Shiver Me Timbers

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

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Arthur Barnette.

It seems like just about every time we open our inbox, there’s an email from somebody saying,

Is this a word? Is that a word? My boss used the word incentivize. Is that really a word?

And a lot of those emails come accompanied with a certain amount of pessimism

About the way the English language is going.

Right.

Well, perhaps they should think about the fact that the word pessimism

A century or so ago was thoroughly derided by lots and lots of people.

Yes, indeed.

I didn’t know that.

Let me read you a couple of…

Here’s a writer in 1892 who complained about, quote,

The way the word pessimism gets flung about of late.

One encounters it at every turn, and it is made to serve as the label of almost every expression of discontent with the existing order of things.

And then somebody just a few years later wrote,

Who will contribute the first dollar to a fund to furnish definitions of the words optimism and pessimism

To writers who use the words as synonyms of cheerfulness and despondency?

And cheerfulness and despondency seem so, right?

Right, right, right.

We’d have to reach for arthasauruses before those seem like the right choices.

Yeah, yeah.

That’s crazy.

I really did not know that, honestly.

Oh, so that’s why your eyes are lining up.

Yeah, of course.

Because there’s so few times that I can do this for you.

No, it’s not that.

It’s that, you know, I now have that little response, right?

That’s another little line to add.

Because when we get those emails and phone calls, we listen.

Because a lot of our job is to listen.

Yes.

And when we reply back, we’re like, oh, we’ll wait and see.

Or maybe we say, you know, it’s not as bad as you think.

Or I think English is healthy.

It can take it.

Right.

There’s a lot of different responses, but here’s a new one.

Here’s a new one.

Yeah.

And I mean, the response we usually give is if there’s anything that’s consistent about English, it’s the fact that it changes over time.

Right.

Right.

I do like the idea, though.

It changes slowly enough that if somebody does come up with a time machine, we will be able to go back a couple hundred years and be okay.

Like, I want to go back and talk to, like, Betsy Ross, you know?

I would love to talk to Betsy.

That sort of stuff.

How did she do that anyway?

Right.

All that stuff.

877-929-9673.

Tell us how the English language is improving your life.

To words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Amanda from Louisville, Kentucky.

Well, I was wondering, my husband and I, we like to play with words in our house.

We like to make up words and make up phrases.

And we’ve made up quite a few, but one of our favorites is one that is in relation to our children.

And we were wondering if there’s anything like this out there, a word other than what the phrase that we made up,

That is for this word.

And what we call it is inside-out day.

And it’s basically the day that they have been outside of the womb longer than they were inside of the womb.

So we were wondering if there’s a day like that, if there’s a name for that type of day,

Or if anybody else has a phrase for that.

Inside-out day.

So when they reach nine months, you do inside-out day.

Yeah, or for our kids it was 38 weeks and 37 weeks and six days.

Okay, nice.

Okay, well, so Amanda, tell us.

It out. So how do you celebrate

Inside Out Day? Well, we haven’t

Done much because usually I’m so exhausted. We just

Celebrate it by hoping they’ll sleep and

Getting some more sleep ourselves.

But we try to take pictures

And just try to, you know, make it a

Almost like, you know, people do those one

Month, two month pictures. We do Inside Out Day pictures.

So instead of 50 or 100

Pictures a day, you do 50 or 100

More pictures that particular day, right?

Right. That’s exactly it. Well, with the first child,

Anyway, the second one got like two.

Oh! Well, they’re only 19 months apart.

We were exhausted by then.

Oh, my goodness.

The spare doesn’t get as much love as the original.

Is that what you’re saying?

Well, she gets a lot of love, just not as many pictures.

Do you do golden birthdays in your house?

That was my question.

I did do my golden birthday, but my kids were, let’s see, it won’t be until they’re 5 and 20.

So the 5-year-old will probably be able to celebrate, but I did mine when I was 11.

Yeah, so just for everyone who doesn’t know, the golden birthday is the day of the month that you were born.

So for me, that’s the 16th.

So my 16th birthday was my golden birthday.

Yeah, that’s really fun.

I got a pogo stick for my golden birthday.

Nice.

That’s all I remember about it.

That’s perfect.

I think some people do celebrate Inside Out Day.

Oh, really?

Yeah, I think I’ve seen references to it on the web before.

That’s cool.

Every once in a while.

Yeah.

That’s not what they call it, is it?

Different name for it.

Unless you’ve posted something on the web about it.

No, —

Okay.

No, that’s the name that they call it, too.

That’s so interesting.

Yeah.

But I like this.

I love the invented holidays that we have on our families.

The little myths that we create, the folklore that develops, the language that comes about,

And it all kinds of sticks.

So by the time your kids are leaving home, it’s this tightly woven net of shared memories and experiences that no other family has.

Oh, yeah.

I like that better than the contrived ones, you know, that Hallmark pushes.

Hallmark holidays.

Right, right.

I think we might start wearing our, at least let the Inside Out Day kid wear their clothes inside out on that day every year.

Now, wait a minute.

Would that be a diaper?

I think that’s a good idea.

Oh, oh, oh, oh, I see.

Where the diapers inside out.

That would not be fun.

But no.

Maybe when they’re old enough to realize what they’re doing.

