Shakespeare’s Insults (episode #1426)

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.

Grant, you thrasonical, self-glorious horn beast.

I beg your pardon?

You apish, leptus-leering abomination.

All true, but I don’t know what it means.

I am having so much fun with this book called The Shakespeare Insult Generator.

Oh, boy.

They made that just for you.

One copy, it says Martha Barnette on the front.

I think he’s got your name inside.

It’s by Barry Craft, K-R-A-F-T.

He is a Shakespearean actor himself, and he’s done this really ingenious thing.

He’s made this flip book that has 54 pages, and each page is actually broken into three flippable cards,

Which means that you can mix and match them.

And these are all insults that Shakespeare used, insulting words.

And you have potentially 150,000 combinations.

150,000?

Yes, by flipping the various cards.

So you get all these three element combinations.

Like Grant, you lumpish mouse-eaten geck.

That’s outstanding.

It’s really wonderful.

And one of the things I really like about it is that it’s teaching me all these words I didn’t know.

Like geck, for example, which is a dupe or a fool.

Okay.

And a thrasonical self-glorious horn beast is a boastful, self-glorious, low creature.

Oh, my goodness.

Yes.

My feelings are wounded.

Oh, no, no, they shouldn’t be.

What hast thou done?

Thou spongy, rump-fed rabbit sucker.

That’s a ton of fun, right?

It’s a ton of fun.

I’ll share some more later in the show.

But these are all from Shakespeare’s plays.

They’re all from Shakespeare’s plays.

And he’s got definitions for everything.

So it’s no mystery.

Yes.

So it’s quite instructive.

And I’m looking at it.

I see it in your hands.

It’s a well-designed book.

It’s artful.

It’s beautiful.

Yes.

It’s very beautifully done.

Highly recommended.

The Shakespeare Insult Generator.

Well, send us your insults to words@waywordradio.org or tell them on the telephone to 877-929-9673.

Or tell the world how much you hate us on Twitter under the handle W-A-Y-W-O-R-D.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi.

This is Matt from Stanford, Connecticut.

And I have a question about the seasons and capitalizations.

All right.

Let’s hear it, Matt.

So I’m a teacher, and we were talking about different, like, weird capitalizations,

Like mom and dad and earth and how sometimes they are, sometimes they aren’t.

But then I got to the seasons, and I said, well, you know, we never capitalize the seasons.

And then I couldn’t really – actually, I second-guessed myself.

I said, well, maybe we do.

I said, that doesn’t sound right.

So I went to the Internet, as any good teacher would do.

I went to the Internet.

You know, the Internet said, yeah, no, you’re not supposed to capitalize the seasons.

But I couldn’t find a good reason why.

It just seemed to me like, and it still seems to me, like a, you know, this would be a common and proper noun situation.

You know, like day is common and Monday is proper.

You know, so I don’t quite understand why season wouldn’t be common and fall wouldn’t be proper.

Interesting question.

Yeah, I think you’re not the only one with this question.

You probably found that when you were searching the Internet, unless you got distracted by cats.

Yeah.

Well, the Internet couldn’t give a…

It just kept on saying it’s not proper.

And I’m like, but why isn’t it?

Okay, good.

Yeah.

And did your students have the same question?

Yeah.

I mean, we all kind of wondered why.

They kind of accepted it, as I have been accepting it for so many years.

But it just didn’t make sense, you know?

Yeah.

Well, you’re right.

It does seem like it should be a proper noun, right?

Yeah.

That period of time, like the days of the week or like the names of the months.

But these words, fall, winter, spring, and summer, and the words that preceded those

In Middle English and Old English have never been capitalized in English.

And I think perhaps part of the reason is because they don’t derive from names.

They’re not eponymous, like names of the days of the week, named for it.

Oh, like gods and such and stuff like that?

And most of the months as well.

Not all of them.

Most of them are also named after folks.

Exactly.

Yeah, they’re more like periods of time.

Yeah, and so there’s a great deal of inertia in English.

I know it’s easy to think that English changes rapidly.

Yeah.

But once we start doing something in English, it is really hard to shake that habit.

And we have this mixed parentage as well where we’ve got the Germanic side

Where they’re more likely to capitalize a ton of nouns,

And then we’ve got the romance side where they’re very unlikely to capitalize anything

Except maybe the first word or sentence.

None of the romance languages that I know capitalize the days of the weeks or the months or the seasons.

Oh, well, that’s interesting.

But the other thing I would say to this, there’s an editing forum, an editing group that I belong to.

This is a super common question from beginning editors where they’ll have a dispute with somebody at the office

Who insists that spring or summer should be capitalized and they have to persuade.

It seems like it should be.

A lot of people think that.

Well, I think if you’re using it in something that functions more as a proper noun, like the fall semester or the winter Olympics.

Spring catalog or something like that.

All right.

Well, cool, Matt.

I hope you helped.

You did.

Thank you very much.

And I am so happy to be on the show.

Thank you very much.

And we always like to say this, teachers.

Thank you for doing the hard work out there in the trenches, buddy.

We know how hard it can be.

You know what?

I wanted to say something to that.

You always say thank you for doing the hard work.

And I just want to say that we’re having a great time.

Oh, yay!

That’s fantastic.

