Sexy Prunes (episode #1385)

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.

We talk a lot on this show about etiquette.

And recently on our Facebook page, we asked this question.

Do you answer phone calls and read text messages during business meetings?

Boy, did that stir some debate.

A lot of strong feelings on both sides, right?

And we linked to an article that referenced a study that shows that 51% of 20-somethings believe it is appropriate to read text during formal business meetings, whereas only 16% of workers over 40 believe the same thing.

And some of the people were saying this on our Facebook page, that maybe it was an age difference.

It does seem to be a little bit age-graded, yeah.

Although I’m outside that.

I’m 43, and for me, I totally do that all the time.

Text messages, email, anything that comes in on the phone, it depends on the meeting.

It depends on what’s happening.

There’s a lot of a meeting that is actually technically downtime, right?

I do think that it depends on the context.

If I’m in a meeting, especially if you’ve invited people in that aren’t your regular core team or something with a larger group at your company or clients or something like that that, I don’t know, in that case, I think of texting as sort of like blowing your nose.

Oh, really?

Yeah, it might make me feel better, but I would most likely get up and leave to deal with it.

So context-specific for you, right?

Yeah.

Answering a phone is beyond the pale for me.

I would reject all calls.

But texting and something that’s silent, I would totally do.

That’s my question.

Depending on the meeting.

Depending on the meeting.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And what’s the difference?

Yeah.

You nailed it.

The regular weekly meeting, I’m probably totally fine with that.

And as a matter of fact, most of the weekly meetings that I go to and the variety of things that I do here, half the room has their phone out next to their notepad because it’s part of doing business.

It’s part of recording things or checking an email or recalling a particular document that you have access to on your phone.

And you can actually contribute to the meeting.

There’s that risk of getting distracted, though, don’t you think?

Always.

The larger context that I see here on these responses is that there seems to be an understanding, an unstated understanding by a lot of the people who prefer to use their phones during meetings, that many meetings are unnecessary.

And that’s something else worth exploring, right?

Yeah.

There was the guy who said, what did he say?

Meetings are vortexes of uselessness and despair.

They are a thinly guised temporal vampire bent on ruining all productivity.

That was Andy McHugh on our page.

It’s so true in many cases.

And there are companies in the Bay Area where they think about processes as part of doing business where they eliminate meetings.

Or they do only stand-up meetings, which is you get one thing to say, one thing to ask, and then you’re done.

There’s that.

And then there are people like Julianne Fowler, who’s a 27-year-old graphic designer on our page.

She said, I think it’s about the rudest thing you can do besides fall asleep in a meeting.

Wow.

I mean, there’s quite a range of feeling about this.

I’d be interested to hear our listeners’ feelings about it.

And also that study that I referenced earlier was really interesting.

It showed that men nearly two to one think that texting during a meeting is fine compared to women.

Oh, interesting.

Isn’t that interesting?

I didn’t know it was gendered.

That’s very strange.

Fascinating stuff we’d love to hear your thoughts about this call us at 877-929-9673.

Or step out of that meeting and send us an email words@waywordradio.org and we’re all over Facebook and all over Twitter.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Ann.

Hi Ann, how are you?

Hello Ann, im I’m well, thank you so much. And where are you being well?

Well, right now I’m in a park in Nashville, Tennessee, but I really live in Saugatuck, Michigan.

There is a word that’s been in my family for at least two generations, and I found out when I was walking and talking with a friend that it’s actually not a real word, which just devastated everybody in my family.

Wait, how do you use a word that’s not a real word?

Well, okay, I’ll tell you the word.

It’s ory-eyed.

Ory-eyed.

And it means really angry, like far angrier than normal.

And, you know, I’m one of six girls, and it was a word that was used quite a bit in my house.

From Michigan?

Actually, we’re from Chicago, but I’ve lived in Michigan a long time.

Okay.

Yeah, and it came from my grandmother, my dad’s mom, who was very proper, you know, daughter of the Mayflower.

She would never swear, but she would get orey-eyed occasionally.

Interesting.

And what’s the evidence that it’s not a word?

Well, okay, so I was walking with a new friend at the time who’s very erudite, and I said, I used the word, and she didn’t know it.

And I thought, well, this is really neat because I actually know something she doesn’t.

And then she said, that’s not a word.

And I said, yes, of course it is.

And she said, no, it’s not.

So I went home, and it wasn’t in the dictionary.

So then I talked to all my sisters, and no one could believe it wasn’t real.

And actually, one of my sisters found it in a dictionary of slang.

Huh.

So then you all were ory-eyed about this friend of yours.

Yes.

I said it’s real.

Well, I don’t know.

Is slang real?

I don’t know.

Oh, yes.

Of course it is.

Absolutely.

Yes, indeedy.

And there’s three things happening here that we just want.

I want to put these to rest really quickly.

Your friend doesn’t know everything about the English language.

Okay, I’m going to tell her that.

One person’s opinion is not enough evidence to say that a word isn’t a word, which I know that sounds contradictory, but that’s basically what she’s saying.