I love that.

And not when they’re infants.

Yeah, exactly.

So when they reach a little more involvement and awareness of their environment.

Well, Amanda, I’m betting that we’ll hear from folks who either celebrate Inside Out Day or something similar.

Amanda, thank you so much.

Thanks, Amanda.

And best of luck with those kiddos.

Thank you.

You guys are my heroes.

It was wonderful to talk to you.

Oh, shucks.

Well, I don’t think I’ve earned it.

Thank you anyway.

Bye, Amanda.

Thank you.

Take care.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

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

If you ever feel like you’ve used the word hiccups too often in one paragraph, I have a solution for you.

Yes.

You can use the word singultus.

Singultus.

It sounds Latin.

It is.

It comes from the Latin word meaning an uttering of sobs or speech that’s broken by sobbing.

How do you spell that?

S-I-N-G-U-L-T-U-S and singultation is the act of hiccuping.

So one hiccup is a singultation.

It’s a single, singultation.

Singultus.

Singultus.

Right.

That is if you have the aversion to using a word more than once.

We’ve talked about this and I do have that.

Yes.

I try not to use uncommon terms more than once in a paragraph.

Yeah.

But if you’ve used hiccups too many times, there you go.

Give us a call, 877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hey there, how you doing?

Great. Who’s this?

This is Alex calling from Indianapolis, Indiana.

Hi, Alex. Welcome to the program.

Hey, Alex.

What’s cooking?

Hey there.

Back when we were having all this cold weather in Indianapolis,

My fiancé, who works at a salon, was talking to one of her clients, and they were going on about how cold it was.

And my girl goes, just makes me feel like shiver me timbers.

And she kind of paused, and the girl looked at her.

It was in her chair, and they both kind of started laughing.

And she goes, I don’t know why, but that made me feel a little dirty almost, like a little weird to say that.

After the fact.

Shiver Me Timbers?

That sounds naughty.

Yeah, I mean, you know, that’s where I heard it from,

Is like all these, you know, pirate movies as a kid.

But, you know, listening to the show every now and then,

You learn that sometimes these phrases really aren’t connected

With what we associate them with,

So we were kind of curious where it came from.

That’s right.

You’re right in this case for sure.

Shiver Me Timbers doesn’t have anything to do at all with shivering.

Well, not the shiver that we all think of when we get cold.

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah, Alex, there’s another shiver in English that means to split into pieces, just to completely splinter.

And if you’re an old sailor on the ship and you’re talking about shiver me timbers or shiver my timbers,

What you’re talking about is splitting the big beams in the ship from either weather or attack.

Oh, right.

So if you shiver me timbers, you’re breaking apart my ship.

Yeah.

Yeah, see, I was thinking it had to do with, like, if they were sailing through a cold, you know, cold area, maybe the wood.

They were like shiver me tempers as in their boat.

Everything was so cold.

Yeah.

That’s what I always thought it was.

Are you old enough to remember the Popeye cartoons?

Yeah, yeah.

In fact, they used to be on with Forky the Pig.

I mean, I’m 26, so I think I caught it really at the tail end of it all.

I think, yes, the far tail end.

Yeah. But you may recall that Popeye used to run around singing shiver me timbers, blow me down if you ain’t the prettiest girl in town. So he was maybe a later popularizer of the phrase. But Robert Louis Stevenson also popularized that phrase in Treasure Island.

Oh, yeah. He’s in a couple of his books, right?

Yeah, a couple of his books.

But the phrase, as far as we can tell, actually goes back to the late 1700s.

And there were lots of different versions of it, like shiver my timbers, shiver me timbers, shiver my top sail, start my timbers, smite my timbers.

Interesting.

Yeah, the idea being just completely destroy my timbers.

Yeah, yeah, that’s funny.

Well, I was wondering, actually, after I initially inquired about it, if it’s just like one of those things that you maybe heard so many times as a young child through these little TV shows that you were watching and really not consciously aware of.

But then it’s like stuck in your head and it comes up every now and then.

You’re like, why do I want to say shiver me timbers?

That’s why we exist.

It’s not a bad mild oak, really.

Come on.

Right?

What’s going on here?

Yeah. As a mild oath, it’s not bad.

That’s right. You can catch yourself from saying something else.

You know, shit, permy timbers.

Or something like that, yeah.

Alex, something worth noting is that even in the early uses, it is almost always kind of a fake term.

There’s very little evidence that real sailors ever used this term.

It pops up in parodies and satire and theater pieces and jocular commentary and little ditties made by people who probably never set foot in the water once in their life, you know?

Yeah, it’s pretty cartoonish.

I couldn’t really see burly pirates saying, shiver me timber.

It’s like saying, I have a case of the Mondays at a construction site.

You’re going to get debt.

That’s good.

Exactly.

That was legitimate lingo there.

Exactly. You’re right. It’s very cartoonish. I think they would say something far more, shall we say, salty.

A little, yes. A little more color, for sure.

Yeah, definitely.

Thanks, Alex.

Well, interesting. Well, cool. Well, thanks, guys. I appreciate it.

Take care now.

Thanks a lot, Alex. Bye-bye.

Take care. Bye-bye.

Well, what phrases caught your eye or ear? Call us, 877-929-9673.

