mostly American South.

William, what do you use?

Yeah, what do you use?

Just because I don’t get strange looks for it is just typical.

Bless you.

Okay.

Okay.

You’ve tried out the cat phrase and it just didn’t work?

People gave you strange looks?

Yeah.

That’s why they’re giving you strange looks, huh?

Well, I mean, there could be any number of reasons.

Well, William, thank you so much for calling.

It’s good to talk with you.

It beats Gesundheit, doesn’t it?

Yeah.

Yes.

I definitely agree there.

Take care now.

All righty.

Thank you so much, William.

All right. Thank you. You all have a nice day.

Okay.

Bye-bye.

Thanks. Bye-bye.

Bye.

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

We’ve talked before on this show about what to call yourself in relation to your pet.

Oh, yeah, sure.

Your cat’s owner, your cat’s human.

Your cat’s mother, mommy.

What do you call yourself in relation to?

One of the cats, I think I belong to him.

I’m his person.

And the other cat doesn’t care.

She’s very aloof.

She’s a typical cat.

Well, she’s a cat.

Yeah.

But he’s very needy.

He demands attention and reaches out with his little paw.

I always think he’s saying, they’re there, they’re there.

Touches me gently to let me know he wants pets.

Oh, that’s sweet.

Well, we heard from some dog, I was going to say owners, but maybe that’s not the right word, right?

Dog, mother and dog families.

I do like this one very much.

Diana, Helen’s daughter from Myers Flat, California, wrote to say that she has a six-year-old pit bull named Lola.

And she says, I am my dog’s service provider.

Isn’t that marvelous?

That’s totally it, yes.

I exist only for the dog.

That’s right.

The food lady.

Well, you’ve had pets in the past.

Oh, many.

How have you referred to yourself?

Well, we used to call ourselves the food ladies.

Yeah.

In our house, I don’t know where it came up, but somewhere along the way when my son was very young and we read books about animals, we started calling all animals our friends.

And so when we go to the zoo, let’s go see our polar bear friends or we have cat friends in the house.

And so when we talk about animals, a lot of times we’ll just tack on friends.

So there’s a raccoon friend came and dug up the tomatoes last night, something like that.

A raccoon friend just killed all our chickens.

Yeah, something like that.

So somewhere it’s just become one of those little in-house words, but that’s one of the ways that we suggest a relationship, but that’s not really familial.

My rattlesnake friend?

No, he hasn’t got that far yet.

Maybe.

I’d try it.

877-929-9673.

More conversation about what we say and why we say it.

Stay tuned.

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

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

If you’re a fan of crosswords, then you may know that the crossword puzzle community lost one of its leading lights this summer.

His name is Merle Riegel, one of the best crossword puzzle constructors ever.

You may have seen him in the 2006 documentary Wordplay.

About the crossword tournament.

Yes.

He was also portrayed in a brilliant episode of The Simpsons,

Where Lisa Simpson enters a crossword puzzle tournament

And actually ends up doing a crossword puzzle that Merle had designed.

Yeah, right.

So in the show, he made the puzzle that she did.

Yes.

And which later became available for other people to do.

Yes, yes.

And so it’s been a terrible loss to those of us who love crossword puzzles.

And I’ve been fascinated reading a lot of the tributes that have come in, and there have been many.

And one of the things that made him such a dazzling, brilliant puzzle constructor was the fact that he wanted to make puzzles that sort of had a life off of the page,

Something that people would talk about rather than using, you know, weird words for a Malaysian canoe or a three-toed sloth or a river in Italy, that kind of thing.

He looked for themes, and he once described being in an apartment store and seeing a sign that said throw rugs.

Yeah, and he thought, well, I hope some bratty kid doesn’t take that literally.

And he ended up creating this crossword puzzle that had answers like toss pillows, slit skirts, pocket calculators, all these things that you didn’t want Junior to do in a department store, right?

Because those words could be verbs.

Right, because you could slit a skirt or pocket a calculator.

Yeah, yeah.

And another time he was walking around in his neighborhood, and he was part of a neighborhood watch program.

And he thought about the words neighborhood watch.

And as a result of that, his clue was something like, so Tarzan, how come you and Jane don’t skinny dip in the backyard anymore?

The answer being neighborhood watch.

That is totally him.

He was so brilliant, so generous, and his mind often worked in anagrams, too.

There was a wonderful story from Deb Amlin, our friend who writes for the New York Times about crossword puzzles.

And she’s a humor writer.

She wrote a book called It’s Not PMS, It’s You, which is a funny book.