You know, and I’ll take all the luck, the good luck and all the, you know, go for it.

You know, you can give me.

But we really do have a great, great time right now.

Oh, that’s nice.

That’s fantastic.

Yeah, I like seeing that.

We’ll rock on then.

Yeah, lucky students.

All right, thank you very much.

Bye-bye.

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

We’ve talked before about paraprosidokians, those statements that start going in one direction and then go in another direction.

Came across another one from Jerome K. Jerome, and I really like it.

It goes, I like work. It fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.

That reminds me of the famous quote about deadlines.

I knew it from Douglas Adams, but I think others said it first.

What’s that?

I love deadlines.

I love the sound they make.

It’s like a whooshing bar.

Oh, yeah.

Exactly.

877-929-9673.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Thank you.

So do you.

Yours is better, which is why I’m calling.

Okay.

Who is this?

Troublemaker already.

Is this Dan?

Yes, I am.

Sorry.

This is Dan from Redwood City in California.

Hey, Dan.

You have A Way with Words, too.

I can already tell.

Welcome to the show.

My father-in-law was born there in Redwood City.

Oh, cool.

What that’s worth, which is nothing.

And I was in San Diego just weeks ago, which is where I found your show.

Oh, nice.

Wow, and I used to know a guy named Dan.

This is amazing.

All right, Dan, what kind of trouble do you want to get up to?

Because it sounds like we’re all in the mood.

Okay.

So back in the Cooking with Gas show, you, Grant, used the term swag.

And that is a term that I have wondered about for years.

I’ve been told really authoritatively, like, it stands for stuff we all get,

Which is a bacronym.

I don’t trust bacronym.

There we go.

Yeah, good.

Your instincts are solid.

To me, when I think swag, I think like piratical, like swag and booty and it’s this, you know, sort of cool stolen term.

And I just, I want to know the origin.

Like, does swag have anything to do with, you know, this jolly swagman in a billabong or like what is the actual derivation of the term or entomology of the term?

I think people pick up the habit of making backronyms in kindergarten and never shake it.

A backronym, just so everyone knows, is when you take a word and you decide that each individual letter stands for another whole word to make a long phrase.

So you said that somebody told you authoritatively that swag means stuff we all get.

But that’s bunkum, hokum, nonsense.

It’s not true.

And a lot of people, or something like secretly we are all gay is another one.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah, and there’s even a fake etymology floating around that claims that secretly you’re all gay goes back to like the 1930s.

And it was the code word, swag was the code word that would get you into the speakeasy so you could hang around with other gay folks.

But that’s all bogus, fake, made up, not true.

Well, we do know about swag related to, let’s use the modern use for now, stuff you get at a con.

Let’s say you go to Comic-Con and you come back with, you know, Pokemon cards and action figures and a couple signatures and some hand-drawn illustrations from a famous comic book artist.

That’s swag.

You know, it comes in a plastic bag or a big colorful bag.

Free stuff.

Free stuff.

You know, maybe you go to an IT conference and you come back with flashlights and miniature screwdrivers and USB sticks, right?

Thumb driver.

Dan, does this match your experience?

Oh, absolutely.

And the pharmaceutical conferences, you used to get just amazing stuff with those.

I bet.

But what’s cool is that this swag, and usually the reduplicated swag bag is used just because it’s fun to say,

Goes back to the 1700s when it referred to a thieves or a pirate’s plunderer booty.

The ill-gotten gains was the swag.

So we’ve got like a solid 300 years on this, actually predating nearly every acronym that exists in English.

Acronyms are a relatively modern phenomenon, basically 1900 and forward.

And there is a suggestion here, and I’m only suggesting it, that swag may be connected to an idea of something swaying from side to side.

And that thing that’s swaying from side to side is the booty, is the plunder in the bag.

Now, think of a hobo with a bindle stick and a bindle over their shoulder.

The bindle is the bag filled with stuff moving from side to side as they walk down the road.

Or think of a horse with bags of like loot slung on either side of it and kind of walking down the road.

There’s the suggestion that that’s where the swag kind of migrated from meaning sway or move from side to side to referring to the actual contents of the thing that is swaying.

So nothing to do with swagger.

It may actually be related to swagger.

When you have a high opinion of yourself, when you swagger, that is you kind of have this particular kind of like big man walk strutting.

You know, you are kind of moving from side to side as you march down the street with your bad self, right?

There’s a particular way of walking when you’re arrogant and full of yourself.

So it sounds like you were right, Dan.

I thought I was, but, you know, some people are just so very, very sure of themselves.

I know.

That’s why I wanted to call the experts and the guys who have all those cool dictionaries.

Dan, thanks for listening.

Take care.

Thanks, Dan.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

Grant thou unwiped, rump-fed measle.

What?

There’s no end to this.

Will we ever stop doing the Shakespeare insults?

It’s going to be every episode from here to the end of time.

Well, yes, there are 150,000 potential insults from the Shakespeare insult generator.

And I’m going to use some more.

What is this?

What am I?

An unwiped rump-fed measles.

So unwiped means unclean.

Yes.

And then rump-fed.

Rump-fed means your rump is well-fed.

You haven’t missed too many meals.

I have a beautiful bum, you’re saying.

Yeah, well, I always say that, don’t I?