Or we’d love to read your comments in email.

That address is words@waywordradio.org, and we have a very active Facebook group.

Grant, do you know what a bed lunch is?

I’m thinking it’s when you have breakfast in bed and you go back to the bed to eat the crumbs.

I don’t even know.

Well, it has to do with eating around bedtime, actually, a bedtime snack.

Oh, bed lunch.

Yeah.

Isn’t that weird?

Like your mom might give you a bed lunch to settle your stomach before you go to sleep.

I don’t think it’s necessarily a good practice, but I’m saying a lot of people have a bed lunch.

Well, you know, that’s not the first time that I’ve heard lunch disassociated from the midday meal.

And a lot of businesses where people don’t work the standard nine to five shift, the meal that they’re permitted by law or by their company is called lunch.

Even if it happens at 10 o’clock at night or two in the morning, it’s still lunch.

Yeah, that’s true.

I’m going to go take lunch.

We’ve got language.

You’ve got language.

Share it with us, 877-929-9673, words@waywordradio.org,

Or tell us about it on Twitter under the handle W-A-Y-W-O-R-D.

It’s Words with Nerds.

Stick around as A Way with Words continues.

I buy tickets to see Friends’ bands.

I buy friends’ books. I buy their art.

I chipped in to help a friend buy a kiln for her new pottery business.

I’ve given to help De La Soul make their next album,

And to Spike Lee to make his next film.

That’s what we do, right?

We support things we like, things we believe in.

If you like this show, if you think of Martha and me as friends,

If you believe in what we’re doing,

Changing the way the world talks and thinks about language,

Please go to waywordradio.org slash donate

And help make A Way with Words.

We can’t do it without you.

Thanks.

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 once again by our quiz guy,

John Chaneski.

Hello, John.

Hi, Grant.

Hi, Martha.

Hey, John.

I told you guys one time,

I think that I do a pub trivia at One Star Bar in New York

With my friend Tony Hightower of Trivia NYC.

And one of our final rounds is always this name three round,

We call it, which is sort of like a tri-bond.

We give you three things,

And you try to tell me what those three things have in common.

Well, you guys like that so much,

I thought we would do it again.

Oh, boy.

Yeah, no, you were good at it, I remember.

Here we go.

I’ll give you three things.

You tell me what they have in common.

Now, most of these are word-related, since this is a show about words.

The first one is essay, excess, decay.

Essay, excess, decay.

Now, it’s funny.

The way you said it, it almost doesn’t work.

Oh.

But the way I say it, S-A-X-S-D-K.

S-A-X-S-D-K.

Oh, they all sound like they’re made of letters.

Yes, exactly.

They’re pronounced as two letters.

You pronounce it decay, which is nice and proper.

It takes away the hook.

That’s right.

Got it.

Okay.

Chintz, jungle, jamboree.

Chintz, jungle.

If you get in the ballpark, I’ll give you this one.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

Oh, they’re all from South Asia.

Yes, they are all from the Hindi.

Very good, Grant.

Nice work.

Dr. Street Pint.

Dr. Street Pint.

Well, they can all be abbreviated with two letters.

Yeah, be a little more specific and I’ll give it to you.

I don’t know how to be more specific.

First and last letters.

Yes.

Oh, there we go.

Nice.

Nice teamwork.

Way to go.

Baited, shrift, aspersions.

Short.

Baited breath.

Okay.

They’re like monogamous words?

Yes.

Yes.

They’re always used with one other particular word.

Yes.

Okay.

Gotcha.

Very good.

Very good.

Finally, fill, cool, hard.

They can all be names.

More specific, please.

Phil?

Like P-H-I-L?

No, it’s F-I-L-L.

Phil.

Phil.

Phil, cool, and hardy.

It does have something to do with names.

Oh, it does?

Yeah.

Oh, well, if you add a Y, you’ve got a Philly, a Cooley, and Hardy.

I don’t know.

That’s what I was thinking.

That’s interesting.

I’m thinking the same thing

Cool

I’ll give you a fourth one that I think will give it away

The word

Washing

Tun, Filton, Coulton

Hartton

Washington

They’re all presidents

Coolidge, Harding

Fillmore and Washington

Very good

You got them all

Cool

Way to go, guys.

You did fantastic on that Name 3 quiz.

Holy moly.

These are tough.

I love them.

Yeah, but you, oh, man, you guys were great.

Just great.

Talk to you later, John.

Take care now.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

And if you want to talk about any aspect of language whatsoever, this is the place to do it.

So call us, 877-929-9673, or send your observations and email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Marzen Grant.

This is Anne.

I’m calling from Connecticut.

Hello, Anne in Connecticut.

How are you?

Good.

What’s up?

I’m a social studies teacher at a middle school in New London, and I’m calling with a question

About A versus Anne Historian.

Growing up, I always heard the rule that when there was a silent H, you used Anne.

For example, Anne Herb.

But one day, I had another teacher of mine actually correct an assignment.

She said it should be an historian, which made me wonder if I’m pronouncing historian wrong or if there is just a special rule for that word.

Oh, okay.

So you’re wondering if the term is actually historian?

Yes, and if I’m pronouncing it wrong.

Oh, really?