But she remembered him this way.

She said, Merle anagrammed the way other people breathe.

His brain was fascinating, somewhat shy by nature.

His opening salvo when he met you was to anagram your name,

And from there, the ice was always broken.

And she said one of her best memories of him

Was when she was staying at a hotel

At the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament.

She ran into him in the lobby, and she said,

He stopped an entire hotel lobby’s worth of people

Dead in their tracks by pointing at me

From across the lobby and bellowing,

Smutty positions!

It was an anagram of the book’s title,

And it was his way of saying hello after not seeing me for a whole year.

It’s not PMS.

It’s you.

Smutty positions, right?

Yeah.

We’ll miss him.

It’s a big loss for the puzzling community.

But these stories will keep the legend alive, I’m sure.

Indeed.

By the way, you can find Deb Amlin’s blog on the New York Times website.

It’s called Wordplay.

And if you love this show, you’ll love that blog.

And by the way, Martha, Arno.

The river in Italy is the Arno.

Oh, I was going to say Poe, P-O.

I went that one, too.

No, you can’t have two-letter answers in a crossword puzzle.

Well, I must be doing a lower grade of crossword puzzles.

I’ve done that one.

This is a show about words and language and everything related and sometimes not very related.

Give us a call, 877-929-9673.

Email us at words@waywordradio.org.

Or tell us what you’re thinking on Twitter at the handle W-A-Y-W-O-R-D.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Good morning.

This is Lori Jo Stratty.

Hi.

And I’m calling in from far northern Michigan up in Petoskey.

What’s on your mind?

I am hoping your listeners can help me think up a new word to describe the following phenomenon,

Which often occurs when you see a really dear friend whom you haven’t seen in decades.

This happened to me again two weeks ago when I attended a camp reunion in northern Michigan.

I was so excited to see my canoe partner from my childhood that I hadn’t seen in 40 years.

40 years.

Canoe partner.

40 years.

Canoe partners.

You know, over logs, under branches, you know.

So my initial reaction when I saw her was pretty typical.

I was shocked at how old she looked to me.

And undoubtedly, I looked really old to her, too.

But what happens is like within a few minutes, the spirit and twinkle of your old friend starts coming through,

And it’s like the face in front of me melted away and was replaced by her younger self.

I was really seeing her as she was 40 years ago.

Many of us talked about that, you know, that thing.

I was asking questions to people, are you having the same experience?

We all said yes.

And what is the word we could use to describe that phenomena?

Wow.

Yeah, that’s an interesting one.

That’s a great description of it.

It is always a big shock.

So there was a reason you were friends back then, and that’s still there.

That essential, whatever that magnetic force was is still there that connects you.

And everything else melts away.

Everything else melts away, and I think it’s the shared experience from a long time ago,

And then it sort of brings forth in them what I saw then and loved.

Their essence.

Yeah, their essence.

And it literally transforms their faith.

That’s amazing.

And you’re looking for a nice one-word wrap-up for this.

Yes, I have racked my brain.

Yeah.

Laurie Jo, I have one expression that’s come to mind.

I’m not aware of any existing one, but I have a suggestion for you.

Take it or leave it.

Yes.

What about Deja You?

Oh, my gosh, that is fabulous.

I knew we’d have a portmanteau.

I love that.

That works for you, huh?

Fabulous.

Yeah, that really works for me, and plus it’s understandable.

It’s accessible.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And what I love is that you’ve encapsulated this experience that we all have,

And I think that’s one of the great things about coining new words

Is when you wrap your mind around some phenomenon

That you haven’t really wrapped it around before,

And it can be contained in a single word.

And that’s why I think maybe this one, déjà vu.

So is that, what is that?

That’s the experience itself is called déjà vu?

Sure, yeah, I’m having a case of déjà vu looking at you.

And it’s a mix of emotional and it’s visual.

It could also be auditory.

Exactly.

But it’s definitely primed. It’s a visual experience that I think is overlaid on an old emotional connection.

Nice. Yeah.

Well, I’ll tell you what. We have a lot of listeners who love language with a lot of energy.

And they love to coin words as well. And I’m sure that they’ll send us several for this.

They may already have words that they’ve coined themselves. All right?

Yes. That sounds great.

And thank you for sharing the memories, too. That’s just the best part of it as well.

Thank you both.

Cheers. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Okay.

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

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Alfred Hubbard from Valdosta, Georgia.

Valdosta. Alfred, is that your name?

Yes.

Okay, great.