Crevacious.

Yes, go pigeon.

Does he not have in his book any complimentary stuff that Shakespeare might say?

It’s all insults.

Well, that would be a whole other book, wouldn’t it?

And not as fun.

Yeah.

Not nearly as much fun.

Come have fun with us.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

This show is not just about how we talk.

It’s about how we listen.

Stay with us.

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 it’s time once again for our quiz with our quiz guy, John Chaneski.

Hello, John.

Hello, Grant.

Hello, Martha.

What’s up, buddy?

I’m back.

I’ve got a puzzle for you guys today.

You know, maybe I go to the portmanteau well a little too often, but I don’t care.

I like them.

They’re new words that deliver twice as much information than the words that are combined to make them.

Right.

Right.

And speaking of information, in this information age, we have so many more new portmanteaus that I’ve made up.

The following portmanteaus combine a popular website with another word.

I’ll give you a clue as to how the word is used.

For example, if I spend hours buying books online, I might end up so tired that I’m almost unconscious.

That would make me Amazonct.

Amazonct.

Amazonct.

Amazonct, right.

Get it now?

Yeah.

Sort of.

Good.

I was going to say Amazonconscious, but I guess not.

No, that’s not bad.

I would say Amazoned out.

Ooh, even better.

We’ve got three new ones right there.

We’ll share the profits from the copyright of Portmanteau.

Now, bear in mind, many of these, if not all of them, are phonetic.

So if they’re writing, the letters don’t work out, don’t worry about it.

These are phonetic.

Here’s the first one.

I’ve bought so many things online using an electronic reimbursement system

That my heart is beating faster than usual.

I’m having…

Pay palpitations.

Pay palpitations, yes.

Boy, I’m getting better, though.

Here we go.

Number two.

When I gamble, I do so illegally via an associate of mine on social media.

He’s my…

Bookie.

That’s part of it.

Bookie.

Is it book something?

Social media.

Book Facebook?

Facebook?

Facebook?

Facebookie.

Okay, there we go.

Facebookie.

Should not have taken us that long to get to that one.

You worked it out.

That was great.

When you’re performing a comprehensive search for something on the internet,

Be careful not to believe every single result you find.

That’s just being…

Goo-gullible.

Goo-gullible, yes.

Goo-gullible, nice.

That one I think we should use.

If you use another popular web search site,

You have to be careful of all the gangs of violent troublemakers.

Yahoo-ligans.

Yes, Yahoo-ligans.

Hey, you know, my friends and I saw those excellent videos

Of Grant Barrett surfing that he posted online.

All the gluefoots and wahinis and groms think that those are totally…

YouTubular.

Yes, YouTubular.

I was thinking Netflix of war.

And nice work, Grant.

Gnarly.

Hang in ten.

That’s great.

Right.

After looking through the thousands of local online classified ads for apartments, jobs, services, personals,

I’m left feeling rather low on energy and enthusiasm.

I’m very…

Craigslistless.

Craigslistless.

Craigslistless, yes.

I sell a lot of stuff on an auction site, but I only sell items within my own personal area of expertise and interest.

That’s my…

E-Baileywick.

Yes, my E-Baileywick.

Now, sometimes, rarely, I leave the house.

Last night I went to a restaurant and shared a meal with my entire network of professional acquaintances.

We called it our…

Linked Indian food?

I was going to say.

Well, more general than specifically Indian food.

Linked dinner, yes.

Linked dinner.

Nicely done.

But we can see what Grant likes to eat when he goes out with his linked dinner.

I call those USB portmanteaus.

Very nice, John.

DVD drives me crazy.

Is that the end of it?

That’s the end of it.

Congratulations.

Thanks, buddy.

You did great.

We’ll talk to you next week.

Take care.

See you next week.

Give our best to the family.

Will do.

And if you want to talk with us about language, you can always call us at 877-929-9673.

You can find us on Facebook and Twitter, and you can email us.

That address is words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Father Dennis from Martin, Tennessee.

Father Dennis from Martin. Where is Martin, Tennessee?

Northwest Tennessee, far away from everything.

Okay.

Well, you’re near Missouri, though.

Yeah, not far from Missouri. I can get to Missouri in about an hour from here.

What can we do for you, Father?

I was at a nursing home not too long ago visiting some people, and I was talking with one of the staff, and they were explaining that someone was going to have to be moved because the two residents sharing a room couldn’t g-ha together very well.

And I said, what does that mean?

And she said, you know, like they don’t g-ha together.

They don’t get along.

They’re always sniping at each other.

And I said, where does that expression come from?

And she said, well, I’ve lived here in northwest Tennessee my whole life.

Haven’t you heard that before?

And I said, no, I grew up in Memphis.

I’ve never heard that before.

And I knew that you guys would be the ones to ask.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, that’s a great southernism.

It’s not just that state, but all throughout the South, there’s plenty of reports of Jee Ha.

A little old-fashioned these days, but it means to get along, to move along.

If somebody Jee Ha’s, it means they’ve got some spring in their step, they’re going.

And it comes from the farming or rural terms that we use to indicate whether or not your animals,

Your horse, your oxen, whatever, should go left or right.

Gee and haw.

That’s pretty much it.

So you’re talking about two animals pulling together then.