If I am pronouncing it wrong, does that mean I’m also pronouncing a history book wrong?

Should it be an history book?

That’s really good.

Anne, it sounds like you already know the answer here.

Right?

Do I?

Yeah.

I think you do. You sound like you’re calling us for confirmation of some basic truths.

Well, I would like to think that I was right from the beginning, and it should be our historian.

Sure. You’re absolutely right.

Yes.

And everyone who is shouting at the radio right now, hold on a second.

Martha’s going to explain.

Well, yeah, the rule for a long time has been that it’s A before a consonant and an before a vowel or a vowel sound.

So you have a high school, a horse, a historian, unless you do pronounce it historian.

But if you do, I think that’s hysterical.

Well, some people do say, I mean, in other dialects of English, it’s probable, possible

That you might drop the H sound at the beginning of words like historian and historical and history.

But in the American English dialects, we don’t do that.

And so the proper article is A without the N.

It’s a historian, a history, a historical drama.

That’s honestly the first time I think Google has ever given me the wrong answer then.

Well, where did you go?

You Googled it?

Because we’ll talk to them.

I just Googled it, and several websites told me that I was wrong in saying a historian.

So I’m so glad to find out that my old English teacher was correct in telling me it should be us.

Why did they say that?

Did they give any kind of reasoning for that?

No, there was no reason why I was so excited to be able to ask you.

I’ll tell you, and I’ll try to do this without ranting, Anne.

I’ll tell you what happened.

There are some people that simply love to feel superior,

And when they find this rule which defeats our expectations,

They love to perpetrate it and propagate it in order to make other people feel like they’re wrong.

And there’s another whole class of people who just believe what they’re told without reanalyzing.

And so I’m so glad that you did your own research on the Internet and called us,

And now you’re getting the straight story here.

There is no reason to say anhistorian unless you don’t pronounce the H.

If your H is invisible in that word, then by all means say anhistorian.

But most Americans don’t say that.

Yeah.

And I feel so much better now being able to tell my students the correct way.

Yeah.

And you know what?

They’re going to get pushback.

They’re going to get people like your fellow teacher who swear up and down that they know the answer.

They don’t.

They’re wrong.

You know what?

This is something I tell people.

If you are looking for a style guide, Anne, if you’re looking for something for your desk or to recommend to a student, open it up to the part where they talk about this rule.

And if they don’t agree with what Martha has said, then don’t buy the book.

Absolutely.

Okay?

Because they’re wrong.

Any book, any topic.

If they don’t agree with me.

I don’t go that far.

I just say this particular one.

Anyway, that’s what I believe.

All right?

Yep.

Great.

Well, like I said, thank you so much.

It was a real honor to talk to you.

I love your show.

It’s our pleasure.

Thanks for calling.

You call us again sometime, Anna, all right?

Sounds like you are a happy camper, not an happy camper.

Very much.

Thank you.

Take care now.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Bye.

There are some people that swear it has something to do with stress, and some people who swear

It has to do with the vowel sound at the beginning, and there are some people who say, well,

It’s just, it’s idiomatic.

It doesn’t follow the rule.

It’s the exception.

Rubbish, rubbish, rubbish.

Prove it, prove it, prove it.

Yeah.

And call us, 877-929-9673, or send your ranty emails to words@waywordradio.org.

Came across a lovely word the other day, swevin.

Swevin.

Swevin.

I don’t know what that is. Sweat heaven? I don’t know.

Yeah, it’s a gymnasium.

It’s a fitness center.

Swevin.

It’s a dream or a vision.

Oh, is that like Old English?

What is that?

Was it Scandinavian or something?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It comes from Old English, meaning a sleep or a dream or a vision.

But I just love it.

It’s one of those words that, I don’t know, it just seems like it looks like what it is.

It’s like the word seven with a W in it.

Doesn’t it just say sleep and dream?

Swevin, yeah.

It’s something soft about it.

It makes me feel the summertime, lying in a field, drowsy, the insects buzzing, the daisies bobbing, and you fall asleep and wake up two hours later with a terrible sunburn.

Right.

But the dream is nice.

Right.

Falling into a swoon, I don’t know, swevin.

Oh, yeah, there we go.

Related to swoon, maybe.

I mean, it feels like swoon.

It feels like that.

And also heaven, a little nap in the middle of the afternoon.

I fell into a swevin.

We would fall into a swevin if you would give us a call, 877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Chris Taggart from Grove City, Pennsylvania.

Hey, Chris, welcome to the show.

How are you doing?

Thanks.

Thanks, good.

How are you guys?

All right.

What can we help you with?

Well, I’m a police officer, and when I first started, I heard a word that was used by older

Officers that I’d never heard before, and that word is hinky.

Is it H-I-N-K-Y?

Well, yeah, I think it is, but we don’t use it in reports.

Okay.

It’s a little bit of slang, and it’s used whenever, you know, you feel something like indescribably suspicious or, you know, something’s not right about someone that you can’t describe.

Like you get a funny feeling where the hair goes up on the back of your neck.

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.

And so your question was, what do we know about it?

Yeah, I mean, where did it come from?

Do we know?

I’d never heard it before I started in police work, and it’s usually used by the older guys.

I only knew it from police shows until I really got it into slang.