The second thing is, if you’ve been using this word in your family for three generations, it is, by God, that’s a word.

It’s totally a word.

You can say it, you can spell it, it has meaning.

But what it meant in the slang dictionary was like a sailor’s term for drunk.

Okay, here we go.

And you weren’t even using it the way it was originally used.

English, that wacky beast, has so many meanings.

Each word has so many meanings.

It’s crazy.

Here’s what happened to this word, and it has undergone some transformations.

We first see it show up, oh, I don’t know, say 1700s or so in Scots.

Scottish English, okay?

And at that time, it doesn’t mean angry, and it doesn’t mean drunk.

It means dismal or sad or melancholy.

Imagine somebody with a droopy face and kind of like a sagging demeanor.

That’s being ory.

O-O-R-I-E, I think is the preferred spelling.

So it meant sad.

Sad, yeah.

And then we see a transformation where it becomes a little more about looking weak or sick or drooping.

And then we see it sometimes meaning to have a chill or to just plain out to be cold.

The Ori cattle in the pasture, right?

Oh, wow.

But then you start to think, well, some people, you could describe somebody as looking Ori who is none of those things.

They’re not melancholy.

They’re not sad. They’re not cold.

But they have that look.

And what would give them that look?

Well, being drunk or being beside themselves with anger, right, would give them that same kind of like something happening with the eyes and the posture and the demeanor where they are not themselves.

They’re clearly something other than normal.

And so we see the slow transformation of this word over time as it starts to mean these variety of things.

So in other words, lots and lots and lots of people have used it over history.

Oh, that makes me feel so good.

I mean, tons of use.

And it shows up.

When you talk about consulting the dictionary, there’s no such thing as the dictionary.

There are many dictionaries.

It shows up in the Century Dictionary.

It shows up in the Oxford English Dictionary.

It shows up in the Dictionary of American Regional English.

It shows up in the Scottish National Dictionary.

It shows up in the Dictionary of the Scots Tongue.

It shows up again and again and again.

Well, it’s a Scottish.

It’s a Scottish word in origin.

Originally Scots, borrowed firmly into English dialects.

Oh, so interesting.

This is like a victory for me.

This is great.

Well, I’m glad to equip you with all the munitions you need to go out and assail your friends.

Yes.

Well, I never stopped using it, and so now I can use it with great confidence.

Indeed.

It sounds like you’re not lacking in that front, I’ve got to tell you.

Anne, you sound like a woman who knows what she wants from life.

Yes, this is true.

This is very true.

All right.

Well, Anne, we appreciate your calling.

Yeah, and if you’ve got anything else from your family of six sisters or your grandma, give us a call sometime, all right?

Okay, thank you so much.

This has been a pleasure.

Take care now.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

We’d love to hear your conversations about language.

Give us a call, 877-929-9673, or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Rob from Moorhead, Minnesota.

Hi, Rob.

How are you doing?

Pretty good.

How are you?

All right.

Welcome to the show.

How can we help?

Well, I am a TV meteorologist.

And when I was in college, I had an instructor who insisted that we only use the singular sky as opposed to skies.

His rationale was there is only one sky.

So you would never say we’ll see sunny skies today.

We will see a sunny sky.

So I’m just curious, at stations I’ve worked at, we’ve had a big debate about what we should use to say sky or skies.

How interesting. And where do you come down?

You know, I have always, it was kind of drilled into my brain in college, so I always have deferred to sky.

Is that right? So you’ve never flown the friendly skies of United or, you know?

Right. And I know that was big in their ad campaign as well, but I’ve always stuck with sky.

And it sounds funny because most people will say, you know, skies will be sunny tomorrow.

It’s pretty common.

You hear it on the Weather Channel, a lot of other weather reports.

But I’ve always gone with the singular.

I think you keyed in on it when you said it feels right to say skies sometimes.

Wouldn’t you agree, Grant?

Yeah, there are a lot of reasons to use skies here.

In places like San Diego County, where we are right now recording our show, we do have skies.

We have different weather because the skies over the mountains might be dropping snow.

And the skies over the beaches might be sunny.

Oh, my gosh.

And the skies in between might have fog.

And that’s at the same time.

Yep.

So we do have different skies here.

And skies is plural.

And the other thing is, there’s an etymology story here that was worth talking about, right?

Martha, do you remember this one?

A very interesting etymology story because sky originally meant cloud.

Yeah.

In the Middle Ages, sky could mean either clouds or the firmament, that vast space.

Or the literal heavens, the place that you ascend to when you die, or the place that holds God or the gods.

Yeah, it comes from an old Norse word spelled the same way.

That means cloud.

So it’s got an interesting history behind it.

So there’s a hanging on here from the 1300s onward of the use of skies to refer to everything above the ground, regardless of what it is or where it is or how many of them or how big or that.

But that is a good point.

My viewing area is about the size of Ohio here.

We cover thousands of square miles.

So it is true that the sky conditions would be different across the viewing area.

There we go.

So this conforms to what we see in the pragmatics of the use of the word skies related to this sort of thing.