If they’re not gee-hawing, then the two aren’t getting along.

Yeah, so they’re trained to obey.

Yeah, exactly.

They’re trained to obey voice commands.

So you might actually have them slowly going.

You know, you train them to plow and you’re going behind to pick up the clods or whatever,

Bust up the clods and so forth.

But I love that.

If you have a couple that doesn’t gee-haw, then they’re not getting along.

They don’t work well in the traces together, right?

Yeah, yeah.

Well, thank you because I grew up in Memphis, and I’m a city boy.

I mean, Memphis is still the south, but it’s a pretty urban place,

And I just never heard anything like that before.

Yeah, didn’t make it to a big city.

I’m not really familiar with farm animals.

Oh, I learned, you know, I learned G and Haw, not as a verb, both words together.

I learned them from Jack London.

I learned them from The Call of the Wild.

Oh, is that right?

Yeah.

He uses them up there in Alaska during the gold rush when he’s working with his animals.

Oh, interesting.

And it goes back 1960s-ish is a verb, but G and Hall, as separate words, go back well into the 1800s, early 1800s.

And this is very American, by the way.

This isn’t something you’re likely to find an English farmer using when they’re plowing the fields.

Wow.

Yeah.

Well, thank you so much.

Listen, before I go, can I share with you my favorite portmanteau?

Oh, please.

Please.

I’m a Catholic priest.

When I get my Bible and my rosary and my prayer books and all those other things together, those things are called my prayer finalia.

All right.

Bonus points for you, Father.

You win the call.

Prayer finalia.

Thank you.

That’s great.

Nice.

Thank you.

Thanks for calling us.

Thanks a lot, Father.

Really appreciate it.

All right.

That was a great day.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Okay.

You can g-haul with us anytime, 877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

Or try us on Twitter at the handle W-A-Y-W-O-R-D.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Lindsay from Williamsboro, Virginia.

Lindsay, welcome to the show.

Hi, Lindsay.

Hi.

So I am part of an online community, whatever, message board forum.

And a while back, one of the members of the board had posted a problem that she had had.

She had just started a new job in a retail.

And she had evidently thought she had this really great first day and had felt like she’d done this great job.

And then her manager had come to her at the end of the day and said, yes, you were wonderful.

You know, this was great.

This was great.

This was great.

But really didn’t appreciate that when customers came up and after you rang them up, they would say thank you for serving them.

She would respond with no problem.

And the manager felt that this was really not appropriate.

And that it wasn’t an appropriate thing to say.

So the member of this forum had come and kind of put it before the group.

Was this an issue?

Was this rude to say to somebody, no problem, most specifically in a retail sort of situation?

And the group sort of really was very split along generational lines.

These self-proclaimed olds, felt, yes, this was rude because, well, of course it’s no problem.

It’s your job.

While the young people were more along the lines of, well, it’s the same thing as saying you’re welcome.

So they didn’t really see an issue.

Now we bring it to you guys as the language arbiters.

Is this rude?

Not so much in an everyday context.

I think, you know, you do a favor for a friend and the friend says thanks and you say no problem.

That’s certainly not rude.

But more in that sort of retail, more formal sort of context.

What makes this particular phrase so different from something like you’re welcome?

Lindsay, you’ve laid it out wonderfully.

And I would guess from the sound of your voice that you’re in the no problem camp.

You’re young.

Well, you’re not an old.

I’m not an old.

Frankly, I have worked in retail, and this is not a phrase that I would have used when I worked in retail, partly because a lot of the people that are customers would fall in the old camp.

And it doesn’t really matter if I think it’s rude or not.

If they think it’s rude, it’s rude.

But also because I honestly, when I worked in retail, I didn’t say you’re welcome either.

I would say, no, thank you, or something along those lines.

Because, again, this is my job.

It shouldn’t be a problem.

It shouldn’t be something that I’m being thanked for.

Yeah.

If you want to talk about it in linguistic terms,

What we’re talking about here is what linguists who study conversation call an adjacency pair.

That’s a two-element construction where one person says one thing,

And then the other person is supposed to say whatever is relevant and expected in return.

And you’ve laid it out beautifully that older people often find that no problem isn’t relevant or expected.

If you’re saying no problem, then you’re responding to something that was a problem.

But if I’m a paying customer, it’s not as if I’m creating a problem for you.

But you can’t analyze the semantic content of no problem because it is part of that pair, just like you’re welcome.

There is virtually no semantic content there.

It is simply a traditional response.

And the problem is that the olds are examining it as if it has semantic content when it serves the same purpose as You’re Welcome.

Yeah, maybe the olds are examining it.

I think it’s just a matter of being used to it, though, used to You’re Welcome.

The other problem, that is definitely it.

The other problem is that You’re Welcome actually has some of its own problems.

For example, there are common sarcastic uses of it where you might do something for a friend and then when they don’t instantly response with thank you, they’re like, you’re welcome.

Yeah.

Right.

And there are other problems with it, too.

It’s bleached out.

Your welcome is so blech that it doesn’t really seem to have any force left in it.

Well, and my pleasure is weird, too.

You know, some people encourage you to say my pleasure.

Because it’s not actually your pleasure, necessarily.

You’re just saying that’s important.

