Skedaddle

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

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

Say you’re making a sandwich and you’re trying to open a jar of pickles, but that top is screwed on really, really tight.

So what is the name of the item that you reach to get it open, the item that’s round and flat and thin and rubbery?

What do you call that thing?

A gripper.

A gripper.

You call it a gripper.

I know there are other words for it, but I call it a gripper.

Lots of other words, according to folks on our Facebook group.

Madeline Morrow from Gulfport, Mississippi wrote, y’all know those usually rubber round things that are used to help open jar lids?

What does everyone call them?

And she always heard her mom call them a rubber husband.

This is not a thing that you get a stag party, is it? Or a bachelorette party?

I don’t know.

And Amy Rourke said she always called it her second husband.

Second husband.

This is my second husband here.

Because the men usually have bigger hands with a stronger grip and maybe are more likely to open the jars.

Or you can get them to do stuff.

Oh, I see, right.

Directing them.

-huh, -huh.

But it got me to thinking because I’ve had those things before and been so glad when I could reach for them.

Some people call them that rubber gripper thingy or just that gripper thingy.

And, of course, there’s always the popular Tuit, you know, T-U-I-T.

I don’t know that one.

It says printed on one of those things, Tuit.

And it’s like you get around to it.

You get around to it.

Yeah.

Maybe you had to be there.

Kind of, but I get it.

Well, what do you call it?

We’d love to hear about that or any other question or comment you have about language.

Give us a call, 877-929-9673, or send your stories about language to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

My name is Andrew.

I’m from Imperial Beach, California.

Imperial Beach, just south of San Diego.

Welcome.

Hi, Andrew.

What can we do for you?

I grew up at the beach, and I grew up surfing.

And one of the terms that we would use for waves when it was, like, big and stormy is the word gnarly.

Now, I talked to a guy once, and he said that he invented the word because he was some old cat, and he was like, yeah, my hands are all gnarled, and, you know, I invented the word gnarly, and that’s how it came to be.

So I was just wondering, and I called the show.

All right, so let’s break this down.

Gnarly, G-N-A-R-L-Y.

And what does it mean in surfing?

Surfing, it just kind of has this adjective for big, kind of like nasty, maybe like heavy.

You know, gnarly in general, it’s kind of hard to describe.

You know, like, oh, did you see that wave that was gnarly or that wipeout was gnarly.

It’s just kind of a generally used term.

It sounds like a situation that really puts an individual to the test, where it’s very complicated and possibly dangerous.

But because it’s a challenge, gnarly is good because you can meet that challenge head on and sometimes succeed.

Does that sound right?

Yeah, that’s pretty on the head there.

I like that.

Yeah, definitely.

And how old is your friend who said he invented the word?

Oh, man, it was just some old timer.

He was probably 40, 50 years old.

I ran into him in Santa Barbara one time.

Wait, 40 to 50 is an old timer?

He showed his hands because they were all messed up and gnarly.

And he was like, I invented the word.

First of all, 40 to 50 is not an old timer.

I’m sorry.

Thank you.

That was like 10 years ago, 15 years ago.

So about 10 years ago, a guy who, let’s say that he was 50 on the high end, said that he was the coiner of the surfing term gnarly, because we know he didn’t coin the other meaning of gnarly, because much older than him, right?

The idea of knobbly or rough or somehow contorted.

It’s possible.

Did he do a lot of surfing?

I barely knew the guy.

It was kind of like one of those things that a beach bum would tell you a story about.

The first uses that I know of of the surfing word gnarly, there’s one from 1977, which is a solid citation, which is in a South African context.

And there’s another from 1970, which I’m a little less sure of, that is also from South Africa.

However, this is a big however, American surfers were surfing some amazing breaks in South Africa in the early 1970s.

So it’s possible that even though that first use in 1970 that I can find is in South Africa, it could still be American.

Crazy.

So that guy would have been old enough to have been a surfer in South Africa in 1970.

However, I doubt it.

Because, you know, you and I, we all hear these guys taking these claims.

I coined this word.

You know, 99 times out of 100, you can prove them wrong with just dates.

You know, you weren’t born.

But in this case, it’s possible, but I would doubt it.

Well, what I picture is the water itself looking gnarly, you know?

Yeah, I mean, it’s definitely used to, like, the water looks gnarly or, like, that wave looks gnarly or, like, did you see that shark?

It can be used to, like, hey, did you see that accident on the freeway?

Man, that was gnarly.

