See the Elephant

Even though you’re listening to this on podcast and not on the air, you can still call our toll-free number 877-929-9673.

And you can still send us email to words@waywordradio.org.

And you can still find us online at waywordradio.org.

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

And I’m Grant Barrett.

I’ve been browsing a great discussion thread at Reddit.

You know Reddit, it’s this social networking, social linking site for people.

Yeah, R-E-D-D-I-T, right?

That’s right.

People post stuff that’s cool, they vote it up or down, and then the popular stuff kind of rises to the top.

Well, one of the links that rose to the top is a link that features idioms from other languages and translates them into English.

And this is an astonishing list of idioms because the cultural things that you need to understand in order to grab these idioms are vast.

The top one at this minute, and I say at this minute because the voting could mean that this one could drop off the top, is from a fellow in Bangladesh who writes about an idiom relating to mustaches and jackfruit.

And the idiom goes like this, oiling your mustache in anticipation of the jackfruit tree bearing fruit.

I always say that.

And more or less it means don’t count your chickens before they hatch, right?

That’s what we might say.

But oiling your mustache?

Yeah.

And he explains, and it’s great.

It’s a little like explaining a joke so that people understand why it’s funny.

But bear with me here, okay?

Okay.

So first of all, you love jackfruit.

Apparently they’re very yummy, right?

Okay.

And second of all, you have a mustache that if you ate a jackfruit, you would get some of the juice in your mustache.

True, but don’t tell everybody.

One has a mustache.

One has a mustache.

The bleach is working.

Don’t worry about it.

And then the third thing is you oil your mustache before you eat so that the jackfruit doesn’t stick, right?

And so then the fourth thing is what’s happening is anticipation of having the jackfruit, which aren’t ripe yet.

You’re oiling your mustache anyway so it’ll be ready when the jackfruit are ripe.

And that’s the whole thing about this idiom from Bangladesh.

It’s wonderful.

Again, it is oiling your mustache in anticipation of the jackfruit tree bearing fruit.

So if you have all that context, it’s actually a very efficient way to say something, right?

It’s perfect. But you need the context.

Right.

Otherwise, you spend four minutes of an intro on a radio show explaining it.

There’s a whole ton of these. We’ll link to them on the website, and later in the show, I’ll share some more.

Oh, man. This is the show where we talk about language and idioms and word origins and writing well and slang and the weird things they say in other parts of the country.

Let us hear from you, 877-929-9673, or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hey, good morning.

Hi, who’s this?

Hey, this is Donnie.

Hi, Donnie. Welcome to the program.

Hello.

Thank you. Hey, how you doing?

Doing well, Donnie. What’s up?

Yeah, I was going to ask, as far as A Way with Words, I remember growing up, we would always say fixing to.

So I was wondering if you guys had any insight on that particular phrase.

Oh, Donnie, you sound like home. Where are you from?

Where am I from? I’m from North Carolina. I’m from Charlotte.

Okay.

Okay. All right.

And that’s a natural part of your family’s vocabulary then?

Oh, yeah. We have our own language. We have a lot of phrases.

We have our own family language, so to speak.

So fixin’ to is just one phrase we would use.

But I’ve heard it out in California a few times.

I thought it wasn’t in the origin.

I look at you guys’ show all the time, so I was like,

Huh, I wonder if they could tell me something about that phrase.

Oh, boy, howdy, can we? Sure.

Awesome.

I’m standing across from the Southern Belle herself,

We’ll tell you all about it.

Oh, is that right?

Awesome.

That’s good to go.

And, Donnie, you said you’re out in California now?

Yeah, I’m stationed.

I’m in the Marine Corps, stationed out at Miramar at the Marine Corps Air Station.

Okay, cool.

Now, do you use it with other people, and they look at you like, what in the world are you saying?

Well, the first couple times they would, but now everyone knows that, depending on how I use it,

They know exactly what I’m talking about.

Yeah, if you say you’re fixing to do something, you’re about to do something, right?

Right, right, exactly.

Yeah, well, this is definitely a Southern expression, and it’s a little tricky to trace the history of it, but I think the idea is that, you know, fix has so many different meanings.

I mean, Donnie, would you talk about fixing breakfast?

I’ll probably say make breakfast.

-huh, okay.

Or fix your hair?

Yeah, would you say, I’m going to fix my hair? Or maybe your mother would say, I’m going to fix my hair?

Right, she would say that.

Okay. Yeah. My mother used to say, I’m fixing to go get my hair fixed.

She said, fixing to go, right?

Yeah, yeah.

Fixing to go fix my hair.

Yeah.

And you’re in a fix if you miss your appointment.

Yeah.

Exactly.

And then you come home and make turkey with all the fixings, right?

Yeah.

So I think the idea is that it had an earlier meaning of prepare or arrange, and you kind of see that in fixing dinner or fixing breakfast.

And so you can kind of see how preparing and arranging might lend itself to becoming fixing to do this or that.

I think they talk about the weather, fixing up to rain and that kind of thing.

And so all the older uses of that verb meaning to prepare, we just don’t use it anymore.

But there’s this one remnant, right?

This vestige of that old meaning that stuck around in fixing to.

Right.

Right.

And again, Donnie, as I said, I mean, you sound like home because you hear it in the south for sure.

Right.

One of the things about Fixin II that might surprise you is that it’s actually grown in use.