Yeah, I’m not having fun.

And the thing about no problem, too, is it puts the customer and the service person on a more equal footing.

And I think that may be what we’re seeing here as well.

The olds don’t want that.

They want that deference that traditionally comes from clerks and salespeople.

And the younger generation doesn’t want that because it doesn’t fit their notions of equality and community.

And we’re all in this together.

You know, today I’m the salesperson.

Tomorrow you’re the salesperson.

We switch roles back and forth.

Yeah.

And to my mind, Lindsay, I think that you might as well respect the older folks’ point of view on that.

I mean, it’s sort of like switching from the informal to to the formal usted in Spanish.

I don’t think it takes that much away from your interaction as a young person.

Right, exactly.

My feeling was always, especially in a retail type situation, is that you kind of modify your language to suit whoever feels that it should be more formal.

You might get better tips that way, too.

But how are you going to know?

You don’t know until they’re ticked off.

Right.

Yeah, but you can guess.

Sure, you can guess.

I mean, it doesn’t hurt to say you’re welcome.

When whole large portions of your world accept no problem with no problem, you just may never know which part of your world is going to have a burr under their blanket about it.

It’s a minefield out there.

Well, sales is just a minefield in general.

Yeah, you’re right.

You’re right.

You never know when you’re going to get somebody the wrong way.

But like I said, I tended to just deflect it completely and respond with a, well, thank you for coming in.

That’s a bit more British, too. Thank you.

I would do that as well.

Thank you in response to thank you is actually really solid.

This is brilliant.

We’ve solved a national problem.

Oh, right. Salespeople everywhere are grateful.

Well, Lindsay, I’d be delighted to find out what happens when you take this back to your forum folks

And find out what they think.

I suspect that there’s just going to be more and more and more discussion that will never end.

Oh, I’m sure. That’s the way they are.

Well, Lindsay, thank you so much for calling.

Seriously, I think we solved the problem right here on the air.

Take care now.

All right, and thank you.

Okay, thank you.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673 or send us an email.

That address is words@waywordradio.org.

Here’s a term I learned the other day, hydranium.

Hydranium.

Yeah.

I don’t know it.

What is it?

It’s a hydrangea.

It’s just a dialectal term for hydrangea.

Oh, that’s funny.

It’s a misunderstanding.

Yes, yes.

You can see how it makes sense, right?

Yeah, it makes perfect sense.

Hydranium.

877-929-9673.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hello.

This is Richard Harris.

I’m a neighbor of Martha’s up in Hillcrest, San Diego.

Oh, nice.

Oh, hi, Richard.

Well, then you’re not far from me either.

I live in University Heights.

Yeah.

Nice to meet you, neighbor.

Good.

What’s up?

What’s on your mind?

Well, my wife’s siblings recall that their father using a term when he was doing some

Tasks around the house that were not up to his typical standards or failed.

It would be, oh, it’s a ham and egg job.

That was in Meriden, Connecticut, 20 miles from New Haven.

My brother-in-law, who was raised in Manhattan, recalls the same thing from an uncle of his, who would use it the same way as above.

And then my brother-in-law also recalls his father-in-law, who lived in Baltimore, using the term.

And we can’t find any origins of it.

Well, I’ve got some stuff for you.

It comes out of boxing, where it basically means a palooka.

The guy who’s just, you know, he’s not a great boxer.

He doesn’t have this fight in him, so to speak.

He’s kind of working for food, you know, and that’s where the ham and egg come into play.

He’s not looking to make bank.

He’s simply willing to just go fight, you know, one more day, day after day.

Okay.

He plugs away.

He’s a plotter, you know.

And we find as far back as 1918, there’s a really interesting usage of it in a Navy journal,

U.S. Navy journal, where they’re talking about a guy who’s passed on,

And he was one of these guys who used to go to these kind of informal bouts

Where the Navy guys, the sailors, would go test themselves against each other in a ring

Just to see who would win.

And they say he was known as a Friday nighter, a Hammond egger, a curtain raiser, a ring warmer.

And you can get from all of these kind of this sense that, all right, we’ve got to have a card.

I’ve got a boxer here with nobody to pair him with.

All right, who’s the next palooka in line?

Just so you can have a bout, you know, just get a guy in there.

And maybe he makes a few bucks for beer or somebody buys him dinner.

And that’s his payment for the night.

He’s done.

And so over time, it was extended to refer to anybody who’s just kind of like putting in time but not really committed to the work and maybe even half-assing it as a result.

Very interesting.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Thanks so much.

Really appreciate it.

Thanks, Richard.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Yeah, by the 1930s, it had already started to leave boxing and become more generic for an amateur or a second reader.

-huh.

I never hear it now.

No, no.

It’s a classic.

I bet the next boxing movie I watch, it’ll probably leap out at me now.

I’ll totally see it in there because they will have pillaged all the boxing glossaries and put the language in there for color.

If you’re wondering where a word or phrase came from, you can always call us 877-929-9673 or send your questions in email to words@waywordradio.org.

I’m surprised I haven’t come across this before, but I learned the term panic monkey.

Panic monkey.

Yeah, these are the people who do what I call kermit hands every time a situation gets difficult.

They start just like flailing their hands because everything’s terrible and it’s a disaster and what are we going to do?