You know, it’s one of those deals where it’s kind of interchangeable.

It’s not specific to the surfing world.

It’s just how I learned the words.

Yeah.

Well, outstanding.

I got to say, Andrew, this is great.

He probably didn’t coin it, but, you know, let’s just talk about surfing language anyway.

That’s fun.

It’s fun to do.

I really appreciate it.

Thank you again for letting me have the opportunity.

Thanks, Andrew.

Thank you, man.

Thank you.

Okay.

Bye-bye.

All right.

Bye.

877-929-9673.

I learned a couple of new slang terms from a friend of mine who’s been a flight attendant for years and years and years.

She and her peers call themselves sky hags.

Oh, I’ve heard that one.

Have you?

Yeah.

Sky hags.

Yeah.

And again, this is a group taking a negative term and claiming it for themselves.

You know, older flight attendants call themselves sky hags.

Did we talk about the BBC radio show?

I believe it’s called Cabin Fever, which is all about, it’s a comedy show.

It’s all about airplanes and aircraft and airports and everybody who works there.

No.

We didn’t talk about it.

There’s a ton of this kind of language, Cabin Fever.

Look it up.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Emily Undercoffler from Mammoth Lakes, California.

Hello, Emily.

Hi, Emily. Welcome to the show. What’s up?

Thank you.

My father always used to say this phrase to me that I always remembered.

It stuck.

And he was a man of few words, so he liked to speak very concisely.

And he always said to me, and here it is in my English, English accent, in promulgating your esoteric cogitations or articulating your superficial sentimentalities, beware of preposterous ponderosities.

And all that meant was don’t use long words.

He was a man of few words.

But when he spoke, we listened.

Where did he learn it? Do you know?

You know, I don’t. I don’t know.

But he was very well read.

He loved poetry.

I don’t know exactly where he read that.

It’s a good question.

And unfortunately, he’s not with us anymore, so I can’t ask him.

Let’s hear it one more time.

In promulgating your esoteric cogitations or articulating your superficial sentimentalities, beware of preposterous ponderosities.

Right.

So it’s somebody intentionally using big words to make the point not to use big words, right?

Exactly.

There’s something cool about this.

And I want to talk about meme culture for just a second.

Meme culture is where we have these images that we pass around and they have text on them.

And this is the way the internet, you know, makes its jokes, basically.

And ideas spread in this way, and images spread in this way,

And politics can happen in this way.

And this passage that you quote actually comes from something that feels a lot like meme culture.

There is an early example of this.

It’s the earliest that I know of, of a whole paragraph that starts with your sentence

And continues on in more of the same language in an education journal from 1875.

Oh, my goodness.

Wow, that’s fascinating.

Thank you.

Yeah.

And can I just read a little bit more of it?

So after your sentences, it says, or articulating your superficial sentimentalities and amicable philosophical or psychological observations, beware of platinous ponderosity.

Let your conversational communications possess a clarified conciseness, a compacted comprehensibleness, a coalescent consistency, and a concatenated cogency.

Eschew all conglomerations of flatulent garrulity, jejun babblement, and asinine affectation.

And there’s even more.

Oh, my goodness.

Yeah.

I wonder if that’s where he got it from.

Well, the thing is, that paragraph was passed around everywhere.

You can search Google Books for a version of your sentence, and you will find it again and again, journal after journal, newspaper after newspaper.

It’ll even appear in, like, satirical places.

And people sometimes edit it and they make their own versions or they shorten it.

And the closing line of it is often, in other words, talk plainly, briefly, naturally, truthfully, purely.

Keep from slang. Don’t put on airs. Say what you mean. Mean what you say.

And don’t use big words.

Oh, I love it. I’m sure he’s looking down from heaven and enjoying this very much.

Yeah, right. But I love the idea that he’s passed it on to.

Now, do you have children and have you passed this on to them?

Are nieces and nephews?

I have got children.

But, you know, I did try to pass it on to them, but I need to try harder.

Yeah.

Because it didn’t sink in with them.

Write it in their birthday cards every year.

I love that.

That’s fascinating.

That’s marvelous.

We’ll put this whole paragraph online.

It’s too much to read on the air, but it’s hilarious.

Oh, yeah, for sure.

Because somebody worked really hard on this.

And it is mostly author unknown.

This particular one from 1875 just says Hagerman at the end of it.

And I don’t know who Hagerman is or was.

Okay, but I’ll look it up.

That’s fascinating.

Thank you so much.

Yeah, sure.