Just call me Al.

Okay.

I just go usually by Al.

Welcome to the show, Al. Nice to talk to you. What’s up?

Oh, first of all, thank you for taking my call. I can’t believe I’m on the Martha and the Grant show.

Our pleasure.

I can’t believe this is a dream come true.

Well, bless your heart, Al.

Happy to have you on the show.

My question is, I was played by a French horn for seven years in high school and college.

Everybody always called it French horn.

But the music said either E-flat horn or F horn.

And if you’re familiar with what we call a French horn, there are at least two types that I know of.

One that’s got the most valves and things, that’s an E-flat horn.

And then you got the one that has less valves and it’s a little smaller and it’s an F horn.

I had a fancy one that had a little valve on there that you, a thumb valve.

Yeah.

You push that thumb valve and it made it either E flat or F.

Right.

But the music always said E flat horn or F horn.

And down through the years, I didn’t think much about it.

But as I began to watch public TV and listen to public radio, I noticed that all of the big orchestras, like the Philharmonics and all that, they would say horn.

I never saw them term French horn.

It would say horn, concerto for orchestra and horn.

And I just recently found out that French horn is a misnomer, that the French had nothing to do with the development of this horn.

And someone said if any ethnicity at all needs to go into it, it would be more accurately called the German horn.

I would like to know the origin of it.

When did it start being called French horn?

And why did they call it French horn if the French had nothing to do with it?

Yeah, I mean, you’ve pretty much well wrapped up the story.

You can Google for a lot of detail.

But this is a horn that came from the hunting horn tradition before there were even valves on it.

And the French were the ones that innovated and turned this into a multi-purpose horn with a lot more flexibility that could be used with other brass and larger orchestras.

And that was why when it was borrowed, the horn itself was borrowed into the English-speaking world.

Everyone called it the French horn because it came through the French.

They were the ones that made it this practical, usable instrument.

You really just kind of nailed it perfectly.

In the lower levels, middle school, high school, that sort of thing, it’s called the French horn.

But as you move into the higher levels of music, it is almost always just plain called the horn.

And as a matter of fact, there was a guy who used to work for the International Horn Society by the name of Harold Meek, M-E-E-K, who for a long time he edited the journal of the society.

His big insistence was that it should only ever be called the horn.

It should not be called the French horn because he, like a lot of people, was just bothered by the fact that the French shouldn’t get any credit for that instrument.

So that’s what you’re seeing.

You’re seeing this—the professionals inside an industry tend to have very specific usage that doesn’t necessarily move to the larger body of English.

Mm—

Okay.

So the French did have something to do with it.

Yeah, well, like I said, they innovated.

They, for one thing, they manufactured the German-designed horns.

And so that’s why it was called the French horn.

You can Google it for a lot of detail.

There’s a lot of really reliable places to find information on this.

Look for the International Horn Society.

They’ll have a ton of stuff.

The really nice thing, I didn’t know before I looked into this,

That it came from the hunting horn.

Well, that’s so interesting to me because, Al, as you know,

It has such a gorgeous mellow sound.

Yeah, it’s the most beautiful.

To me, it’s the most beautiful instrument in the orchestra.

I have to agree with you, and I’m really impressed that you played it for so many years

Because I know it’s one of the most difficult instruments in the orchestra as well.

I played the flute for many years,

And I always aspired to be as good as the horn players.

They were amazing.

Well, Al, I hope we’ve confirmed a lot of what you understood about it,

But I hope that we’ve given you a little bit more

That you can do a little Internet searching on your own

And find the full historical details.

It is really fascinating to think about this essential instrument

Before it was essential,

When it was just a thing that people could leave or take,

And now you wouldn’t have a big orchestra without several of these, right?

That’s right.

Well, Al, we are glad that you called in,

And we’re on the Martha and Grant Show.

Thanks, Al.

This is great.

This has made my day.

Made mine, too.

You just gave the show a new name.

I like it.

Take care now.

All right.

Thank you.

All right.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

The term that was new to me,

You probably know it, Grant,

Is hippie Christmas.

What is that?

This is a term for when college students are moving out of their apartments.

You know, and there’s all this great stuff.

They just leave it by the curb or the dumpster, right?

Yeah.

Because they don’t want to haul it home.

Right.

Perfectly good clothing and perfectly good furniture.

Furniture and toaster ovens and hot plates and chairs.

Yeah.

There are places like in Madison, Wisconsin and in Arcata, California.

They fall on different dates, but it’s when there’s this turnover of people leaving their apartments.