You will frequently find this, for example, on the old show NYPD Blue.

They used it all the time.

I can remember the character Sipowitz.

It’s one of his favorite vocabulary words.

But there’s some stuff that we know from the slang dictionaries about this.

The Historical Dictionary of American Slang actually has two entries that apply.

They’re kind of the same word.

Actually, if I was doing this entry, I’d probably combine them into a single entry.

But one of them spells it H-I-N-K-Y, and another one spells it H-I-N-C-T-Y.

And the older one is the Hinkty one, H-I-N-C-T-Y.

It dates back to the 1920s with two meanings that come up at about the same time.

One of them comes up in the African-American community in about 1920, 25.

So it means snobbish or haughty, fastidious even.

And then at the same time, coming up in police language and the kind of the language of the underworld,

It comes up and it means, just like you said, feeling suspicious or having caution

Or just feeling like something’s not quite right,

Which is typically how it’s used in scripted dialogues and television shows and movies these days.

And it’s not too much of a surprise that these two meanings should come up at once.

They’re a lot closer than you might think.

They both suggest in the observer a feeling of heightened sensation,

That what you’re observing is beyond the norm.

And that’s, so it doesn’t surprise,

And also slang when it starts out is often really variable

And has a wide range, you know, a big array of meanings

That are gradually winnowed down to one or two.

So Chris, is that how the older guys would say it?

Like, this situation’s hinky, there’s something hinky about this guy?

Yeah, that’s exactly right.

Yeah, and that’s used, you know, between officers.

You know, no one would usually say that in front of the public.

-huh, interesting.

And under the hinky entry without the C in the middle, H-I-N-K-Y, in the 1950s, some uses start to pop up in written language that showed that it meant nervous or jumpy.

So you might describe a suspect or a scull that way, right?

Where they, you know, there’s something hinky about this guy because he’s literally fidgeting.

He can’t control his blabber mouth.

He can’t look at you in the eyes.

It’s that sort of thing.

So it’s a little bit beyond suspicious.

It’s more about behavior.

Yeah, yeah.

That’s on point.

That’s right.

So that’s what we know.

I’m actually really surprised, to be honest, that it’s still out there in the field.

I always thought it was just kind of fossilized in TV shows at this point.

Well, I mean, maybe I work with some fossils, but don’t tell them that.

And my daddy was a cop for a long time.

I don’t remember it ever coming out of his mouth, but who knows?

Well, thank you very much.

That’s really interesting.

Thanks, Chris.

Take care now.

Yeah, call us again sometime.

Thank you, you too.

All right, bye-bye.

Well, we’d love to know the workplace jargon where you are. Call us 877-929-9673. Send it an email to words@waywordradio.org. And if you just can’t wait to share it, we have a very active group on Facebook. Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Tana from Vermont. Well, I wanted to talk about the word fever. So my husband and I both use the word differently. I grew up in Vermont, and I use the word when someone’s sick, you say, you have a fever, or I have a fever.

And he grew up in Memphis and also spent a lot of time in Mississippi.

And he says it like it’s an event, like capital F fever, like do I have fever or I have fever.

I’m wondering where does that come from?

Oh, that’s really interesting.

That’s a great one.

Most people don’t notice that subtlety, actually.

It kind of just slips right by them.

There are a couple of interesting things that happen when we talk about diseases.

Sometimes they take an article, sometimes they don’t.

Sometimes when they take an article, they take a definite article.

For example, you don’t have flu, you have the flu, and you don’t have a flu.

It’s just the flu.

And we can go down the list of diseases that work this way.

They are specific articles that work with them, or they don’t have one at all.

But there doesn’t seem to be a rhyme or reason.

With fever, though, we had a switch.

Somewhere between the 1940s and the 1960s, we went from mostly saying, in print at least, had fever.

Martha had fever and was in bed for three days, to saying had a fever.

Grant had a fever and he was back on the baseball field by morning.

And I think the major difference here, at least these days, is that if you have fever, you tend to be Southern.

And if you have a fever, you tend to be in the whole rest of the United States.

Now, outside of the United States, I don’t have any data, but that’s pretty consistent here.

And it looks like have fever is slowly waning even as we speak.

Year by year, have a fever with the indefinite article continues to grow and become more common.

One thing that I think I see is that it depends, and you kind of hinted at this in the way that you phrased it,

It kind of depends now on whether or not you feel like the symptom is a condition or an incident.

That is, is this an ongoing part of my nature or what’s happening to me?

Or is this a thing that I believe has a finite start and end time?

So it’s kind of about perspective as much as anything.

So like we talk about my daughter who has asthma, that she has asthma,

Or that she’s having an asthma attack.

Yeah.

Similar to that.

Something like that.

Okay.

So he comes by it quite honestly.

I was accusing him of being a little melodramatic.

We do have some diseases where there is also a disagreement just like with fever.

Diabetes is one of those.

So some parts of the country, again, tends to be in the South, they say, I have the diabetes or the diabetes.

They also might say, I have the sugar to mean diabetes.

But it’s really interesting to see that variability.

And I’ve also seen in the South the fever when you’re talking about a specific type like typhoid.

If it’s been going around and it’s the thing that’s much discussed.

Exactly.