As the South and the North have become a little more alike, people in the South have tend to exaggerate their use of some of those Southernisms that show that they are Southern and that they have an identity that goes beyond what you might see in the media.

In places like Oklahoma, it is regarded as a typical indicator of local speech.

And so people are more likely to use it now than they were 20 or 30 years ago.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

That’s interesting.

That’s interesting.

Yes, indeed.

Yeah, and I know it’s been around for a while because Charles Dickens traveled in the U.S. In the 1830s,

And he wrote about that and how odd that was.

He wrote to the folks back home in Britain about how odd that was that they say fixin’ to do things.

Oh, he did?

So he actually wrote about that phrase?

Yeah, yeah.

Oh, wow, I wasn’t familiar with that.

Yeah, so it’s been around quite a while, and it’s a little tricky to trace the history,

But I think it has a bright future.

Hey, Donnie, it’s so great to hear from you.

Yeah, definitely.

We have a bunch of phrases that we use,

And I could probably throw a million phrases at you,

But maybe for another show.

Oh, send them an email.

Yeah, we’d love to read them.

Yeah, email us, and let’s talk again, okay?

Definitely.

I would definitely do that, and I appreciate your time.

Okay.

Our pleasure.

Thanks, Donnie.

Thank you, Donnie.

I’m picking to go take a nap.

What a great idea.

Awesome.

Thanks, buddy.

Bye.

Bye.

Thank you, guys.

Bye-bye.

Call us with your regional expressions, 877-929-9673.

You can always email us, words@waywordradio.org.

More idioms from other languages.

I speak and read a bit of Spanish, so I paid particular attention to those.

And I know a lot of our listeners also speak some Spanish.

So this one is from Venezuela.

Como te gusta la papa pelada.

And it means you really love peeled potatoes.

And the whole idea here is that you’re lazy and you want your work done for you

And you don’t want to buy the potatoes unpeeled.

Right, right.

It’s great, right?

Yeah, there’s a variation of that having to do with mangoes too, right?

Yes, yes, there is.

You like your mangoes peeled.

Yeah, well, you like the low-hanging mangoes, the low-hanging fruit, so to speak.

Yeah.

And then another one in Spanish, I think this might be Argentinian, cortito como patada de chanco.

Yeah.

It means short like a pig’s kick.

I know.

And so you might describe somebody who is small in stature as short as a pig’s kick.

That’s lovely, right?

Love it.

What are the idioms from other languages that you’d like to share?

877-929-9673 or send them an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi.

Hello, who’s this?

Oh, my name is Carla and I’m from San Diego, California, and I just had a question for you.

How can we help you, Carla?

Well, I listen to your show all the time, and I was in my office the other day, and all the women erupted over the word overnighting, because every time we put it in the computer, the spell check says it’s wrong.

And we all know what it means, and we all agree that it definitely is a word.

However, I thought, well, what a great question for Way With Words.

So I wanted to see if you had any thoughts about whether it was a word or if it’s slang.

So you mean you’re sending a package or something for delivery tomorrow morning, right?

Yeah.

Or the next day.

I think that’s ridiculous.

There’s two paths to take here on this.

First, let’s just talk about the technology for a second.

We’ve done this before, but it bears repeating.

The spell checkers and grammar checkers that are in Microsoft Word and Microsoft Office and Outlook and all those other programs, whether it’s in Firefox or Apple Mail or whatever you’re using to compose your documents, are guidelines.

Okay.

They are not the definitive word on this stuff.

Just treat the red squiggles underneath the words as a reminder to pay attention, not necessarily advice to change it, but to say, oh, hey, I think this word is unusual.

Just make sure it’s right.

Right.

They’re guidelines, but they’re red squiggly guidelines.

And if it’s fine, you can actually go out.

I think you can right-click on the squiggle and add it to your user dictionary, and it will never come up again.

Yes, and I will definitely do that.

I just wanted to make sure that, you know, especially since it’s a work email, that it wasn’t sounding like a complete idiot.

No, no, no.

You have our permission.

Overnight as a verb is completely 100% standard American English.

There is nothing wrong with it.

Great.

Well, I’ll share this with the ladies.

I appreciate that.

Great.

And maybe overnight a message to Microsoft.

They should change that.

That’s ridiculous.

Well, they do update their dictionaries with every release of the software.

They have a problem where dictionaries themselves are kind of conservative about their inclusion.

Right.

And so there’s this, like, series of delays.

So your software dictionaries are going to be 5, 10, 15, even 20 years behind mainstream English.

Certainly they can’t keep up with all the new jargon, and it’s probably not their business to try.

They’re more interested in mainstream English, the most likely cases, and they do a pretty decent job of just bringing stuff to your attention.

So do you agree if everyone has the same idea of what it means and it’s an understandable message to relay, then it’s probably acceptable?

Yes.

Yeah, I think especially in a business context.

Right.

If everyone in your office agrees on this and it’s the right context for it, absolutely.

Okay.

Where you run into problems is when one group agrees and another group disagrees.

And that’s when we have conflicts and that’s why we have a radio show to talk about them.

Yeah, I just didn’t want to interpret it as slang.

No, no.

No, you’re good.

It’s business jargon, but it’s totally fine business jargon.

Great.

It’s almost not jargon.

No, that’s what I’m saying.

It’s standard American business jargon.

It’s like perfect.

And some dictionaries even have it in there.