And so you know if you just go down the street with your pickup, you’re going to find some good deals.

Some real good stuff.

Hippie Christmas.

Hippie Christmas.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Megan.

I’m calling from Billings, Montana.

Hello, Megan.

Hi, Megan.

What’s up?

My husband and I have been married for 10 years,

And we constantly argue about the little foam thing that you can put around a soda or beer can.

Constantly.

Yeah, constantly. It comes up more often than it should.

You drink a lot of beer, do you?

No, but every time we go have any gatherings with his friends, they offer me a drink and,

Do you want a koozie with that? And I look at them and their backwards Wyoming ways and say,

Don’t you mean a cozy? And they say, no, they’re koozies. And they look at me indulgently because

I’m a Montanan and I obviously don’t know what I’m talking about because we don’t drink

Beer the way Wyoming, Wyomingans drink beer.

What do you use, a straw or something?

How differently can you drink beer?

I have no idea.

Apparently just using koozies versus cozies.

Heathens.

So anyway, you would be settling a long-term argument if it was cozy versus cozy.

Do you really want it settled?

Only if I get my way.

I ask because my wife had been arguing about whether or not dill pickles and bread and butter pickles are better since we got married nine years ago.

And, you know, I don’t really ever, I always want that to be our argument.

You don’t want to let go of that.

Yeah, because otherwise we might argue about something more serious.

We have other nonsense arguments that we can have.

Yeah, okay.

But we’ll also help with his friends because they think I’m a silly one cannon.

They gang up on you.

We can help.

I don’t know if it’s exactly the help that you need.

Here’s the thing.

You know what a tea cozy is?

Yes.

Okay, so this is a little probably crochet or knitted thing that goes on top of the teapot to keep the tea warm in between pouring yourself cups.

This is where the idea of the drink cozy came from.

And the drink cozy kind of popped up in the 1970s.

We see real strong evidence of in the late 1970s.

And by 1980, we started to see a wide variety of patents appearing for a variety of different kinds of cozies.

Now, the difficulty with this is, is that in order to differentiate themselves and to get patents approved, they each came up with their own different kind of innovations.

This one has a zipper.

This one folds.

This one’s made out of a different kind of material.

And importantly for our conversation here, they would usually use a different name.

Usually it was the same word with a different spelling.

So you will find in 1980 a Koozie, K-O-O-Z-I-E, patented.

And you will find Cozy, K-O-Z-Y, and you’ll find a wide variety with double O’s or single O’s with K or C, S or Z, a whole ton of these spellings.

And so what we have here is the same word with different spellings.

And probably Cozy started exclusively as a brand name, as a patented brand name for a product that you could buy at the store.

Kind of using like band-aids instead of saying like a plastic gauze.

Yeah.

Adhesive bandage or something.

Yeah, something like that.

But the gist of it is you are both talking about the same device.

You’re actually using the same name with different spellings and different pronunciations simply because these businesses wanted to do that.

But the original form is cozy.

That’s kind of the thing about this debate.

It’s not really why have a debate about this because it’s the same word with different pronunciations and spellings.

It doesn’t matter.

Very true.

And I will bring that up the next time we have a gathering with his friends and they look at me like I’m crazy.

I’ll just say it started out as a cozy.

You guys are just using a brand name Koozie.

Yeah.

That’s a good summary.

And in my thinking, if you prefer a brand name over the generic name, then you’re probably like have suckered for some kind of commercial intent.

Exactly.

Megan, so you got to report back to us.

Tell us how this goes down.

We’ve loaded you up with some information here.

The gist of it is either one is fine.

Koozie is the original.

Take your pick and people should just lay off.

I’m ready to go educate my Wyoming friends with my traditional Montana linguistics.

Yeah, there we go.

Oh, boy, educate.

Do let us know how that goes, okay?

Original and authentic.

I will.

Thank you guys so much.

All right.

Thanks for calling.

Thank you very much.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

We’d love to argue with you.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

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This program would not be possible without you.

Grant and I are out to change the way we listen to each other and the way we think about language.

And you’re making it happen.

Thanks also to senior producer Stefanie Levine,

Director Colin Tedeschi,

And editor Tim Felten in San Diego.

In New York, we thank production wizard James Ramsey,

Quiz guide John Chaneski,

And that master of keeping it real,

Paul Ruist at Argo Studios.

A Way with Words is an independent production

Of Wayword, Inc.

From the Recording Arts Center

At Studio West in San Diego,

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

Bye-bye.

So long.