That’s why you would need that definite article because it’s a very particular one in everyone’s mind.

Exactly.

Yes.

Nice.

That’s so interesting.

All right.

I know, right?

Language?

Who knew?

Well, thank you so much.

Yeah, sure.

Take care.

All right.

Thanks a lot, Tana.

Bye, Tana.

Okay.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673 is the number to call.

We’d love to hear from you.

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The address is words@waywordradio.org.

We talked early in the show about the word pessimism

And how there used to be a lot of pushback against introducing that word into the English language.

Here’s another word that really got people’s hackles up back in the 1930s,

The word contact as a verb, to contact somebody.

In 1931, an official at Western Union wanted to ban the use of contact completely throughout the company and said that, quote,

The loathsome person who invented this hideous vulgarism should have been destroyed in early childhood.

And he went on to say, so long as we can meet, get in touch with, make acquaintance of, be introduced to, call on, interview or talk to people, there can be no apology for contact.

I really think that rejecting neologisms is part of that human animal where we reject the outsider.

It is a way of being intentionally unwelcoming so that outsiders don’t try to interlope with your resources and your, you know, your womenfolk or that sort of thing.

I don’t even know. It’s just something caveman-like about that automatic rejection of new words.

I know, right? Yeah.

Yeah, it’s like you go to all the trouble to learn a pronunciation a certain way or a verb a certain way and then somebody replaces it.

Wow, yeah. So it’s like somebody coming in, I’m going to steal your food. Weird.

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Find us on Facebook, SoundCloud, Stitcher, iTunes, and just about everywhere you can get podcasts.

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.

The birch canoe slid on the smooth planks.

Glue the sheet to the dark blue background.

It’s easy to tell the depth of a well.

These days, a chicken leg is a rare dish.

I got the coded message, I will deliver the package to the bridge in Berlin.

Right? That’s what you told me, right?

Sure.

Put on my fedora and my trench coat and in the fog.

We’ll do the exchange.

Actually, I think you know what I’m really talking about.

These are test sentences devised by researchers at Harvard in World War II to test communications devices like microphones and headphones and cockpit transmissions, that kind of thing.

And the challenge for them was to come up with phrases that made sense, sentences that made sense, but that also sort of reflected the whole gamut of the sounds that we make when we talk.

And so these sentences, interestingly enough, have been used since then.

They’re used today by cell phone companies, the sort of can you hear me now kind of test.

And it’s really fascinating to me, partly because I think they’ve got this odd poetry to them.

Is it because they’re short words and they tend to be very Anglo-Saxon and the bluntness of the end syllables,

Like T on the end of a word is an important thing to check when you’re checking audio quality?

Yes, exactly.

I’m not sure why, but all of these sentences are composed of words that only have one syllable except for one of the words, which has two.

So, for example, you have, a rod is used to catch pink salmon.

The source of the huge river is a clear spring.

Help the woman get back to her feet.

Oh, nice.

Isn’t that something?

A pot of tea helps to pass the evening.

And so having these sentences that you use across devices and across tests means that you are comparing apples to apples.

So you’ve got cell phone A from the 90s and cell phone B from the 2000s and then the one from the 2010s.

And then you really know what you’re talking about when you compare their quality or their waveform, the output, that sort of thing, right?

Exactly. Yes. And you can find lots of them.

There are dozens of them and you can find them online.

They’re really quite beautiful, I think.

Yeah. And so we’re going far beyond the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs.

Right.

It’s not just the letters, it’s the phonemes.

Exactly. I mean, it reminds me of the language that you use to indicate letters, you know, alpha, bravo, Charlie.

And we’re getting close to what people who are public speakers do when they rewrite scripts so that they can be understood in big stadiums versus, say, in front of a brick wall, in front of 50 people in a comedy shop, right?

Talk about that.

Well, the same material that works in an intimate environment doesn’t work in a stadium because you have to take into account echoes, the fact that some parts of your language won’t be reproduced.

Like maybe the high-pitched stuff will be missing and the plosives will be suppressed and some of the fricatives will disappear.

You just got to take that into account.

Interesting.

Yeah, we have the same experience switching from print journalism to radio as well.

If you’re writing a radio script, it’s really quite different.

Much shorter sentences and much more simple language.

I heard Alex Bloomberg talk about this on a podcast,

And this is the guy who does Planet Money.

He’s from This American Life.

He did the startup podcast about starting up his company,

And he talked about how when you look at his scripts

Or even Ira Glass’s scripts,

You don’t actually see what looks like normal prose.

It looks almost like staccato,

Like a badly transmitted telegram.

It looks almost like a censored document with a lot of words taken out because that’s what sounds natural, even if it doesn’t look natural.

-huh. Yeah, when you’re talking, you fill in those lacunae.

Ooh, nice. Very good.

This is a show about language and how we use it.

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Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Carlita Costi.

I’m calling you from Bayside, Texas.

Welcome to the show, Carlita.

What can we help you with?

I’m wondering about the word avuncular, meaning like an uncle.

Okay.

I want to know if there is a way to say like an aunt.

I’ve never run across it.

To my knowledge, I’ve never heard it.

So you want a one-word answer instead of aunt-like or aunt-like?

Yes.

I live in South Texas.

We have a lot of Spanish speakers.