The pragmatics, that’s all the stuff that surrounds a usage that isn’t about meaning necessarily, but it adds to the context of it.

So, for example, in skies, we use skies in English if we’re talking about the sky over multiple places at the same time.

We when we’re talking about a sky at different times.

So it is skies because the morning sky in the evening sky could be different skies.

And when we’re thinking about more than the sky that we can see right now in front of us, I’m thinking about the skies over America are beautiful.

But the thing is, they’re different everywhere.

I’ve got snow here and rain there and a hurricane coming up over there.

It’s it’s it’s different.

So you could easily say North Dakota skies, but maybe you would only say Fargo sky.

Because Fargo is a much smaller area with kind of one consistent thing happening, right?

I see.

Well, it may be tough now to break the habit of going to sink the sky.

I’ve got to say, if you avoid sink the skies, I think you’re totally fine.

But I would also argue this is another case of overreach by a professor.

Rob, this is fascinating.

We’re so glad you called.

All right.

Thanks for the help.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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

And if you just can’t wait, find us on Facebook.

Hop on the Language Bus 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 we’re joined on the line by our quiz guide, John Chaneski.

Hi, Grant.

Hi, Martha.

Hi, Brian.

What’s up?

What’s happening in the quiz world there?

We’re going to do sort of a combination, I call combining quiz today.

I’m going to give you two clues together, and you’ll give me a single phrase or an idiom answer.

Now, these will take the form blank with the blank.

For example, if I said, a person who behaves toward another in a way that shows romantic interest, and a thought you have about how to do something, that would clue what with the what?

Flirt with the thought?

No, I don’t know. Flirt with the idea.

Flirt with the idea.

Yes, flirt with the idea. Perfect.

Oh, okay.

Great. I like this.

So there’s two ways for me to not get the answer. Nice.

Exactly.

As we say in the puzzle world, there’s also two ways in.

Oh, sure.

I see.

Here are some more. Here we go.

Okay.

Waltzing and tangoing and Betelgeuse and Vega.

Dancing with the stars.

Yes, dancing with the stars.

Okay.

No longer present and Zephyr and Sirocco.

Gone with the Wind.

Yes, Gone with the Wind.

Siraco.

One each now.

It’s good.

He’s strong.

Falls unconscious and pike and mackerel.

Sleeps with the fishes.

Sleeps with the fishes.

Oh, very good.

Okay.

Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes.

It’s a message.

Blank with the blank.

Leave a place and continuous movement of liquid.

Go with the flow.

Go with the flow.

There we go.

Go with the flow.

Yes, very nice.

Obtain and television broadcast.

Get the picture.

No.

Remember with the…

Oh, I see.

This is hard.

Obtain…

Something with…

Obtain and television broadcast.

On with the show.

No, you had the first one right.

Get with the show.

Get with the program.

Get with the program.

Get with the program.

All right.

Nicely done.

Celebrity questions and answers and supernatural bloodsucker.

Stars with the chupacabra.

No.

Oh, interview with the vampire.

There we go.

Interview with the vampire.

Very nice.

I actually like this one.

It sounds very sweet.

A Lord’s Wife and Source of Light.

Lady with the sun?

Lady with the star?

Lady with the light bulb?

Lady with the…

With the blue dress on.

Lady with the lamp.

Yes, Lady with the lamp.

Gosh.

Very nice.

Okay.

Male person and blueprints.

Man with the plan.

Nice.

Man with the plan, yes.

Here’s the last one.

Turn over and over and hit with the fists.

Roll with the punches.

Roll with the punches, yes.

Very good.

Nice work, you guys.

John, you’re the host with the most.

Oh, that’s what I wanted to hear.

Thank you so much.

Which means you have parasites, and we’ll get those off after the show.

Thanks, John.

All right, calling exterminator.

Bye-bye.

Thanks, guys. Bye.

You know, quizzes are just some of the things that we do here.

We also answer questions about language.

Give us a call, 877-929-9673.

Email us, words@waywordradio.org.

And find us on Facebook and Twitter.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha and Grant.

This is Steve Brankham calling from Milwaukee.

Hello, Steve.

Welcome.

What’s up?

Thank you.

I’ve been listening to your show for years, and if nothing else, I’ve learned that English is subject to a lot of variations in regional dialects and that no one particular form is the correct one.

Well, something occurred to me while I was reading a book the other day, which was an Isabel Allende book, which of course she writes in Spanish, but it was translated. And one word got me thinking about this, and I started to wonder if there’s no correct way to write or speak English. How does a translator know what to translate it to? Are there guidelines? Is there kind of a translator’s convention for how they do that? Is it up to the publisher, the editor, whatever? Interesting.

And what was the passage? The word was sack. And it struck me, why didn’t she use bag? Why sack? Sack. S-A-C-K. Sack.

So then that one simple question I had ballooned into this larger question that really I have no idea. This is a really good question. This is a question that translators struggle with. There is a translator by the name of B.J. Epstein, and she took a look at the translations of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn into Swedish. And I think she compared something like 15 different translations.