It’s not a big deal.

All right.

Well, thank you.

Have a wonderful day.

Yeah, you too, Carla.

Thanks for calling.

Okay, bye.

Bye.

Call us, 877-929-9673.

Or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

And if you just can’t wait to talk with us, go to Facebook.

You’ll find us at Wayword Radio.

Grant, some more Argentinian slang from that list that you pointed out on the Internet.

How about this one?

It translates as, you are a carrot, sosuna zanahoria.

That just means you’re a dummy or a blockhead?

Yes.

Very good.

Have you heard that before?

No, but to call somebody a carrot, I couldn’t think of a positive meaning behind that.

And I really love this one.

It’s a voz te chifla el moño, which means your bow tie is whistling.

I love it.

It means you’re crazy.

Love it.

Let us know your favorite foreign language idioms.

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

Coming up, it’s our weekly word quiz.

Stick around for more from A Way with Words.

You’re listening to A Way with Words.

I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

And on the line is that master of mayhem, John Chaneski from New York, with a quiz.

Hello, John.

Hello, Grant.

Now, I have a quiz for you today I think you’re going to like.

Okay.

This quiz puts you right in the middle of things.

That is to say, the answers are common phrases that all have the word my in the middle.

Okay?

Okay.

I’ll give you a sentence that ends with a blank my blank, and you provide the words that go in the blanks.

Okay.

For example, Davey, your uncle thinks it’s a hilarious joke, but just ignore him if he ever says to you blank my blank.

Pull my finger.

Pull my finger.

Very good.

Now, the answer will always be verb my noun.

Okay?

Okay, great.

Verb my noun.

Okay.

Here’s the first one.

Listen, Tex, if you don’t think I’m holding that last ace, then you can just blank my blank.

Call my bluff.

Call my bluff is right.

Start off with a nice one.

All right.

What I’d really like my car to have is chrome wheels, LED tail lights, a spoiler, and flame decals.

So come on, Joey.

Blank my blank.

Pimp my ride.

Oh, nice.

Pimp my ride.

Very nice.

Now that my car is a sweet ride, what do you say we race?

Adios, slowpokes.

Blank my blank.

Eat my dust.

Eat my dust.

Yes.

You know, Bart may be the most famous for it, but I’ve been saying it for years.

Blank my blank.

Eat my shorts.

Eat my shorts.

Very nice.

Deb is a real potty mouth, but she thinks she can curse a blue streak and make everything right just by saying, blank my blank.

Bless my heart.

No.

Oh, that’s wrong?

Try something else.

Oh, pardon my French.

That’s right, pardon my French.

Who is Deb? This is a friend of yours?

You promised to work into the quiz this week.

Do you want to know the honest answer?

I was thinking of Deb Morgan, the character on Dexter.

Oh, okay.

That’s exactly true, I’m like, she’s a real potty mouth.

But, you know, excuse her French, or pardon her French.

Since this is your first time at a state dinner, don’t worry, just watch what I do and blank my blank.

Follow my lead.

Very good.

Oh, you are going to pay, my friend.

Believe me when I say this thing, which I know to be true.

You are going to regret what you have done.

You blank my blank.

You mark my words.

Good.

Mark my words.

This one is a historical quote.

My opponent will rule out raising taxes, but I will.

And the Congress will push me to raise taxes, and I’ll say no.

And they’ll push, and I’ll say no.

And they’ll push again, and I’ll say to them, blank my blank.

Read my lips.

No new taxes.

Very good.

And now the music portion of the show.

This 1970 classic by Chicago was a B-side, but it became a very popular slow dance favorite at proms.

Color My World.

Color My World, very good. Color My World with hopes of loving you.

Nice job.

With hopes of remembering the words.

This 1965 song by the Beatles is on the album Rubber Soul.

Baby, you can blank my blank.

Baby, you can drive my car.

Beep, beep, beep, beep, yeah.

There we go.

Anyway, that’s my blank my blank quiz for today.

And you guys were fantastic.

Oh, my gosh.

Thank you.

You lit our fires.

Thank you.

And if you’d like to talk with us about grammar, slang, punctuation, word origins, call us 1-877-929-9673.

Or you can send those emails to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, how are you?

Super, who’s this?

This is Marilyn Madison from Burlington, Vermont.

Well, hi, Marilyn. Welcome to the program.

Hi.

Hi.

How can we help you today?

So I have an interesting expression that my beloved mother used to say. It’s landegosion, she would say. And we had a whole dictionary of sayings, and this is one of the ones that mystified us. Because, you know, she was a very happy person. She’d say, golly gee, and all those kind of statements. But this one, she would say in the same kind of manner, like, land of Goshen, you know, land of Goshen.

In reference to what? What would have happened that would make her say that?

Well, you know, something that was interesting or, you know, like, as I said, it was similar to golly gee or wow.

I see, very good. Land of Goshen, a biblical place I apparently understand now.

Yes, yes, exactly. But I want to know, where does that statement come from? What’s the history of it? I would love to know.

Okay, we can give you that. Yes, Goshen is a biblical place. Was your mother religious at all?

Not extremely.

Okay. You know, her mother’s family came from Prince Edward Island. You know, they were Christian, but they weren’t, you know, to the extreme level, like Methodist or whatever.