And I don’t know if you know the Spanish word tia, which means aunt.

Right.

Okay, well, there’s kind of a tia culture.

The tias, do almost everything, like from matchmaking to making tamales.

And so, you know, there’s kind of a need for that, like an ant, like a tia.

Oh, I see.

And I have wondered about the word, and I’ve never seen one,

And I wanted to see if there is one, and if not, maybe why not?

So on the uncle side, when we say avuncular, we don’t always mean exactly like an uncle.

We mean jovial, friendly, kind of goofy, maybe telling little silly jokes.

Kindly to younger people.

Kindly spoiling a little bit, but not overly invested in anyone else’s happiness.

Yeah.

And so aunt-like, where you don’t mean she behaves like your mother’s sister,

You mean that she is…

Sort of like a godmother.

Okay, got it.

Yeah.

So she’s a connector of people.

She’s probably very social.

She is bustling around the edges of every social situation trying to make everything work, that kind of person.

Yes, exactly.

Yeah, well, one suggestion I’ve seen for that term is antique, like A-U-N-T.

Oh, really?

But that’s got another layer, right?

Yeah, that’s got another layer.

That does have another layer.

Yeah, even with that U in there, I think it has another layer.

And I’m a proud aunt, so I don’t necessarily recommend that one unless you’re joking.

There is a similarly Latin-derived term that refers to somebody’s ant, and it’s matertural.

Okay, I’ve seen that one, but I’ve never heard it used.

Yeah, it’s not used commonly.

M-A-T-E-R-T-E-R-A-L.

There’s one historical use before the modern age when people started asking this question a lot.

I mean, outside of people asking if there’s a word for this, this word is almost never used.

Right.

Material.

I see.

It’s really interesting that in English we kind of have this little hole for that place, right?

That’s what I thought.

Would you like to propose one then?

No, I don’t have one.

All right.

You know, I would just say antish, I guess.

Mm—

Yeah.

It’s complicated, though, because when we say antish, there’s all the obvious jokes.

What do you mean?

She’s got six legs, things like that.

Yeah, right, right.

Okay.

Yeah, and it doesn’t sound as positive, I don’t think, as a vuncular.

No, it doesn’t.

No, no.

I would rather have a friendly word.

Well, matur-tra-ol is your answer, Carlita, but I’m afraid there’s no joy in that answer.

Okay.

All right.

Thank you.

You know what?

We have a whole world full of creative listeners who are bound to come up with something else,

And we’ll share those on future shows, all right?

Sounds good.

Thank you for your call, Carlita.

Bye-bye.

Thanks a lot.

My pleasure.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Well, we’d love to know what you think, so call us.

877-929-9673 or send your comments and email to words@waywordradio.org.

Here’s a quote I love from Terry Pratchett, who died recently, the author.

It’s still magic if you know how it’s done.

It’s totally true.

If you’ve seen Ricky Jay do his card tricks, you can watch them a hundred times.

I watched a video on Netflix and rewound a certain scene 20, 30 times, a lot,

To try to see if I could see how he was pulling out entire decks of cards,

Apparently out of nowhere.

Utterly amazing.

How does he do it?

It has to be magic.

Maybe it is.

It’s an amazing dexterity that comes from decades of practice and 200,000 repetitions.

It’s astonishing.

A lot of mistakes, too.

I loved it.

Yeah, it’s still magic, even if you know how it’s done.

We miss you, Terry.

Give us a call, 877-929-9673.

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Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Dalton Winslow.

I’m calling from Meriden, New Hampshire.

Dalton Winslow from Meriden, New Hampshire.

Hi, Dalton.

Welcome to the show.

What’s up?

I teach at a boarding prep school, Kimball Union Academy, and I teach one section of junior English.

I was just recently teaching Huckleberry Finn, which is full of all kinds of interesting slang.

And most of it is pretty understandable.

But there was one expression that was used at least twice that was a little bit confusing to me.

And the word was nation.

And I don’t know if it’s meant to be short for something like tarnation or some other mild swear, but it sounds something like that.

Dalton, how would it be used?

Do you have a sentence from the book?

Yeah, so I’m looking at the Norton Critical Edition, and I’m on page 140 of that.

And this is where the king and the duke have just come on the raft with Huck and Jim,

And they’re trying to pass themselves off as royalty sort of fallen from grace.

Embarrassed royalty, sure.

Right.

So anyway, so the duke first, you know, does his spiel and, you know, tries to pretend that he’s a duke.

And then the king is feeling sort of left out.

So his comment is, look here, Bilgewater, I’m nation sorry for you, but you ain’t the only person that’s had troubles like that.

Nice. I’m nation sorry for you.

I’m hung up on Bilgewater.

Look here, Bilgewater.

He claimed that he was the Duke of Bridgewater.

Okay, okay, okay. It’s coming back to me now.

These are two of the biggest rascals in fiction, these two guys.

The biggest rapscallions, yes.

And then they fall easily into the Mississippi River habit of boasting and bragging and trying to one-up each other.

Right.

And you eventually find out that Jim and Huck are kind of eye-rolling in the background,

Neither one believing but just going along so there’s not a fight, right?

Right, yeah.

There’s a second use.

Sure.