This is why I love your show.

Thanks for calling.

I really appreciate it.

Thank you for sharing that linguistic heirloom, Emily.

Oh, you’re welcome.

Take care now.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Thank you.

Have a great day.

Goodbye.

Okay.

That’s wonderful.

So in other words, eschew obfuscation, right?

Exactly.

And you wonder if that particular two-word phrase originated from somebody who was aware of this particular bit that had been passed around.

I mean, we’re talking hundreds if not thousands of times that had been reprinted throughout the English-speaking world.

Newspapers, yeah.

What fun.

It’s pretty delicious to say, right?

Yeah, it is delicious to say.

And the point is still good, right?

Why use a big word when small words will do it?

I think it illustrates the point perfectly.

Bring us your linguistic heirlooms.

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

I learned a slang term from fellow hiker Jill Richardson recently, and that is gram weenie.

But that’s G-R-A-M and then weenie, like a hot dog, gram weenie.

I don’t know what that could possibly be.

I hesitate to guess.

This is a person who is obsessed with reducing the weight of his or her backpack.

Yes.

I know that moment.

Yeah.

Because if you’re on a long hike, you know, a through hike going hundreds of miles, that backpack can get really heavy.

And so there’s this whole group of people who try to cut down every single way they possibly can.

And they buy little scales, you know, like a postal scale.

Sure.

And they do things like, you know, cut your toothbrush in half or take a child’s toothbrush.

Or say you’ve got medication that’s in a foil, you know, a little foil thing with the little blisters.

You cut them out around the little foil.

That’s like the weight limits for spaceships, right?

Where they weigh every screw.

Exactly.

Here’s another tip.

If you want to reduce the weight in your backpack, you take moist wipes with you, you know, in little packets.

But you take them out at home and let them dry out overnight, and that makes them a little less heavy.

And then when you’re camping, you add a little bit of water.

I love that.

They’re called gram-weenies.

But I get the motivation, right?

Oh, totally.

But if I’m ever packing for a trip to Mars, I’m hiring these people.

877-929-9673.

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 that mysterious figure, our quiz guy, John Chaneski.

Hi, Grant and Martha. I should take this mask off and not be so mysterious.

Thank you.

Just go right ahead. Here you go. Hi. Oh, it’s nicer in here with the mask off.

It was him all along.

It’s me, John.

That’s right. Dun, dun, dun.

Today’s quiz takes the form of phrases that fit a pattern.

Now, we’ve done these before, blank and blank, or blank of the blank.

Now, today’s is blank in the blank.

Okay.

All right. For example, if I asked you to name the violent femme song featured in the movie Gross Point Blank that features the line,

Big hands, I know you’re the one, you’d say…

Something in the sun.

It’s blister in the sun.

Yes. Very good. That’s just our example.

So let’s find out what’s inside, what’s in. Here we go.

Pop Goes the Weasel is probably the most common tune used in what classic toddler’s toy that shares its name with a fast food chain?

Jack in the Box.

Jack in the Box, yes.

What phrase describes a person who possesses an object or an office they have no ability to use,

Something they have no need of, something that would be of great value to somebody better qualified to use it?

Dog in the Manger?

Yes, exactly.

Dog in the Manger.

Nicely done, Martha.

Similarly, what phrase is used to mean a minor irritation that spoils the success or enjoyment of something?

Fly in the ointment.

Yes, fly in the ointment.

It might inspire you to place a screen around your liniment, as it were.

Now, there are two different recipes by this name.

The English version consists of sausages and Yorkshire pudding batter with onion gravy and vegetables.

The American version consists of an egg fried inside a slice of bread.

Toad in the hole.

Toad in the hole is right.

Most Major League Baseball teams and many minor league ones schedule games where four-legged friends are welcome to attend.

They are known as Doggy Days or by what rhyming name?

Blank in the blank.

Bark in the park?

Yes, Bark in the Park.

Yeah, I’m hoping to bring our dog Goldie to the Brooklyn Cyclones Bark in the Park this year.

On a lighter note, the video for what 1984 rock song features the singer-songwriter

Inviting a young Courtney Cox out of a concert audience to cut a rug with him on stage?

Dancing in the streets?

No.

No, it’s a Martha and Vandellas or Bowie and Jagger song.

But no, it’s a Springsteen song.

Oh, it is?

You get the first part right.

Dancing in the dark.

Yes, dancing in the dark.

There we go.