Okay, okay. But if they were at all familiar with the book of Genesis, then the expression land of Goshen would be very familiar to them. It’s in the story of Joseph when he talks about in the land of Goshen, let them dwell. He’s securing a place for his father and brothers to dwell in the best part of Egypt, the most fertile, beautiful part, which was Goshen, G-O-S-H-E-N.

Yeah. And I’m fascinated that your mother used expressions like golly gee, because land of Goshen is kind of a euphemism, like golly gee is, you know, instead of saying something much stronger. The term land itself is a euphemism for Lord.

Land sakes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Land sakes. In fact, I can remember, Marilyn, my mother saying land and land sakes, Martha Ann.

Interesting. So land of Goshen is kind of like my gosh, which is a euphemized version of my God.

Yes, yes. My gosh, that’s right. It’s a shortening of Goshen.

Gosh.

Gosh.

Well, or gosh is a word used instead of God. I mean, there was a time when people’s sensibilities were so delicate that some people would use the word land instead of Lord or gosh instead of God. You don’t hear that much anymore.

I see. Because they didn’t want to be seen as blasphemers?

Right, exactly. I mean, as I said, my mother would say land rather than Lord.

Just land.

Yeah, land. My mother always used to say also Mary, Jesus, and Joseph. That was a similar era, I think. Mary, Jesus, and Joseph.

Mary, Jesus, and Joseph. Nice. Nice. Yeah. Yeah, so it’s land of Goshen, or you often see it land of Goshen, you know, with the F out of the of. But land of Goshen. Well, great to talk with you, Marilyn.

Thanks, Marilyn.

All right. Thanks so much.

Bye-bye.

All right. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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

Hello. You have A Way with Words.

Hi, Grant. Hi, Martha.

This is Frank Kaliva calling from Washington, D.C.

Howdy, Frank. Welcome to the program.

Thank you. Great to be here.

What’s cooking in Washington, D.C.?

Well, a lot’s going on.

Are you straightening out the government for us?

Well, trying to, a little bit at a time at least.

Okay. All right. Well, how can we straighten out things in your world?

I’m a Yankee transplant down here. I’m originally from Syracuse, New York, and went to college in Rhode Island, and I moved down here for grad school a few years back. And I noticed when I was going out to restaurants in particular that I was getting really confused looks from busboys and servers at the end of meals. And I wasn’t really sure why. And then finally a friend who happened to be from Texas that I was out with one night mentioned that I was saying a very confusing thing when the server would come over and ask if I was finished. I would say, I’m all set, which I thought indicated that I’m done with my meal. You can take the plate away. And I finally talked to other friends in D.C. or from all around the country and realized that this is something apparently peculiar, at least in my experience, to the Northeast. And it’s also even stranger, I guess, because I realized other people will say, I’m all set to mean, well, no, I don’t need anything. Or, you know, maybe if someone asked you if you wanted a cup of coffee, you might say, no, thanks, I’m all set. But I sort of have this secondary meaning that’s common up in Syracuse, at least, which is, you know, I’m all set, meaning, you know, please go ahead and take it away. So I guess my question is, you know, what’s the origin of this phrase? And am I right that it’s a kind of northeastern sort of thing?

Interesting. I can see the area of confusion there. They weren’t quite sure what you were all set for.

Exactly.

All set to continue your meal or all set for the plate to be taken?

Exactly, exactly. Interesting. Oh, wow. I never really thought about that. They talk funny in Syracuse anyway.

Yeah, Yankees.

Must be all the snow. And I love how you say down there because D.C. is definitely the south, but so often it doesn’t behave like the south. And matters of language, it’s definitely more southern, isn’t it?

They say that it’s a southern efficiency and northern charm in D.C.

Right. And I guess maybe that applies to language as well.

I like that. Yeah, I’m trying to think what I would say if Grant came to my table and he was the server. Excuse me, madam. Are you all finished?

Yeah, I would say. Can I take your plate?

I would say yes to those.

You would.

But I think I would say I’m fine or I might actually say I’m good.

I’m good.

Yeah, to me, if I was your server, I wouldn’t take your plate.

You wouldn’t.

No, I absolutely would not take your plate.

If I said.

Because you were fine as you are, which is at the table with your plate. But if I said I’m all set, would you take it away?

No, no. I wouldn’t.

Okay. And Frank, when you’re telling somebody you’re all set, you mean?

It means I’m finished.

Interesting. And in Syracuse, servers often, I’ve noticed going back home to Syracuse, a server will often come over and say, are you all set with that? Meaning, can I take it away from you? So it works on both ends.

Sure. But it’s a natural extension of all set. Well, set as an adjective in English has long had the meaning of ready or prepared or at a point where something can begin.

Right.

Right? And so it’s just like one more step beyond that where it’s kind of understood that what is set is for the next stage to happen and the next stage is to take the plate.

And does this happen outside of the restaurant world? I mean, if you’re, let’s say that you’re, I don’t know, you’re at the workplace and somebody comes to your desk and says, do you need any more paper? And you don’t need more paper. Would you say, I’m all set, meaning don’t give me more paper?

I would.

Yeah, that’s why it seems. Yeah. It seems like at this one particular restaurant context, it almost means the opposite of what it means in other contexts.

Interesting. Oh, wow. I love this stuff. But it is standard English, right, Martha? I see this in a couple of dictionaries. It’s in the Cambridge Dictionaries, and the American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms actually has an entry for it.

Yeah?

Yeah. This says ready, in a position for some action, as in I’m all set to leave the country.