It’s like jazz hands when the music starts going really fast.

Yeah, they don’t keep their cool when things get tough and they start freaking out.

People around them are like, what is your deal?

So a panic monkey is somebody, and sometimes they thrive on panic.

So they only operate if things are at an intense level, the deadline is approaching, and the money is tight, and everybody’s looking over their shoulder.

Yeah, they can’t function otherwise, right?

Yeah, panic monkey.

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

Stay tuned.

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

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

When we were in Dallas recently for some appearances,

A listener named Alan Josephson asked me about an expression that his mother, Adele, used all the time.

And I wonder if you’ve heard it, Grant.

The phrase was, enough food to feed Cox’s army.

Enough food to feed Cox’s army.

I have heard it, but I don’t know anything about it.

What do you know?

Yeah.

Well, and as you can imagine, it means a whole lot of food, right?

Okay.

Well, the weird thing was that I said, no, I’ve never heard of that expression.

And we turned to somebody who was standing nearby and we said, have you heard this expression, enough food to feed Cox’s army?

And the guy said, oh, sure.

Yeah, I use it all the time.

And this caught me up short.

And so the whole week that we were in Dallas, I was asking people about this phrase.

And again and again, all these Texans told me that they knew it as either enough food to feed Cox’s army or enough food to feed Cox’s army.

Cox’s.

Yeah.

And come to find out that there was a Cox’s army, C-O-X-E-Y.

And the story is pretty interesting.

In 1894, the United States was in the middle of a terrible economic depression.

And there was this Ohio businessman named Jacob Cox.

He organized this massive march on Washington to protest economic policies and urge a public works program like road building, that kind of thing.

And he got a lot of publicity about it.

He set out from Ohio, and they covered about 15 miles a day.

A lot of them were just walking.

And by the time he got to Washington, supposedly there were about 500 people there.

There were also a lot of journalists there.

And he later organized a bigger march in 1914 that he was saying was going to bring a million people.

It didn’t.

But anyway, the expression enough food to feed Coxie’s army started showing up in citations in the early 20th century, right about that time.

And an interesting footnote at that first march, L. Frank Baum was one of the observers.

And there has been speculation that Baume used some of those themes in The Wizard of Oz.

You know, you have the yellow brick road, which could be the road to Washington or road building.

You have the cowardly lion, who may have been a reference to William Jennings Bryan, who was perceived as a lot of people as cowardly, and so on and so forth.

There was also later, weirdly enough, a Cox’s army that marched on Washington, a whole different protest in the 1930s.

But I just found it really weird that there were all these people in this town we were visiting who knew this phrase and neither one of us did.

No, that’s really strange, right?

Isn’t that strange?

Yeah, but that’s the way language works.

Yeah.

Stuff stays local until it isn’t.

Yeah.

Yeah, well, and I don’t know any reason that it would be particular to Texas since it was a march on Washington.

Yeah, I don’t know either.

Weird stuff, right?

Weird stuff.

So thank you for sending us on that journey, Alan.

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Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha. This is Isaac from Portland, Oregon. How are you?

Hi, Isaac. Welcome.

Hi, Isaac. What’s going on?

Well, I’ve got a question about a phrase that came up at work recently.

All right.

The phrase is spitball or spiffball.

It’s used as a verb, and I think it means to pass ideas back and forth, like brainstorming.

One of my coworkers used it, and there was some disagreement over whether the term was spitball, S-P-I-T, or spiffball, S-P-I-F-F.

And we looked it up, and we found both usages on the Internet.

So I’m just wondering what the story is between spiffball and spitball.

I can kind of see where spitball would come from, you know, passing ideas back and forth, like tossing a chewed up wad of paper.

All right.

Swapping spitballs?

Well, you spit them at the ceiling and see what sticks.

That’s kind of the sixth impression, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Whatever sticks is what you go with.

Like throwing jelly against the wall.

Basically deciding what your consensus is.

Just toss a bunch of random ideas into the group and see what everyone can go for.

But let me backtrack here.

Who is the advocate for SPIF, S-P-I-F-F?

SPIF?

So that was actually my supervisor.

He’s from California.

I don’t know if that makes any difference.

No, fire him.

Fire him.

You just fire him.

Okay, you can Google just about any error and find hits for it on the Internet.

That doesn’t make it not an error.

Yeah.

All right, so SPIF ball is not a thing.

You’ll find about 20,000, 25,000 usages of them.

A lot of them, basically usernames, not even actual in context, straight up English usage of them.

So the number of total real uses of spiffball to mean spitball is actually really low,

Especially compared against the staggering tens of millions of uses of the word spitball and all of its variants.

So it’s S-P-I-T-B-A-L-L, and it means to wad up pieces of paper, moisten them with saliva,

And either to spit them or shoot them out of a straw against the wall or a ceiling,

And then the expression from the business world is you spitball.

You throw some stuff up there, see what sticks.

Whatever sticks is what you go with.

So it’s just kind of a way of developing consensus.

So is there such a thing as a spiffball?

You know, it sounds vaguely like something that Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes would come up with.

Yeah, I know.

That’s what I thought.

I don’t think spiff meant spiff.

Yeah, exactly.

But he has Calvin ball, which is not spiffball.