What phrase, meaning a person or thing whose value is hidden, is used to describe Aladdin several times in the Disney movie and is the title of a song in the Broadway musical Aladdin?

Diamond in the Rough.

Diamond in the Rough, yes.

Shine in a piece of coal.

What delicious phrase describes something that is pleasant to contemplate but unlikely to be achieved?

Pie in the sky.

That’s right.

In 2006, England’s Barclays Bank trademarked what phrase to mean an automated teller machine, which apparently didn’t catch on because most people still use it to mean a small, modest, or obscure place like an inexpensive cafe or restaurant.

Hole in the wall?

Yes.

Really?

Yes.

Barclays trademarked hole in the wall.

Oh, you’re kidding.

To mean an ATM.

All right.

That’s the quiz.

I’m going to get back in the saddle myself and ride off.

You guys are fantastic.

Back in the saddle again.

Again.

Thanks, John.

Thank you, Grant.

Thanks, Martha.

Take care.

We talk about all aspects of language on this show, so call us with your stories.

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

You can find us on Facebook and Twitter.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Sam Baker.

How are you?

Hey, Sam, where are you calling us from?

I’m calling from Bowling Green, Kentucky.

Miss Martha Barnette did a lecture here not too long ago, and we got to talking and figured I’d call you guys.

Well, hi, Sam. Welcome to the show. This is Grant.

I didn’t get a chance to see you in Kentucky, but thanks for calling us.

We got into a fascinating conversation that sort of spilled over to after the discussion was over around emojis as linguistic phenomenon.

And my question after the lecture, which we didn’t get to talk about, was could you all etymologize the word emoji as it’s so pervasive in texting today?

So the etymology of the word emoji, that is a really good question.

And the reason it’s a good question is because lots of people misunderstand its origins.

Do you have any theories?

We sort of touched on it being Japanese, but I also have another theory that it’s more emotive.

It’s coming from the word emotion, although that’s about as far as I can get.

That’s pretty close to the common theory.

The common theory, people suppose without looking it up, that emoji came from the word emoticon,

Which stands for emotion icon, which are the old text symbols that we make with punctuation.

Some of us still do.

But it turns out that it’s just a coincidence that the word emoji looks a little bit like the word emoticon.

It isn’t from the word emotion or emoticon or emotive or anything like that.

It’s actually made up of two Japanese words.

The first prefix, e, means something like picture.

And emoji, M-O-J-I, means something like character.

So it’s a picture character.

Right on the nose.

And we borrowed it from the Japanese kind of with the symbols because they really pioneered this.

Like, we always have to separate out the history of the word from the history of the idea.

But before the word emoji was really used in this way,

The Japanese were putting digital symbols inside digital text,

Kind of the same way we do now, like where you have, like, standard characters

And then a picture in line with it.

Long before we were, they had a system in the 1950s, even,

Where a bunch of newspapers got together and agreed on a baseball symbol

To use when they were sending, like, the baseball scores

And the baseball reporting around to all the different news outlets.

A happy baseball?

No, it’s just a baseball.

It’s got a nice little circle with the stitching kind of.

It’s very clearly a baseball.

But that’s the 1950s, far before you would think that that kind of thing would have been happening.

Okay, so in other words, that word is divided in a different way.

We divide it into emo and G, right?

Yeah, exactly.

But it’s really E-moji.

The other thing we should talk about, Sam, over here, do you pluralize that word?

What’s your plural for emoji?

I’m just going to tack an S on at the end.

That’s what I do.

It’s emojis.

Yeah, and we’re really seeing this kind of settle out in English

Since the word is relatively new,

Where it hasn’t been conclusively decided by English speakers

Whether or not we’ve all agreed upon emoji as the plural

Because it kind of behaves like some romance languages

Where the plural ends in an I,

Or if we’ve decided we’re just going to tack an S on it

And make it behave more like an English plural.

Interesting.

Well, if I could text you anything, it would be a head exploding.

It blew my mind.

It’s good, right?

Oh, this is such a delightful thing.

We’ll know in 50 years without an emoji or permanent.

I wonder if they won’t just be like some of the fads of the past and just kind of like wither away to nothing.

Or maybe just one or two will stick around.

Well, that’s a good question.

I find myself using them more and more.

My iPhone automatically fills them in.

If I type cookie, I get a little picture of a cookie.

I almost never use them because a few of the people I correspond with use them.

Sam, next time you have a brain buster, do give us a call.

And say hi to everybody there at Western Kentucky University.

I most definitely will.