Now, she lived for a time in Sweden. She still translates between Swedish and English. And what she figured out was that these translations, many of them just basically did standard Swedish as the form on the other end, moving from English into Swedish. Oh, interesting. And did not try to translate any of the dialects of the speakers, not Jim, not Huck, not any of the Missouri kind of drawl. None of that showed up in Swedish. Wow.

And so those translators made a choice just to go from mainstream Swedish. And when you’re translating into English, say from a Allende novel, it’s up to the translator to decide whether or not they want to choose just kind of a mainstream kind of generic English or if they want to try to recreate period jargon or age-specific slang or regional kind of inflections, that sort of thing. And usually what you’ll find, though, the default for a lot of translations is academies.

Because the people who are translating tend to be fully schooled in the literature of the two communities, the two cultures that they’re moving from. And that’s the level that they’re operating at. They’re operating at kind of a university level of language almost.

So Huck Finn was translated into a more formal language? Well, standard. I didn’t mean to say formal. I meant to say standard, which is just kind of more everyday. So they didn’t, for example, try to do what would a rural kind of unschooled, barefooted boy sound like in Sweden. They didn’t try to do Huck that way.

Gee, that sounds like sort of a shame, doesn’t it? It does. But the other end of the problem is this. How do you communicate that? So, Steve, the problem would be, let’s just stick with Huck Finn as a really good example. The problem would be I’ve got a rural, uneducated young man who kind of doesn’t have parents and kind of lives in a, sleeps in a barrel, right? And what is the equivalent accent that I would find in Swedish for that kid? Is there such a language?

Now, you might say, well, I’m just going to make him sound uncultured and make some typical grammatical errors. That’s one way to do it. You might also say, well, I’m going to make him sound like these certain kind of people in the south of Sweden who are seen as uncultured or rustic. And he’ll just adopt their language because the signal that is sent out to all my Swedish readers is, you know, we’re going to build upon your stereotypes. Take advantage of what you think about this kind of speech so that you will understand who Huck is and what he’s about just by the choice that we made in the dialect.

It’s complicated. And I know we have many translators listening to the show who will probably chime in and offer their opinions on this. Steve, if you want to know more about this, I do recommend that you read the blog by BJ Epstein, the translator that I mentioned. She keeps a blog called bravenewwords.blogspot.co.uk. You can just Google her name, BJ Epstein, and you’ll find it. It’ll probably be your first result. She keeps a very active blog. She talks about these day-to-day issues. She talks about her work. It’s very easy to read even if you’re not a translator.

Is she a native English speaker? Yes, she is. She grew up in the Midwest, I believe, Chicago. And she talks at length about this stuff, and it’s an enjoyable read. She’s a good writer, which probably makes her a good translator as well. So I would recommend that as a little bit of homework for you, okay?

I’ll do that. It’s something to do when I’m not listening to or A Way with Words. All right.

Thank you so much for your call, Steve.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Thank you.

Much appreciated.

We’d love to hear your experiences with reading books in translation.

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

Grant, remember when we were talking about things that photographers say to get people to smile?

Oh, yeah.

You know, like say cheese or say whiskey, that kind of thing.

We heard from Aaron in Santa Rosa, California, who said that photographers will tell people to look sexy by saying the word prunes.

Prunes.

You look sexy when you say that.

Oh, yeah, so I get a little trout pouch.

Yeah, a little hooker, yeah.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Louis in Indianapolis, Indiana.

Hi, Louis. Welcome to the show.

How are you doing? What can we help with?

Hey, thank you, thank you.

Okay, I’m a retired freight train conductor,

And we have some slang that we use on railroads,

And we got one particularly.

They don’t use them anymore, but we had what used to be called a caboose,

And it was always referred to as a crummy.

And I used to ask the guys, and I used to look at different railroad books and things,

And I could never find a definition or an origin of why the caboose was called a crummy.

And that’s my question.

Why is a caboose called a crummy in railroading?

Did you know that, Michael?

Yeah, and what would have been the origin of the word?

I knew the term existed, but I’m not sure that we have an origin for crummy.

No, we know that it’s at least 100 years old is a bit of railroad slang.

Most people outside of railroading don’t know crummy can mean caboose.

Or it used to refer to the brake van, or is that the same thing as the caboose?

Yeah, they used to call it van, way car, or hack, things like that.

So the caboose is where the employees spend their time, right?

Do you have bunks there and maybe a place to sit and eat?

Oh, yeah.

To store your stuff, like lockers?

Yeah, when I came on board,

We would be in there sometimes

Nine to ten hours on a

Run before we got to a crew change.

And so

You had all the facilities.

You had basically

Living facilities that you could eat, sleep,

Or whatever on it.

And so

Myself, I thought

One time it was called crummy

Because a lot of times

The crew that we would relieve

On it would leave the thing in such a mess

That I started saying, boy, this thing

Sure is crummy. You know what, Lewis?

That is the strongest

Theory that I’ve read about this.

That is exactly why.

Because they leave food everywhere.