It’s very different.

Although the rules of Calvin ball are so loose, maybe you could call it spiffball if you wanted to.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think the only rule is you can’t put it the same way twice, right?

Yeah, exactly.

So it’s not a thing.

Spiffball’s not a thing.

It sounds like a pronunciation.

You know, Isaac, you know that I’m usually like, yeah, whatever.

If I actually think there’s room to call something a variant or to say that it’s harmless or suggest that it’s up-and-coming slang and maybe we need to keep an eye on it because it could come a new thing, this is not a thing.

Spiffball is not a thing.

Okay.

Now your big problem is how do I tell my supervisor that he was wrong?

No, is your supervisor right?

I love telling him he’s wrong.

Oh.

No, no, no.

He was wrong.

I love telling him he’s wrong.

Okay.

Hopefully you have that relationship established already.

Oh, yeah.

No, we’re, yeah, it’s a good one.

My suggestion to you is to build this up until there’s a lunch on the line or a half day off or something,

And then to tell him, here’s the incontrable evidence from Martha and Grant that you don’t know what you’re talking about, dude.

All right.

Okay.

Well, I look forward to breaking the news to him.

Thanks, Isaac.

Let us know how it goes.

And if you need us to post a job ad for you, we’ll do that.

All right.

Take care now.

Thanks a lot.

Bye-bye.

Bye, Isaac.

Have a good day.

We know you have a dispute in your place of work about language, so call us about it, 877-929-9673,

Or send it an email to words@waywordradio.org, or you can find us on Twitter at the handle Wayword.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is AJ from beautiful Charleston, South Carolina.

Charleston.

Beautiful Charleston, South Carolina.

Lovely.

I would agree.

Welcome to the show, AJ.

Hi.

How can we help?

So here’s the background to my question.

My dad and I live together, and we were having a conversation about how I have a boa constrictor as a pet.

You do?

Yeah.

Is his name Julia Squeezer?

His name is Wayne.

His name is Wayne?

Why did you name your boa constrictor?

Because it’s Wayne’s world.

It’s excellent.

Is that why you named him Wayne?

Well, it’s actually a reference to a musical that my friends and I loved when we were kids.

Oh, really? Okay, a musical.

So someone asked my dad, oh, how do you feel about that?

And he said, well, I’m not a big fan of Wayne.

And for some reason, that was the thing that got me thinking that usually don’t hear someone say, I’m a fan of him.

It’s usually I’m a fan of his.

But when it’s the person’s name, it’s usually singular and not possessive.

So I was just wondering what the usage is on that and what’s more correct, because I’ve not been able to figure it out on the Internet.

Okay. And so you feel like a fan of Wayne’s is more correct than a fan of Wayne?

Well, it just doesn’t sound as, like, when it’s a question of friendship or fandom,

I feel like you would more belong to them.

So the possessive apostrophe S would be more correct.

But then also there’s the of way, so that already implies the possessive.

And if the double possessive is wrong or which one you would think was correct.

Yeah, a lot of people have suggested that there’s something wrong with the double possessive

Or the double genitive, as we call it, that it’s redundant or that it’s actually too possessive.

But this construction has been around since Middle English.

It’s been widely used by lots and lots of people.

There’s nothing grammatically incorrect about it.

And in fact, it’s sometimes useful because if you say he found a bone of the dogs, that’s different from saying he found a bone of the dog, right?

It’s two different things.

Yeah, that’s true.

The bone of the snake.

But the word fan is problematic here, I think.

There’s a question of directionality with fan.

It suggests a one-way kind of action, whereas, for example, if you replace fan with friend, friendness is mutual.

It works both directions, and fan tends to work one direction, which may throw us some confusion.

Yeah, I think to be a fan of it just seems like a special case where that’s almost like a verb itself.

Like, I admire Wayne, or I’m a fan of Wayne.

Another way of looking at this, AJ, is you probably wouldn’t have a problem if you said,

Wayne is a friend of mine, and yet with of and mine, we are still talking about a double possessive there.

We just simply haven’t done a proper noun with the apostrophe S to express that second possessive.

Yeah.

So it’s really interesting.

But either construction actually works.

You can say a fan of Wayne or a fan of Wayne’s.

You will often find when you look at written descriptions of oral language, you will often find that people do have to clarify after they say that, though.

They have to indicate what they mean if there’s any doubt.

So it sounds like what we’re saying is that either one of your constructions is correct.

We just can’t figure out why your dad doesn’t like the snake.

Yeah, I’m a fan of Wayne’s.

Yeah, that’s the bigger problem here.

Send us some pictures of Wayne, all right?

Can we put him on social media?

Show the world Wayne and his coolness?

Yes.

All right.

AJ, thank you so much for your call, all right?

Thank you so much, Dan.

I’m a big fan.

Take care.

Say hello to Wayne.

Great.

You’re a fan of ours.

Is that what you said?

Bye-bye.

Nice. Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

Grant, thou unhandsome, stretched-mouthed mushroom.

I’m just going to be over here while you amuse yourself.

I’ll just be sitting here playing word games on my phone.

You know, they should make a Shakespeare insult generator app.

There probably is one.

It kind of begs for paper, though, doesn’t it?

Yeah, it’s so much fun to just go through this.