But that’s slightly different.

What is?

It’s you’re prepared. You’re prepared for something.

Well, yeah. I guess it depends on what you’re prepared for, though. So, Frank, when you go back home, you don’t have this problem at all. But if you go to the South or the West, you have this problem.

That’s what you think?

Absolutely, yes.

How interesting.

Well, maybe we should add another line to that saying, northern charm, southern efficiency, and the baffle gab of both.

I think that could be the name of our show, the baffle gab of both.

Frank, I think what we’re saying is we’re not sure if it’s regional or not, but your data suggests that it is.

Yeah.

Well, I guess this may be one that we have to put out to folks listening out there.

Does this sound wrong to you?

Let us know in email to words@waywordradio.org.

Or if you use it yourself, give us a call and tell us why and what kind of reactions you get.

877-929-9673.

Well, terrific.

I can’t wait to hear what other people say.

Thanks very much.

Thanks, Frank.

Thanks a lot, Frank.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Bye.

This one’s not in Spanish, and I don’t read Romanian, so I’ll just say the English version of this idiom.

But I love it.

Describe somebody who’s cheap.

You’d say, he’d steal your chickens and then beg for eggs.

It’s great, right?

Very nice.

The guy who has everything asks for more, basically.

Terrible.

What are your idioms?

What are the things that you learned in other languages that are odd to hear in English?

877-929-9673 or send them an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Cindy from Eau Claire, Wisconsin.

Oh, well, welcome, Cindy.

Hi, Cindy. Welcome to the program.

Well, I was listening a couple of weeks ago, and I got the idea.

I wonder if A Way with Words might be able to help me find the origin of this little oral family heirloom that I’ve found myself to be the soul keeper of.

And it’s something I relentlessly just begged my mother to repeat until I had it memorized.

And this was during the 1950s.

But now my mother’s passed away, and I realized too late, of course, that I didn’t ask her where she got it from.

Oh, well, we love these.

Toity, poiple, black boys, sitting on a coibstone, choipin’ and boipin’ and eatin’ doity oithworms.

And along came Moidal and her boyfriend, Hoiman.

They saw the toyty-poidal black boy sitting on a coib stone, and they were poitoid.

Wow. That’s quite a tongue twister you’ve got there.

We’re applauding here.

It is. And, you know, my mother and her ancestors were all raised in Wisconsin, spent no time on the East Coast.

I haven’t either. I have no idea where this came from, a movie or what, but I have it stuck in my head now, and I would really like to know where on earth it came from.

So you remember this from the 50s, as far back as the 50s then?

Yeah, yeah. It’s a while ago.

Yeah, it’s a while ago. And your family, you’re the sole keeper of it. Wow, that’s quite a heritage you’ve got there.

This is so cool.

Yeah, it’s definitely a characterization of the Brooklyn accent.

Toidy, toid, and toid, you know, is the classic.

Toid.

Toid, or the old school New York accent, which became so stigmatized in New York City that people don’t really talk like that anymore in New York.

But you do it pretty well for somebody from Eau Claire.

Yeah, toidy, toid, and toid.

33rd and 3rd.

As many years of practice, toidy, poiple, black boy sitting on the cobstone.

I do have some information for you.

I don’t know about the ultimate origin of this, but I can give you a span of years and a few little places that it’s popped up over the decades.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

One of the more recent places that it appeared, believe it or not, was in a 1985 song by the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Oh, no.

Yeah, yeah.

It was their second album called Freaky Stylee.

It was not a very successful album, but it’s in there.

And it’s similar to what you have to say.

30 Dirty Birds Sitting on a Black Curtain.

Notice it’s dirty birds instead of blackbirds, and they’re not purple.

They’re just dirty.

Dirty, dirty birds sitting on a curb, chirping and burping and eating dirty earthworms.

And it goes on with some…

Along comes Herbie, different names, too.

Hoi!

Yeah, and you’ll find throughout history that the names that are used tend to change a little bit, too.

I find another one from 1987 in a newspaper.

It’s Hoibee and his girlfriend, Goidi, so Herbie and Gertie.

Hoidi and Goidi.

Yeah, Hoidi and Goidi, Herbie and Gertie.

But to make a long story short, the earliest use that we know of, and there’s definitely more work to be done, it’s in the copyright records of the Library of Congress.

There was a song published in 1944 called Toidy Doidy Boids, 30 Dirty Birds.

And I haven’t seen the full lyrics for that song, nor have I heard it.

I could not find it to save my life.

But I bet you this is a version of this.

I’ll bet it is.

And I bet 1944 is not the earliest date because this characterization of the Brooklyn accent was common for ages.

And it shows up even in Bugs Bunny cartoons and in old kind of ethnic stereotypes in newspapers and like the kind of like one-off, one-color fiction that would be serialized there.

Yes.

Yeah, so it’s got a life.

And like all folk rhymes, it tends to have many versions.

Yeah, like a game of telephone.

Yeah, exactly.

And so there’s not one definitive version that I know of.

Yes.

Yes.

Oh, I’m so pleased.

I’m pleased to know that it still has a life.

Yeah.

Yeah, definitely.

And Cindy, you’ve contributed to it here.

Tarty-darty-boids.

I guess I did as long as I didn’t, you know, alienate anyone.

I hope I was politically acceptable.

Oh, of course you were.

Definitely.

Definitely.