Okay.

And thanks for having me on, guys.

Thanks, Sam.

Okay.

Thanks, Sam.

Bye.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

And talk to us on Twitter @wayword.

Hello.

Welcome to Way With Words.

Hi.

This is Emily.

Hi, Emily.

From Fisher’s Indiana.

Well, welcome to the show.

Thank you.

What’s going on, Emily?

Well, it’s kind of funny.

I had a situation where I was talking to my husband and I said something about, well, I don’t want to be Nebby about that.

And he said, Nebby, what are you talking about?

What is Nebby?

And I realized that I’ve had these two girlfriends for 25 years who’ve used the word Nebby.

And now I’m starting to use it.

And I don’t really know what it means, but I just kind of use it as if I do.

So I thought, well, I will.

I said, I need to contact Boy With Words and ask them what that means.

Yes, you do.

And so how do you use it?

What’s your definition for it?

You know, I think it sounds like picky, like when you’re nitpicking about something.

That’s how I use it.

But I think my girlfriends use it to mean gossipy.

So they’ll often say something like, before they say something that might be a little gossipy,

They’ll say, oh, I hate to be nebby about that.

But somehow I’ve adopted it to mean like picky, like I’m really picky about something.

So I’m being very nebby, I know, like pretentious and picky about food or something like that.

Okay.

Okay.

And where are your girlfriends from?

Did they grow up in Fishers?

They did not.

They grew up in Michigan.

But I did ask them something, and they said they had a friend.

Because I asked them, where did you hear it?

And they said they heard it from a girlfriend who lived in Pittsburgh.

Boom.

Yes.

If I had a bell, I would ring it.

Why are you laughing?

There you go, because both Grant and I were sitting here just hoping that you were going to say Pennsylvania.

That’s so funny.

They remember the first time they heard it.

They were quite young.

They were in grad school, and they heard it, and they thought it was such a fun word,

And so they just started using it.

Obviously, now I’m using it, and I don’t even know what I’m talking about.

Oh, okay.

So they picked it up from their friend who is from western Pennsylvania.

Perfect.

Yeah, Grant and I are really thrilled because this is a term that is pretty much particular to that area.

Nebby meaning nosy or interfering, that kind of thing.

Snoopy.

Snooping.

Yeah, that’s a good word for it or inquisitive.

But nosy is a particularly good definition.

It is a particularly good definition because nebby comes from Scotland and Ireland and parts of northern England where neb means nose.

Or nib, N-I-B.

Yeah, yeah, like the nib of a pen.

It’s like the pointy part, the nose.

Yeah, you know, it’s funny because I kept thinking, is it nebulous?

But that would make no sense in terms of how I’m using it or they’re using it.

Right, right.

And I thought about the nib of a pencil or, you know, a pen, but then I didn’t know how that fit.

But nose makes a lot of sense.

The Scots and the Irish have long used it to mean the beak of a bird, too.

Yeah.

Oh, how do they spell it?

N-E-B.

Or N-I-B, either one.

Either one.

So if you’re nebby or nebby-nosed or nibby, then you’re sticking your nose into other people’s business.

And over time, that word came to mean more like being brusque or sort of, you know, cheeky.

Yeah.

So then from accidents of immigration and settlement, it’s stuck in Pennsylvania, but pretty much nowhere else.

That’s so funny.

Well, no wonder nobody else knows what it means.

I’ve asked people before and they’re like, I have no idea.

I’ve never heard that.

Yeah.

And they might tell you nebb out, which means to mind your own business.

Nebb out.

Butt out.

Oh, how funny.

That’s really fascinating. yeah

Emily, I’m so happy that you had done your own field work and had sussed out that particularly important bit of information that it ultimately came from somebody from Pennsylvania.

That’s perfect.

Emily, thank you so much.

This is wonderful.

You’re welcome.

Thank you.

All right.

Take care.

I will now know what I’m talking about.

Yeah.

Take that back to your friends in Michigan.

Bye-bye.

I will.

Bye-bye.

So 1737 is one of the early uses of the word nib to mean nose, right?

So she is using a word that has, you know, a little under 300 years of history.

Yeah, yeah.

More or less.

How about that?

And very, very picturesque, right?

Very picturesque, yeah.

And I love these words that take us back to who we were when we first got to this country, you know, these different roots.

And it’s not just the food words from the Native Americans, but it’s these strange little household words and the interpersonal words that come from the deeper parts of the dialect history.

Fossilized into the language.