Fleas or lice

And dirty clothes.

Chicken bones on the floor.

Yeah, exactly. Chicken bones.

Tobacco.

Has there ever been a better sign of a pig than a chicken bone?

I’ve got to tell you.

Yeah.

Now, you didn’t do that, did you, Lewis, for the next one?

Oh, no, no.

I always tried to leave it clean because I hated getting on one that was dirty.

And so I’d always try to leave it clean.

And I’ll just throw one more at you.

The slang for the maintenance of weight guys back then used to be,

Those are the fellows that maintain the tracks and the ties and stuff.

They were called gandy dancers.

Gandy dancers.

I’ve definitely heard that one.

Did you ever do that work?

Nope, nope, nope. That’s hard work. Back then it was. It’s easy. Now they’ve got machines and stuff.

Right. These are the fellows that kind of, if the rails kind of get out of alignment or need a few more wax.

Yeah, they have a crew and a work train used to come through, and they would repair the ties, put new ties down, new rails down, things like that.

There’s a brilliant documentary. It’s about a half hour long. You can find it at folkstreams.net.

About gandy dancers, and they’ve got some of the old-timers singing the songs while they’re working.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, they used to do that.

It’s really interesting.

Yeah, because they’ve all got to work together, so they have to find that rhythm.

So they’re all pushing on the rail with these really long, heavy rods at the same time, just kind of easing back and forth, pushing that rail over.

Right, hence the dancing, right?

Yeah, exactly, because they’re literally dancing as they’re all together in unison, easing back and forth, pushing those rails into place.

Yeah.

Well, I do. I thank you all for the information.

And like the one for Crummy, I’ve read in every book, it said no one could find out the origin or where it came from.

Well, we’re not much better than that, but I like your theory, and a few other people who study slang think that your theories hold some water as well, all right?

All right. Well, thank you so much for your help.

Thanks for listening, Lewis, and thanks for calling. We really appreciate it.

Thanks for that first-hand report.

Bye-bye.

All right.

Bye-bye, Lewis.

The gandy part of gandy dancer is a little more of a mystery supposedly comes from the gandy manufacturing company of Chicago. There are some tools that say gandy manufacturing company of Chicago, but it’s possible that company came after the term, the term existed, and they just took the name. So we don’t really know for sure gandy dancers, but that sounds like an interesting life writing, right? In the crummy, right? Getting out once in a while, I’d like to be the first group.

Yeah, the first co.

Yeah, but we love it when people call us about their workplace slang, so we invite you to do that, 877-929-9673, or send it an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Grant, you and I both get a lot of requests to do things, whether it’s blurbing a book or appearing someplace.

And it’s hard to turn people down, right?

Well, here’s a great example of how to do it.

This is a letter that E.B. White wrote in 1956 in response to somebody who was asking him to be on a committee.

He says, Dear Mr. Adams, thank you for your letter inviting me to join the Committee of the Arts and Sciences for Eisenhower.

I must decline for secret reasons.

Sincerely, E.B. White.

I am so stealing that, right?

It just sounds so important.

I must decline, comma, for secret.

And it leaves you as desirable, even more desirable the next time.

So they’re going to elevate the options, right?

Right, right.

Next time we want you to lead the committee.

Exactly.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Tony Price.

I’m calling from Indianapolis.

Hi, Tony.

How are you doing?

I’m doing fine.

I’ve got a word my grandmother used to use, and it was DAPIS, I think D-O-P-I-S.

And it meant someone who was kind of swapping around in their food, especially as a child.

And she would say, yeah, don’t be a DAPIS.

Don’t be a DAPIS.

She didn’t happen to come from Pennsylvania, did she?

We have family in Pennsylvania.

But she also, well, the area of Indiana I’m from is very high in German Catholic area.

Yes.

And it’s a word that means often clumsy or awkward.

And you usually see it D-O-P-P-I-C-H, doppich.

Sometimes doppelich as well, D-O-P-P-L-I-C-H.

Yeah, there are lots of different spellings.

And it comes from Pennsylvania Dutch.

It goes back to a German word that means the same thing, clumsy or awkward.

Sounds the same.

That’s funny because I’ve never heard anyone else use the word, and that’s why I called.

I tried to use it once with my daughter, and it made her cry, so I took it out of my vocabulary.

She was about five at the time, so I thought, well, no need to use that one.

Why did she cry?

Did she think you were saying bad words to her?

Well, you know, maybe it was just the tone, but she just started crying and said, I don’t want to be a dapus.

And I said, honey, you’re not.

Oh, gosh.

That was the last time I used that word.

Poor thing.

But children are sensitive, right?

She just knew from context that it was something she didn’t want to be.

Yes.

Yeah, I definitely think the context, probably the context and the tone, she knew it wasn’t complimentary.

Yeah.

Oh, no, it doesn’t have anything to do with the word dope.

It goes back to German.

So that’s probably where you picked it up.

Yeah, that’s funny.

Well, I always want to know, and I enjoy your show, and I appreciate taking my call.

Thank you.

Thanks, Tony.