Tarty-darty-boids sitting on a floor.

Well, my mother would be pleased and very embarrassed that, of all things, she would be remembered for this.

Oh, yeah?

There are worse things.

There are worse things than toity-toity-boids.

Toity-boible-black-boids.

Toity-boible-black-boids.

Oh, I’m just so pleased.

Thank you.

Our pleasure.

Thank you for calling.

It lives on.

Thank you so much.

It lives on, Cindy.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Boy-boy.

Bye-bye.

Boy-boy.

I love that stuff.

Grant, we should link to the Red Hot Chili Peppers lyrics.

And you can hear it on YouTube.

I’ve heard it on YouTube before.

There is a lot of heritage that comes with language.

There’s a lot of things passed from parents to children, and if you’d like to share some of yours, send us email to words@waywordradio.org, or call us 877-929-9673.

We’ll be back with more of your calls when A Way with Words continues.

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

More at nu.edu.

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

And I’m Martha Barnette.

Grant, one of the things I love, of course, about the Internet is stumbling across something that you never saw before.

And recently, I stumbled across some of the best writing advice ever.

This is what I’m going to send to people the next time they write me and ask me how to write well.

What did it say? It said, don’t do it. There are enough books already?

Well, you know, he suggests that it was pretty painful.

This is by Landon Y. Jones, who was once the editor of, of all things, People magazine.

But it’s one of the best examples of advice about writing.

And I just want to share some of it.

First of all, he starts out by saying there’s no such thing as a writer who has not faced his or her job with a mixture of fear and loathing.

And then he said it gets worse.

Consider the nature writer Annie Dillard.

I love her stuff.

What she said was, I do not so much write a book as sit up with it as with a dying friend.

I hold its hand and hope it will get better.

Oh, my.

Isn’t that powerful?

And he goes on to offer seven habits of highly effective writers.

And I’m not going to go through all of them.

He starts out by talking about how the first stage of writing prose is to make a mess.

To think of yourself as a mop and just mop the floor.

Absolutely.

Get that stuff up and then squeeze it out.

And he goes on to talk about the process of organizing.

And then he offers this advice.

He says, don’t get it right the first time.

Don’t even think about getting it right on the first draft because all good writing is actually rewriting.

The biggest mistake that a writer can make is not to revise.

Rewriting does not mean you have failed.

That’s right.

What’s astonishing about this advice is how closely it is in line with current thinking and writing software.

Where, yeah, there are many injunctions in the software world about premature optimization.

That is, write your code until it works and then move on to something else that works.

And don’t spend too long on perfecting one little part of it until you have pretty much the whole thing kind of scoped out and in some way functional.

And I think that works for novels, too.

Oh, that’s interesting.

Well, he also talks about at some point during the process, you should write your last line.

I don’t always do that, but I kind of think of the kicker.

Where you’re going with it.

Yeah, then you have a destination and it’s like a trip, you know, then you just have to get there.

And he offers some great advice about if you have writer’s block.

He says, sometimes I’ll read a writer I admire just to listen to his voice.

It seems to help me the same way that it helps Michael Phelps to put on his iPod and listen to his pump music before a race.

You absorb one writer’s rhythms and voice in order to unlock your own.

I agree with that.

I find that really true.

So he gives all this great advice, but I think that it’s probably telling that the title of this article is, But Writing’s Still a Butt-Busting Job.

That’s right.

You know, people sometimes write to me and they say, is there a software program I can use to become a better writer?

Well, no.

You know, it can be painful, difficult work.

It’s not easy.

We will link to this article on our website.

I think it’s just terrific.

And you’ll find it at waywordradio.org.

What works for you when you’re writing?

What makes your writing better?

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

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi there.

This is Kelly.

Hello, Kelly.

Where are you calling us from?

Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Welcome to the show.

How can we help you?

Oh, I lived in Texas for about five years, and I’ve never heard anybody say grandma and grandpa in Texas.

It was always mama and papa or papa.

And I said to a couple of people over the course of the five years that I lived there, well, what is the deal with mama and papa or papa?

They said, well, we don’t use grandma and grandpa.

It makes us sound too old.

What?

So I thought, is that a Texas thing?

Or is that all over the South that they say that?

Or is it just Texas?

I wasn’t sure.

Mamma and papaw instead of grandma and grandpa.

Exactly.

And they said that mamma and papaw sounded younger than grandma and grandpa?

Even though they mean the same thing?

Yeah, it means the same thing.

But they just don’t use grandma and grandpa there.

Interesting.

Yeah.

We have, in all the different branches of my family and my wife’s family, I think there are a couple different sets of mamas and papas, but there’s also a pawpaw and a peepaw and a meemaw and a mamaw.

Oh, my.

A whole variety.

And there’s a grandma and grandpa, and there’s a mammy, there’s a grammy and a pop.

And, you know, it’s the modern family.

And where is that?

Missouri and Iowa.

Oh, really?

But I think you’ll find the, is it ma-ma that you’re saying?

Ma-ma.

Ma-ma.

Ma-ma.

Ma-ma for grandma.

It does exist in other parts of the country.

Appalachia, common there.

It’s not the kind of thing you’re likely to hear in the Northeast, but it’s not precisely regional, if that makes sense.

It’s not very fixed in one area.

It’s generally sprinkled throughout the country.

Really?

Yeah.