877-929-9673.

A couple of months ago, I ran into a woman and her teenage daughter.

And the teenage daughter was really, really self-possessed, really almost like an adult talking with me.

And her mother said, oh, yeah, we’ve been world schooling her.

World schoolers are people who take their kids off around the world for a year or for more than that.

You know, they take a gap year.

Oh, yeah. I know families like that who’ve done the sailing around the world with their kids.

And I know a family that went to Italy and their kids are all great.

And I learned so much about food and culture and language.

Right.

And there are tradeoffs, of course.

But there is this whole growing group of parents who are world-schooling their children.

And they’re finding each other online and talking about it.

I love it.

What I wouldn’t have killed as a child to be world-schooled.

Oh, can you imagine?

Yeah.

I wanted nothing more than to leave home and go do something else.

877-929-9673.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hello.

How are you?

This is John Reber from San Antonio, Texas.

Welcome to the show. What can we do for you, John?

There is a phrase or a term used down here in South Texas that is called Las Canibulas in Spanish.

And basically from what my grandmother and my aunt told me,

It is a period of the month in January into February for all 12 months of the year,

Basically rotate through the 12 days right there.

The year starts on the 31st and goes to about the 11th or 12th of February.

So let’s just say this term so everyone hears it clearly.

It’s Las Caniculas, right?

That’s correct.

C-A-N-I-C-U-L-A-S?

I believe that is correct.

They taught you that in January there were 12 days

Which kind of recapitulated the weather and the seasons of the year in those 12 days, right?

The whole year kind of condensed.

That’s right. For the coming year.

Yeah, that’s really interesting.

There’s so much to say about this.

Las Caniculas has this strange etymological history,

And I’m sitting across from somebody who’s probably just dying to talk about it.

So the canicula is related to the word for dog for a really important reason, right?

A little dog.

A little dog, right?

Yeah, yeah.

That’s correct.

It’s actually related to our term in English, dog days, which is a period of the year where it’s super, super hot.

And we get that from the Latin term canicula, which means little dog, which refers to the star Sirius, S-I-R-I-U-S,

Which at a certain time of the year kind of rises with the sun or follows the sun.

And so it’s like the sun’s little dog.

And so in the time of the Hippocrates, say roughly 400 BC or so, they believed that the rising of Sirius to a certain point meant that the weather would change.

Now, in the centuries since, the stars rise differently throughout the year.

And as people have moved to different latitudes throughout the world, Las Caniculas has started to mean something different.

And at the time of Hippocrates, who was a doctor, as you may remember, he believed and others believed that a variety of vapors and humors would cause illness.

The heat or the steam or the rain or whatever was happening could make you sick.

And the Las Caniculas was a bad time of year.

But here in the New World, depending where you are in the Spanish-speaking countries, including most of Central America and Mexico and parts of South Texas,

It’s either the first 12 days in January or any 12 days in January or 40 days starting at the middle of July

Or some days involve September.

They have different days on the calendar where they all use the same term, Las Caniculas,

And they’re looking for particular weather patterns that happen season after season, year after year,

So they know it’s time to reap or to plant or to do nothing.

So it’s a crazy, interesting mix of folklore and superstition all going back thousands of years to the Romans.

I believe that.

Yeah.

I love that idea of the first 12 days of January kind of setting out the pattern for the whole rest of the year.

Kind of like an almanac.

Running the gamut, yeah.

An almanac condensed in these few days.

Well, cool.

That’s everything that we know about Las Caniculas.

But it’s actually, I haven’t found a real definitive source on it.

But if you come across one, by all means, send it to us.

I’m just interested really in the myths and folklore of Latin America and what the different traditions.

Because the Mexican tradition is different than the Guatemalan tradition, which is different than the Costa Rican tradition, which is different than the South Texas tradition.

They all have their own different patterns and kind of understanding of Las Caniculas.

Thank you, Brian. And also, Martha.

All right.

Take care now.

Bye-bye.

So here, just to kind of summarize a little bit of this, if I may.

In parts of Mexico, it’s 30 or 40 days.

And they’re said to start on the 14th or the 18th of July.

And the first day is said to predict how the weather will be for the whole rest of the season.

And if it starts with rain, then you’ll have 40 days of rain.

If it starts with heat, you’ll have 40 days of heat.

And the temperatures in parts of Mexico are going to be as high as 115 degrees for days on end.

So some people really take this very seriously, and they know what they have to do if that first day is really hot.