Thanks very much.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Pennsylvania Dutch is a rich mind of language.

Isn’t it?

There’s a cool word that they have that some people still use in the English-speaking part of the country that has Pennsylvania Dutch settlers.

Grex, to complain, G-R-E-X.

Do you know this one?

Grex?

No, that’s great.

That’s a Latin word for flock, I think.

Yeah, so I’m Googling here, and I came across a book that you should definitely read, by the way.

All right.

Thrill of the Chaste, The Allure of Amish Romance Novels by Valerie Weaver Zerker.

So apparently she’s written a book about a category of books that I did not know existed.

There’s a category of Amish romance novels.

I’m imagining big shirtless men with huge beards holding the woman in a wagon or something on the cover, right?

Or sitting next to her.

Right.

Thrill of the Chaste.

I love that.

And the big moment in every book is probably like, the candle blew out and something happened in the dark.

Clearly further research is needed.

I will get you a copy for Christmas.

I’ll see if I can have the author inscribe it.

Oh my gosh, that’s great.

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

Hop on the language bus 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 Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

And it’s that time of year when we give our annual book recommendations.

Grant, what you got?

I’ve got one book to recommend this year.

I feel a little like I should come with an army of books to recommend.

Certainly there’s a lot going on in our house book-wise.

But this one book I wanted to share with you because my son really loves it.

And so I’m kind of passing along his recommendation.

The book is called Valley Cats.

It’s by Gretchen Preston with illustrations by Karen Newman.

And so the book is about Booney and River, who are two cats who kind of live in a kind of almost country environment where there are humans who have lives and cats who have lives.

And we hear the voices of the cats and the voices of the humans.

And it’s about their relationships and the adventures they get up to.

And inside covers of the books are maps.

This is one of the things he particularly loves about the book.

My son really likes the fact that when they go to a place near the river, he can see the river or the treehouse, he can see the treehouse.

And then kind of place them in their environment.

It’s a long book. It’s a thick book. It’s a chapter book.

Big illustrations on some page.

But it’s something that you need a steady reader to do or a parent needs to read it to the child.

Like your child can’t really be a newbie.

So we read this at bedtime a couple chapters at a go.

And I think the reason my son loves this book, Valley Cat, is that he’s really kind of getting into the lives of these kittens or these cats.

So Boonie and River, they’re kind of like us but a little different.

Some of their concerns are cat concerns and not really human concerns.

And he’s kind of seeing through the cat’s eyes how our cats might perceive us and think of us.

So there’s a scene where a cat befriends a blind man who moves into the neighborhood.

And we understand that the cat decides that he’s going to adopt this person and climbs up on his lap and becomes his buddy.

And my son was just kind of taken with this idea that the cats have will, an initiative.

And he never really quite thought about that, of these beings as being something other than cute little, you know, things there for his enjoyment, that they have their own internal lives.

That’s very cool.

That’s what fiction does, right, is get us outside of ourselves.

So that book is Valley Cats by Gretchen Preston with illustrations by Karen Newman.

And I should say we haven’t read them yet, but there are two more books in the series, More Valley Cats.

And the next one, Valley Cats, The Adventures of Booney and River, was just released.

Very cool.

Well, Grant, I have a book that I’m really excited about, and I know you’re going to love it.

Now, picture this.

You and I are both admirers of Brian Garner, author of Modern American Usage, right?

And we’re also fans of David Foster Wallace.

Yes, yes we are.

Who died, unfortunately, in 2008.

Wouldn’t it be cool if you could get the two of them together for a casual conversation about language and the craft of writing and that kind of thing?

Wouldn’t it be cool?

Yes, and you have something for me?

I have something for you because this happened.

It’s so cool.

They were friends, the two of them.

And in 2006, they videotaped a casual conversation together at a hotel in Los Angeles.

So it turns out that there’s this marvelous conversation between the two of them that he has transcribed and published as a book called Quack This Way.

David Foster Wallace and Brian A. Garner talk about language and writing.

And Grant, it’s short. You can read it in one evening, but it is a gem.

It’s just this gorgeous book of these two guys sitting around talking shop, and we get to eavesdrop on it.

Sounds fantastic. Two very intelligent men coming from different ends of the writing spectrum,

But meeting in the middle to see where they overlap and to see where they differ.

This isn’t their carefully crafted prose. This is them chewing on ideas and kicking them back and forth.

And David Foster Wallace comes across as so passionate and precise and also kind of self-effacing.

There are a lot of times in the transcript where he says, I know you’re going to cut this, but blah, blah, blah.

And, of course, that’s some of the best stuff, right?

They talk about airline jargon.

They talk about when you might want to use the passive voice.

I mean, all this kind of stuff that we talk about on the show, it’s just, it’s really a thrilling read.

I can’t recommend it highly enough.

And the book again?

Quack This Way.

Isn’t that great?

That’s fantastic.

We’ll put links to these book recommendations on our website.

And, you know, we’re always interested in the books that you’re reading that you think we should share with the rest of the audience.