Yeah, my grandparents were from, my mother’s parents were from Virginia, and my father’s parents were from North Carolina.

And in Virginia, it was grandmother and grandfather.

They were a little bit more formal.

But then in North Carolina, I mean, you have to understand, my father’s mother was this tiny, wiry woman who gave birth to him in a log cabin at the foot of Sugarloaf Mountain in North Carolina.

And several other kids, no midwife or anything like that.

And my memory of the word mamaw is that I went over there when I was very young and I watched her eating a grapefruit, you know, half a grapefruit.

She got down to the bottom of the fruit and then she squeezed all the grapefruit juice out onto a little plate.

And then in front of everybody, she just picked up the plate and slurped all the grapefruit juice off.

And then she just looked around and said, just call me mamaw.

Oh, wow.

What?

And I had never heard anybody else called Mamaw, so I always thought Mamaw had to do with slurping grapefruit juice.

So then I started doing it, you know?

I’d be eating grapefruit with my little friends and slurp it up and say, just call me Mamaw.

Oh, my.

So all of which is to say, yes, it’s not just a Texas thing.

Yeah, it’s pretty widespread.

The names for grandmas and grandpas in this country are many.

There’s dozens, if not, I don’t know, maybe even hundreds.

I don’t know, tons of these.

And a lot of people, in my reading, a lot of people do give the excuse that you said or the reason.

That’s not quite an excuse.

They give the same reason that you said, which is they’ve chose something else because in their mind, grandma or grandpa is their grandma or grandpa.

And that just seems too old to them.

Right.

So it’s a, it’s a, it’s kind of like breaks the chain of generations.

They don’t want to feel like their own grandparents.

Right.

Some other special name for the role, though, is always chosen.

The grandchildren almost never call them by their given name.

There is some other special name chosen for that position of honor as the grandchildren.

That’s interesting.

Kelly, what do you do in your family?

I call them Grandma and Grandpa.

On both sides?

Or just the one side?

Well, it’s Yaya and Papu on the Greek side.

Oh, Yaya and Papu.

That’s nice.

Well, Kelly, I think we’re going to have to get a bigger server for our email because I’m betting that we’re going to hear from a lot of people.

Oh, you’re putting the call out, are you?

Well.

What do you call your grandparents?

Yeah, I think whether we do it or not, we’re going to hear.

What do you call your grandparents and why?

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

Thank you so much for calling, Kelly.

Thanks, Kelly.

Thank you.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Grant, I’m looking at this list of idioms that you were talking about, and it’s got some great Argentinian ones that I’ve always liked, one of which translates as, I don’t have hair on my tongue.

I don’t have hair on my tongue.

Right.

What could that possibly mean?

It means you’re a straight talker, that you’re not a liar.

No tengo pelos en la lengua.

Aha.

Very good.

I love that.

And here’s another one that I wasn’t familiar with.

Que baranda.

It means what a handrail.

What?

Is it somebody who’s dirty?

Well, sort of.

It means what an awful smell.

Que baranda.

You know, think of how skeevy a handrail really is.

Yeah, yeah.

When it’s still a little greasy and warm from the last hand that passed.

And you’re like, right?

A cold handrail is better than a warm handrail.

That’s right.

Now that should be an idiom.

You know, that’s really good.

Call us with yours, 877-929-9673, or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Frank Erdogan calling from San Diego.

Hi, Frank. Welcome.

Hi, Frank.

Hello.

Hi, what’s going on?

Well, I’m an old graduate of the U.S. Military Academy, and it’s a place that being both a college and the military is pretty deeply layered with its own jargon.

Oh, yeah.

But one came up the other day in a conversation between me and a classmate that even though I’ve heard it many times over the years, for the first time it struck me as just profoundly weird.

Now, he and I, we graduated at a time and managed to serve our entire military careers during peacetime, so we’ve never been in combat.

But his son, who is graduating this summer, has managed to snag a commission in the infantry.

And when we were sitting down and talking about that and the war in Afghanistan, he turned to me and said, yes, in no short time, my son will have seen the elephant.

And that’s the phrase.

And it’s one that I’ve heard many times over the years.

I’ve always understood it, you know, when spoken between soldiers to mean somebody who has been in combat, who has actually been had bullets fired at him in anger.

But seeing the elephant, it frankly makes no sense to me whatsoever.

Enemy elephants, right. That’s weird. It is weird.

I love it. It’s an old term. It’s got a great history in the military.

But the military use is an offshoot of, well, it goes back to 1835 or so, if you can believe that.

Perhaps even older. That’s the best that I’ve been able to do. There’s an anecdote in some of the old reference works that I think does a pretty good job of perhaps explaining the origin of this.

And originally, and even occasionally still, it doesn’t just mean that you’ve seen something remarkable, that you’ve experienced something that most people haven’t. It’s that you did it, and you found the experience wanting. That’s outside of the military, usually. If you’ve seen the elephant, you’re like, oh, yeah, I’ve seen the elephant. I’ve been there, there it was, big whoop.

And in the military, it tends to be, I’ve seen combat.

And even during the gold rush period in California, to see the elephant meant that you just went to California or that you worked a gold mine.

And as a matter of fact, there were a number of gold mines in California that were named the elephant in kind of a reference to this slang expression.

It’s pretty interesting stuff.

But this anecdote in Bartlett’s Book of Americanisms, the short version of it is that he says it might have come from an old ballad of a farmer who, while driving his mare along the highway, he met with a showman’s elephant, let’s say a traveling circus or a traveling fair.