They’re going to prepare for the next 39 days.

But again, it’s very different about where you are.

One state of Mexico, it starts on the 14th, another on the 18th, and some people approximate it.

It’s all really cool.

Yeah, so it goes back to the dog star Sirius, which is in Canis Major.

Canis like canine.

Which is where we get the word canicula, which means little dog.

Right, canicula, yeah.

And here we are in this country doing something that the Romans did.

Yeah, crazy.

Looking at the stars to calculate the weather.

Yes, and it’s connected to Sirius satellite radio.

It’s got a little dog.

Oh, there we go.

Nice.

In its logo.

Minds blown.

I know, right?

And Sirius Black could transform himself into a dog in the Harry Potter books.

Is that right?

Yeah.

See, I read him in Spanish, so I missed some of that.

Well, he was still a dog in Spanish.

Hit us up on Twitter, W-A-Y-W-O-R-D.

Support for A Way with Words comes from Jack and Caroline Raymond,

Proud sponsors of Wayword, Inc., the nonprofit that produces and distributes this program.

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.

There is a book out right now that is making me wish I was still a dictionary editor.

Oh, I know what it is.

I still think of myself as a dictionary editor, but I haven’t done full-time dictionary editing for, I think, a little more than 10 years.

This book is Word by Word by Corey Stamper, published by Pantheon Books.

And she is an editor at Merriam-Webster, one of the finest dictionary makers in the English-speaking world.

And she talks at length in this book, chapter by chapter, not only about her own relationship to dictionary editing and to the language in general,

But the inside story of what it’s like to work there and what it’s like to become that person that people look to for language guidance and language advice.

The reason this makes me feel like I want to go back to becoming a full-time lexicographer is that she writes about it with such gusto.

She seems to really enjoy the work, even though in places she’s peevish and in places she’s profane.

But she’s also self-effacing.

She’s academic.

She’s witty.

She’s erudite.

She brings her own life into it.

She talks about mother-daughter interactions.

She talks about friends at work.

She talks about people who no longer work for the dictionary but have left their imprint on it.

There’s a sense of love that she has for her co-workers and the institution of the dictionary.

And Merriam-Webster is a company that’s existed for a long time.

But I think overall, I think it’s her love of English that really pulled me in here.

She really appreciates it.

She talks about revising entries that personally offended her.

And gives her opinion on what it’s like to go in and realize, oh, this is a sexist dictionary entry.

We must fix this.

And I am the person who is here right now who can do this job.

It’s really nice.

The other thing is she talks about, which I did not have when I was a dictionary editor.

I worked for Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press and some other publishers.

She talks about the unbreakable rule, which is there must be silence on the editing room floor at all times.

You really have to leave the floor to go have a conversation in another room.

Like you don’t speak on your phone at your desk.

Right. That’s a big no-no, right?

It’s a big no-no.

So there’s like this tomb-like silence.

It’s not a tomb. No, it’s not a tomb.

It’s working together alone.

It’s the glory and the joy of working together alone.

Because you know that all these people that you can see in their cubicles are doing what you’re doing or some version of it.

And together you’re making these dictionary products that will guide the way people speak in a work in the real world.

There should be a word for that.

For what?

Working together alone in silence.

Working together alone in silence, yeah.

Maybe it’s Merriam-Webster-ing.

It’s kind of like the monks, though, who’ve taken an oath of silence who are all sitting there carefully, you know, doing their scribe work on parchment, right?

I want to share one part from the book that really, to me, demonstrates the tone that she takes with the whole book.

And this part is about one of the dictionary editor’s tasks, which is finding sample sentences, and she calls them verbal illustrations.

And she writes, they say that the best editors have a sharp, sharp eye and a filthy, filthy mind.

And they are right.

Editors are, at heart, 12.

If we can construe something as a fart or sex, or a fart and sex joke, we will.

This is a double-edged sword as you write verbal illustrations.

The elevation of your adult duty is constantly pulling against the gravity of your native gutter thinking.

Duty must prevail, because duty ostensibly pays the bills.

And so she talks about this frank approach to language.

It’s like if you’ve ever had a family friend and in their family they’re all comfortable with nudity and your family isn’t,

The dictionary editors that I know, all of them, have this really frank relationship with the language where all of the things are exposed

And all of the undercarriage is visible in a way that it isn’t to anyone else except maybe some linguists.

But very honest approach and accepting it for all of its failings and all of the broken parts of it and just writing it down saying, yep, that’s how English is.