Let us know, 877-929-9673 or email words@waywordradio.org.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha. This is Pat Brennan speaking. I live in San Diego.

Hi, Pat. Welcome.

And I had a question about accents.

Okay. We’d love to hear it.

I grew up in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and at a young age we moved to San Diego for the fishing industry in Point Loma.

I have had this accent that I have since I was about 15 in California.

Of course I had before that.

And I have been commented on by every single person I have ever met in my life as soon as I opened my mouth.

And I don’t even say a word with an R in it.

They know I’m from somewhere, but they don’t know where.

All my cousins have lost their accents and do not have the Boston accent anymore.

And I’m wondering where does this accent come from and what mix of English or French

Or the people coming down from Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, the Irish.

Where did this accent come from?

Well, I like it, Pat. It reminds me of my Boston relatives.

There’s a short story to tell you.

Actually, this is a deep subject that requires reading a book to fully understand.

But the brief version of this story, the briefest that I can make it,

Is that it used to be that there was full roticity in American English.

That is, we all pronounced our R’s.

But there became a period where the people of power, the people who had prestige,

The ones that we looked up to, the people who led our institutions,

They began to pronounce it without an R.

They lost their roticity.

They lost their R in certain situations, after certain vowels, in certain words.

It’s not that you don’t pronounce the R’s.

You either pronounce them differently or you don’t pronounce them in just a certain class of words.

And you’ve got vowel changes that go along with that R change.

For example, you probably say carry instead of carry.

So this persisted well up through the early 1900s up to the period of World War II where after the war, this accent loses its prestige.

It loses its association with the Boston Brahmins.

It loses its association with people of class and money and style of education.

Yeah, I’m thinking of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Yeah, because there was a period before World War II where this was the accent that was taught to people who were in film and radio.

It wasn’t perfectly like the Boston accent, but it was close,

And they did certain things with their ahs, father, might be more of a thing that you’d say.

It’s not Scots. It’s not Irish.

It actually comes to us from the educated class in the U.K.

It’s called RP, Received Pronunciation.

And actually, the R-lessness in the U.K. is actually also kind of a modern invention as well.

It didn’t used to exist as well.

Somehow, the people in power were able to adopt this accent, and it became the thing to speak.

We tend to speak like the people we respect and the people who control our worlds.

And in that way, an accent spreads.

So it’s not usually going to rise from the bottom up.

It’s going to drop from the top down.

And so that accent then moved to the power centers of the United States, New York City, and Boston.

And then they took a stronghold among the educated classes there.

Those also tended to be the moneyed classes and the elected classes.

And in that way, the accent became a thing to emulate by strivers and people who wanted to look or act as if they were on a higher social scale than they’d been born to.

So that’s really the short version of it.

Well, it’s good to know that it had a beginning and that it’s slowly fading, it appears, like you say, in all the states.

So I’ll just keep on.

Yeah, I’d hang on to it, Pat. I think it’s charming.

I do, too.

Thank you for calling.

Okay, thank you so much.

Bye-bye.

I should say that there’s one place where R-lessness,

That is the tendency not to use an R after a vowel in certain words, is increasing,

And that is in the speech of young African Americans.

So we have different trends happening among different speech communities,

Different conventions taking hold.

I love this.

Pat’s accent probably will become archaic at some point.

Right.

Yeah, and it’s kind of already happened in New York City.

The New York City accent from the 1930s is really hard to find now.

And it’s kind of more generalized to a regional accent.

And that’s the way language goes, and that’s what we love watching and listening to and talking about.

Give us a call, 877-929-9673, or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Professor Benjamin Davis.

I’m the CBS Harold Dow Professor at Florida A&M University.

Oh, very good.

Welcome to the program, Professor. How can we help you?

I just have a question about the use of the noun hospital.

And when it’s turned into hospitalized, the IEZ form of it.

Now, when I was going to graduate school, I had this great professor, Merv Block,

Who taught us when writing broadcast not to say hospitalized.

He said, use your vocabulary. Say what it is.

And, you know, for the world of me, I can’t teach my students that anymore because it’s everywhere.

And when I tell them, I say, well, you know, it’s a generally accepted term, but I prefer that you not use it.

I’m wondering what you guys think about it.

So his injunction was against using hospitalized as a verb.

Yes.

Did he have an argument?

Yeah, he was really for our using vocabulary, using words to explain what we’re trying to say.

He was sent to the hospital.

They are all in the hospital.

Hospitalized is something that was really being adopted, I guess, at that time for broadcast reporters.

And I guess I never got over his good teachings.

So I think I’m either getting really old and I need to get with the times, or maybe you guys have some ideas of how this word can or should be used.

Well, I was going to say, the word has sort of been normalized.

Definitely. It’s got a good 40 years on it at this point.

When were you in school? Maybe the time it struck your professor as new.

Actually, what was that, 84? I was at Columbia.

Okay.

Yeah, about 1984.

And Merv Block was Walter Cronkite’s writer for many years.

So I just took whatever he taught to be gospel.