And the elephant knocked the farmer over and spilt his milk and destroyed his eggs.

And so the farmer, you know, basically having all of his produce destroyed and nothing to show for it, consoled himself with the fact, well, at least he’d seen the elephant.

Wow. So the earliest use of it was not military.

Right. Yeah. As far as we can tell, it’s an old expression.

Like I say, 1835 for certain. I would not be surprised if it’s much older than that.

Like the gigantic mammals of the earth, they called them charismatic megafauna.

What?

Like elephants have long been so exceedingly rare that they were often creatures of mystery and discussion and often uses models for different linguistic expressions in a lot of different languages and a lot of cultures around the world.

Once the elephant became known outside of the places where the elephant is native, the elephant immediately worked itself into the language of the world.

See, now, I was guessing that it would go all the way back to maybe the Punic War, the St. Hannibal’s elephant.

That was what jumped into my mind when you said that.

Because I haven’t heard it in civilian life, seen the elephant.

Oh, you haven’t?

No.

I’ve heard things like, you know, how are you going to keep them down on the farm after they’ve seen Paris?

It’s certainly not that common outside of the military anymore.

But you can go back as recently as the 30s or 40s in the United States and find it in books and magazine articles.

It’s definitely a bit of color that fiction writers like to use.

As far as day-to-day speech, I can’t say that I’ve ever seen it outside of the reference works.

Well, if the elephant broke his eggs, I can understand why he saw something and wasn’t all that happy about it.

Thank you so much.

I really appreciate you looking that one up for me.

Thanks, Frank.

Thanks a lot, Frank.

Our pleasure.

Y’all take care.

Bye-bye.

All right, bye-bye.

Bye.

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

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Karen from San Diego.

Hi, Karen.

Hi, Karen.

How you doing?

Hi, good.

Thank you.

What would you like to talk with us about?

Well, I’m a graduate student at the University of San Diego, and I’m on a group project for one of my classes, and we were working on the project, and there was a part of the project that was not fully developed, and one of my classmates said that she would go ahead and flush that out.

And I told her, oh, that’s interesting. I always thought it was flush it out, you know, like put meat on the bones.

And she thought it was flush.

And there were four of us in the group, and two thought it was flush it out, and two thought it was flush it out.

And then I was at dinner a couple nights later with some friends of mine, and it’s a couple. They’re a married couple.

And they told me that they had had the same conversation a few weeks earlier, and he thought it was flush, and she thought it was flush.

And so we wanted to call the experts to find out which is it, flush it out or flush it out.

So some people think it’s flush, F-L-U-S-H, flush it out, and other people think it’s flesh, F-L-E-S-H.

Right.

Flesh it out.

Right.

And you’re in the flesh camp?

I’m in the flesh camp.

I think it’s put meat on the bones, like build it up.

And the other camp is like toilet flushing.

Like toilet flushing.

I think it’s the idea of kind of like moving the ideas, you know.

I see.

Oh, moving them along.

Flushing it along the channel.

Right, right.

Interesting.

Well, Karen, I have to tell you, you’re on the winning team.

Excellent.

Yeah, it’s definitely flesh it out, unquestionably.

And I realize, we realize that there are a ton of people who think it’s flesh it out, and they’ve done all this post hoc reasoning why flesh seems to make sense or could make sense.

But it is not flesh it out.

You do not flesh out an idea.

You flesh it. You add meat, you add sinews and meat to it.

Right, right.

You add the muscles and the organs and the things that are going to make it work and move.

Perfect.

I’m going to let them know because it’s definitely been a point of contention here.

So we’ll be glad to know the right answer.

And you know what? It’s one of those things, this is the response you’re going to get.

They’ll refuse to change.

So just be prepared for that because they will insist to no end that, you know, they’ll find some other.

Well, it’s interesting that they, I mean, they sound so much alike that I wasn’t sure if you were saying flesh or flush, actually.

Yeah, that’s part of it.

Yeah, that’s how it happens because that vowel sound and the variety of ways that Americans speak can be indistinct and hard to perceive.

Very good. Well, thank you so much.

Oh, sure. No problem. Thanks for calling, Karen.

Bye-bye.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

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

Grant, I have another idiom for you from Spanish that refers to somebody who’s afraid of something.

You know, we might say that they’re a chicken.

In Spanish, you say, arrugaste como frenada de gusano.

You wrinkle like a stopping worm.

Oh, because you kind of shrink back maybe?

Well, you know, a worm is going along really fast and then, well, they don’t go along really fast. That doesn’t make sense, but it’s almost like a cartoon image.

You wrinkled like a stopping worm.

Sort of like a little accordion.

I don’t know.

It’s, you know, a little poem in a tiny phrase.

Love those idioms.

Call us with yours, 877-929-9673, or email us, words@waywordradio.org.

Things have come to a pretty pass.

Our romance is growing flat.

That’s our show for this week.

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

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

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Stefanie Levine is our senior producer.

Our technical director and editor is Tim Felten.

Tim also chooses our music.

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

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

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

Thanks for listening. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. So long.

Ciao.

Neither, neither, neither. Let’s call the whole thing off.

You like potato and I like potato.

You like tomato and I like tomato.

Potato, potato, tomato, tomato.

Let’s call the whole thing off.

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

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