Maybe it’s the book that you use, you know, if you have like the curse word jar at home, you also have this book.

Not only do you have to put a dollar in the jar if you say something offensive, but you have to read one of these out and call yourself it.

I agree with you, you heinous leptus leering momsy butt.

Momsy butt.

Outstanding.

Which is a cask of sweet wine.

That’s all it is.

Yeah, not the derriere.

Gotcha.

Still, though, Shakespeare had a fascination with the hindquarters.

Indeed.

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Twitter, W-A-Y-W-O-R-D.

Go to our website for 200 free episodes and find us all over Facebook.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Terri from Fort Worth.

Hey, Terri.

Hi, Terri.

How are you doing?

I’m good.

How are you guys?

Super duper.

What’s going on?

Just some words came up.

I use here at work, it’s smidge and tidge.

And I didn’t know if you guys were able to do the shimmy.

Oh, sure.

Yeah, I can give you a little bit on all three of those.

What’s the context here?

When are you smidging and shimmying and tidging?

From the OR stretcher, you know, we have them move on to the OR bed.

I work back here in the OR.

So you’re in a hospital?

So I tell the patients, I said, okay.

You just kind of move over just a tidge or a smidge and my dad used to tell me forever that

Tidge was not even a word so i don’t even know i’ve been using it for years so i don’t even know

Where i came up with it and then so when i say shimmy i said just shimmy on over here and sometimes

The room when i say shimmy they go shimmy shimmy cocoa pop shimmy shimmy pop so the room kind of

Pops out. So anyways, it’s just kind of goofy stuff like that.

That’s awesome. I know that song. I don’t know where I picked it up, but I knew that song as a kid.

Yeah, I’ve heard it too. I’ve not heard it in a, are you in a hospital or some kind of medical

Facility then? Yeah, okay.

Okay.

It’s just a little surgery in small inpatient hospital. We do surgeries and stuff like that.

Okay. And Terry, when you use these words, do your patients seem to understand what you’re saying?

Yeah, but they’re pretty much already medicated.

They’re already sedated, so we have to have them move from the bed.

They come into the OR room to the OR bed.

So to get them there, I just say, okay, just kind of move over just a smidge or a tidge or shimmy over.

Well, I can help you with all those.

We can help you with all those.

You could use your own language and nobody would notice is what you’re saying.

It’s funny you said that is because my friend sitting here, she says, I have my own language.

And she’s like, yeah?

Oh, you do.

Because Terry has her own language.

I’m like, oh, okay.

Well, is it just Terry’s language, Terry?

No, not those three words anyway.

Smidgen is the longer form of smidge.

So smidge is just a certain name of smidgen.

And smidgen probably comes from a Scots word.

So Scots is this amalgam language spoken in Scotland, a little bit of English, a little bit of Gaelic.

It’s a very distinctive tone to it.

And there are a ton of Americans who have Scots heritage, so we’ve got a lot of that language, too.

There’s the word smidge, which also means just a little bit in Scots, so that’s probably where smidgen and smidge come from.

There are a ton of related words, variety of spellings and pronunciations, but generally that’s the history.

Tidge is probably a mix of smidge plus either touch or tad.

So if I tell you to move over a tidge, it’s tad plus smidge, which still just means a little bit.

And it’s got a long history as well, 50 to 80 years, depending on which dictionary that you check.

Shimmy has got a great story, though.

Shimmy was a dance in the early 1900s, a very suggestive erotic dance that involved the hips moving from side to side

In a certain kind of undulation of the form to such a degree that it was banned throughout the country in a lot of different municipalities.

New York had some laws about it.

Wyoming had some laws about it, a bunch of other places.

And so when we talk about a shimmy, we are often talking about moving our body in a way that’s very similar to that dance.

Mm—

Yeah.

Well, they can’t do that very well being medicated and go to the other bed.

No.

Well, Terry, thanks for your call.

And do us a favor.

If you do have your own language, we want to hear more of it.

Give us another call sometime, all right?

Okay.

Thank you so much.

All right.

You take care now.

All right.

Hi to your coworkers.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

We email words@waywordradio.org.

And on Twitter, we’re at Wayword.

Here’s another insult from the Shakespeare insult generator that I really like.

I learned something.

Thou wanton swag-bellied underskinker.

Underskinker?

Underskinker.

An underskinker is an assistant tapster that is someone who draws beer for customers.

I didn’t think that was insulting.

I mean, we live in Craft Beer City here in San Diego.

Yeah, I wonder if they’re like super filthy or they don’t get any tips or they’re also cleaning up the vomit from drunk customers.

I don’t know.

Maybe they get a lot of other junky tasks, terrible tasks.

I don’t know.

I know a lot of underskinkers here in San Diego, and they are good friends.

Yeah, me too.

And they all seem to have great muscles and awesome tattoos, both the men and the women.

And I’m like, how do you keep that great body and work next to so much alcohol?

Right.

And they have a wealth of knowledge about beer.

Yeah, that’s true.

That’s true.

It’s a really nice thing about San Diego, isn’t it?

Yes.

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Things have come to a pretty path.

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The show’s coming to you from the Recording Arts Center at Studio West in San Diego, California.

Thanks for listening. I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett. Bye-bye.

So long.