Jim uses it shortly after that when Huck is sort of giving him a skewed history lesson on what kings and dukes do.

And he says, Huck says, take them all around.

They’re a mighty ornery lot.

It’s the way they’re raised.

And Jim responds, but this one do smell so like the nation, Huck.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, both of these nations, you nailed it at the top.

It is a, how should I put this?

It’s a reduced form of a mild swear word.

So all of them originating from damnation,

Which was euphemized into tarnation and a few other nations

And shortened to nation as a way to still get across the idea that you are swearing.

However, it stopped being a swear.

It just started being a form of emphasis.

And we’ve talked about this on the show many times,

How so many words kind of become removed from their original meaning.

Their semantic value is bleached out or completely lost,

And all they’re used is kind of almost an adverbial way to emphasize what follows after.

Sure.

And so that’s exactly what nation is doing here.

We find this goes back well in the mid-1700s at least, this nation used in exactly this way.

And so it can be used to mean large or great or excellent or very or…

I’ll go back to the 1700s.

So in England or here?

Here, yeah.

No kidding.

This is very much an Americanism.

You will find occasionally popping up in British text,

But you’ll always find at the root of that there’s some American connection to that author.

Either they traveled in the U.S. Or they were born in the U.S., that sort of thing.

But it’s a very American term.

Thanks, Dalton. Really appreciate this.

Take me back to my childhood in one of my favorite books of all time.

It’s a great one.

Thanks for calling.

All right. Thank you.

All right. Take care.

Bye-bye.

Call us at 877-929-9673 if you’d like to talk about language,

Or you can send your stories about language to words@waywordradio.org.

A couple of weeks ago, we talked about the term insensible losses.

This is a medical term that has to do with things that you lose from your body.

For example, the vapor that comes out of your mouth all the time, but you don’t really see it until the air is cold, right?

And you have to be careful about your insensible losses if you’re, for example, hiking at high altitude.

And I was saying I wish somebody would write a poem about insensible losses because it seems like such a wonderful metaphor.

Well, we got a few.

Oh, yes.

I saw a couple of genius things in the inbox.

Yes, yes.

We got one from Aaron Harmon in Sacramento.

And he writes, I’m not in any way, shape, or form a poet, but your comment that there should be a

Poem about insensible losses tickled me and made me think about artists who were unappreciated

During their lives and found creative output reduced because of it. And he says he came up

With this poem during a break at work. He works as an accounting tech by day. So here’s his poem,

Insensible losses. Through time, great art, from hands unknown, unseen before the artist,

Dead. From hands no more, that write or rhyme, at last these works post-mortem read.

I like that. And what is his name? That’s Aaron Harmon in Sacramento.

Aaron Bravo. Nice, right?

Oh, that was one of the things I saw in the inbox. That is really nice.

Really nice. Well done.

Here’s to the artists who are working without the recognition they deserve.

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Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Marianne calling from Jackson, Wyoming.

Marianne, welcome to the show.

How are you doing?

Thank you.

What’s going on?

Good, thank you.

What can I help with?

Well, I was calling to ask about the word Johnny.

And that’s, I’m a nurse, and I went to school in Boston, went to nursing school in Boston, worked there, and worked in the East for the first six years I was a nurse.

And then moved west to Wyoming, and nobody uses that word out here.

What’s a Johnny?

Everyone says hospital gown.

Oh, hospital gown, the one with your butt exposed.

Yes, exactly.

When I used Johnny out here, people didn’t quite know what I was talking about.

So I said, oh, a hospital gown.

Can you grab me a gown?

That’s always an uncomfortable moment, right?

Yeah, it’s a different language.

Interesting.

So did they think that a Johnny was a bedpan or something?

No, people would just look at me like, what are you asking for?

And you didn’t encounter Johnny until you got to the hospital in Boston to do your work there?

I had used it all through nursing school.

We had always called a hospital gown Johnny.

In Boston, though?

Mm-in Boston.

And I used it in Vermont as well.

I worked there for a while.

Yeah, you would think that medical terminology would be standard across the country, but no.

It sounds like we’re talking regional here.

It is, yeah.

The bit of slang is really particular to Boston and the surrounding states that are influenced by it,

Which is an ever-shrinking sphere but sufficiently still encompasses New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut, parts of New York.

And it’s been going on for more than 100 years.

We find early uses of Johnny, Johnny gown, Johnny shirt,

Terms like that from the early 1900s,

But almost always associated with New England or Boston in particular.

So how did it get the name Johnny to begin with?

There are a lot of half-cocked theories on this.

Some suggest it makes it easier to go to the John,

Which I don’t think is correct.

It makes it more embarrassing to go to the John.

Some suggest that it’s derived from long Johns,

Which doesn’t really fit because they’re very different kinds of garments.

But we’re going to just put this firmly in the nobody knows category and just stop speculating about it.

Nobody knows, okay?

Okay.

There are a lot of Johnny terms.

There’s tons of slang where Johnny can mean a lot of things, and some of them we can’t even talk about on the air.

But it doesn’t seem to be related really to any of them.

Okay.

Well, thank you.

Yeah, sure.

Thanks for calling.

I really appreciate it.

Thanks a lot.

Bye, Mary.

Have a good day.

Give up the good word.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

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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.

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.