Yeah, I could see that being really good advice for reporters who tend to slip easily into the jargon of their profession.

And they slip into the jargon of the professions that they cover.

So if they’re writing about health care, they just pick it up.

And some of that stuff is opaque.

Or if they’re writing about police situations, they pick up that language.

Heck, even the traffic reporters pick up the language of the sheriffs and the highway patrol, and they relay that to their audience.

I wonder if his point about hospitalized wasn’t related to trying to drop that journalistic voice, that kind of tone that journalists tend to take where I’m the arbiter of all good things in the world and trying to get you to talk like a normal human being.

And maybe hospitalized was one of many examples?

Possibly.

Actually, that’s what they tried to get us to do there.

I don’t know if they succeeded with me, but, yes, they were trying to accomplish that.

Well, you sound fine to me, but this is a different kind of broadcast, isn’t it?

This is conversational.

Well, don’t you think that the issue is really the I-Z-E?

I mean, I said normalize earlier.

I said it’s been normalized, and neither of you flinched.

But I think that a lot of people get upset when you use eyes after a noun like that.

Right, when you verb a noun, and particularly when you use the I-Z-E to make that noun into a verb.

Yeah, this kind of complaint about I-Z-E verbs has been going on for 400 or 500 years.

Really?

Yeah, it has been.

But the surprising number of these verbs slip by us, completely unnoticed, unremarked upon, and nobody complains about them.

But a few are set aside for particular attention as being especially reprehensible, like incentivize.

Hospitalize has come up a few times.

I believe it was Edwin Newman in one of his books in the mid-70s used to complain about hospitalized and similar verbs.

Yet it’s counter to what we hear from some of our other listeners who want English to be simpler.

Why can’t we have just one word for this idea of was admitted to the hospital instead of having to say out the long version of it?

And I think Merv may have also been thinking that we were being lazy, and they didn’t want us to be lazy with words.

So he wanted you to have some intentionality about your word choices.

But I think having a hard and fast rule against that word maybe isn’t such a great idea.

I’m sure we’re going to have some responses from our other listeners about the word hospitalized.

But, Professor, thank you very much for your call.

Oh, you’re quite welcome. Thanks for taking it.

Okay, thanks. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Well, what do you think about this kind of thing?

Call us, 877-929-9673.

Send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

And we’re all over Facebook and Twitter.

Grant, are you familiar with the site called songstowearpants2.com?

No. No, I’m not.

This is where Andrew Wang makes these adorable little videos.

People write to him and request a song on a particular topic, and he writes a song and he performs it.

And some of them are really great.

But the reason that I’m talking about this is that somebody asked him to write a whole rap song without using the letter E.

And he did it, and it’s really, really good.

And you can find it at songstowearpants2.com.

But it’s got a great refrain of, do you kids miss this fifth stiff glyph?

I’m not using it.

And he’s holding up a cardboard cutout of the letter E, and he’s saying, do you kids miss this fifth stiff glyph?

I’m not using it.

He’s actually done a lot of videos like that that involve wordplay.

Sounds like a clever fellow.

Yeah.

Songs to Wear Pants 2?

SongsToWearPants2.com.

Check it out.

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

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Anne.

Hi, Anne.

This is Martha.

Yes, this is Martha.

Where are you calling us from?

Amherst, Massachusetts.

Amherst.

Well, welcome to the show.

How can we help you?

Well, I have a question about a phrase that my grandmother used that I have never seen in any literature.

She was born in 1869, and she was not wealthy, but she was proper.

And my mother told me that she would never refer to a bull as a bull because of its role in impregnating cows.

So she called it the animal.

So I’m wondering if this was just my grandmother or if this was common in that era, the late 1800s, early 1900s.

So there’s an avoidance of the word bull because of the act of the bull in breeding.

Wow.

I’ve heard of things similar to this, but never quite this.

I’ve never heard the animal used that way, but H.L. Mencken called that period the golden age of euphemism.

There were lots of different euphemisms like that for bulls, for that reason.

Tons of avoidance.

Yeah, it’s crazy how much they invested all their time in avoiding it because it was so suggestive to them.

There are all kinds of euphemisms like that from that period, you know, referring to a corset as a foundation.

Oh, she might have done that, actually, now that you’ve mentioned it.

Yeah?

Yeah, I think she might have.

Or you might talk about a flirtatious woman being very free in her manners.

-huh, -huh.

I’d be interested to hear if anybody else called bulls the animal as opposed to a cow brute.

And people actually said the cow brute, the gentleman cow?

Cow brute, male cow, critter, beast, anything but bull.

So your grandmother was connected to a larger trend in the history of English, this kind of pulling back of saying words that had been considered ordinary and deciding that they were newly improper to say.

Well, Anne, we appreciate your bringing this to our attention.

Well, thank you.

All right, take care now. Bye-bye.

I love your show.

Oh, thank you very much.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

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We’re coming to you this week from the Recording Arts Center at Studio West in San Diego, California.

Thanks for listening. I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett. Take care.

Sayonara.

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.

And oh, if we ever part, then that might break my heart.