It is actually broken in that way.

That’s how it is.

That’s how it is.

Nothing’s off limits.

Nothing’s off limits.

In any case, this book is Word by Word by Corey Stamper, published by Pantheon Books.

I highly recommend that this is, out of all the books that I have about dictionaries and dictionary making, this is the only one that really made me feel excited about the trade.

And the other thing that it’s going to do, besides making me feel like I should go back to full-time dictionary editing, to full-time lexicography, it’s going to make you feel like you should become a lexicographer.

But the sad news is that it is a shrinking business.

And there may be more members of Congress than there are full-time English lexicographers in the entire world.

It’s just not that open anymore.

Oh, no.

So what do those of us with sharp eyes and dirty minds do?

You know what you do?

You make your own folk dictionary.

Make them.

We love them.

Lexicographers love it.

When the amateurs do their own individual work, and then it’s recorded in history,

And then we can cite it, and you become a part of the language because you made a dictionary too.

Okay. Well, we talk about words on this show, all aspects of language,

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

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Kaya from Wisconsin, from Oakfield.

Hi, Kaya. Welcome to the show.

Hello.

What’s up?

I’ve always been wondering why, when they named months, they named September the ninth month and not the seventh month.

And like October the tenth month and not the eighth month.

That’s a really good question.

Yeah.

Are you a student of Latin?

No.

Just knowing that set means seven and oct is eight.

And DEC usually stands for ten.

And so I was just wondering why the months were named as they were.

Yeah, it’s a great question.

And it has to do with the very messy and very long history of trying to make sense of time

And trying to figure out how to divide the calendar up, divide up the year.

Those numbered months are reflected in an early Roman calendar that was only 304 days and had only 10 months.

Yeah, and it started with Martius, like our March, which was named for the Roman god of war, same root as Mars, you know, the planet Mars.

And it went Martius, Aprilus, Maius, Junius.

And then after that, it started numbering the months.

So the fifth month was Quintilus, and the sixth month was Sextilus.

And then you go on to September, October, November, and December.

And so they’re all numbers that come directly from Latin.

And then later on, the month Quintilis got changed to Julius in honor of Julius Caesar.

And August has its roots in Caesar Augustus.

And there were 12 months in the year after that.

Well, so they added January and February, right, at some point.

And those were tacked on to the beginning.

But the beginning of the year wasn’t January, right?

Right.

Until what, the Gregorian calendar came about?

It was, yeah, it was a while, yeah.

Well, that makes sense, starting the year with March.

Yeah.

You know, and then they, yeah, that makes sense then.

And eventually that calendar got adopted in the British Isles.

Before that, they were using Anglo-Saxon terms for months, which are kind of cool.

The month of February was Solmanoth, which means mud month.

And May was three milcha, which basically is the month of three milkings because it was the time of year when there were so many flowers and the cows were eating so much that you could milk your cow three times a day.

So your observation about the hidden numbers in the months was a good one.

Thank you.

Yeah, there you go.

That really helped.

There’s a good book on this by a classmate of mine, David Duncan.

It’s called Calendar, and the subtitle is Humanity’s Epic Struggle to Determine a True and Accurate Year.

So it really was an epic struggle.

It’s varied from time to time over hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years.

So you might check that one out.

Okay, thank you.

Okay, well, thank you so much for calling.

Thank you.

You’re welcome.

Bye-bye.

You’re welcome.

Bye-bye.

What’s astonishing to me is that the Gregorian calendar, named after Pope Gregory XIII,

Wasn’t instituted in the English-speaking world until 1752.

That’s late.

That’s really late, right?

And so anytime you look at older dates and older periodicals, books, what have you,

You got to wonder how they got that date and what it actually means.

If they say, oh, we celebrated the new year, do they mean March 25th or do they mean January 1st, right?

Yeah, what a challenge.

I can’t figure out how they ever figured it out.

I assume it’s kind of like languages now, right? Just a great deal of translation.

Maybe you carried something in your wallet that had like a little translation key. Or it’s like metric to imperial where everything was cups to ounces and so forth.

877-929-9673.

We’re reading about snakes. Snakes. Snakes. Snakes. No. Why did it have to be snakes? No, it’s sneck. It’s S-N-E-C-K. Do you know what a sneck is? It’s a latch. It’s a dialect word from Scotland. And so a sneck draw is a latch lifter that is a sly, crafty person. Or a sneck lifter can be a burglar. It can be a ghost. But we heard from Bob Gorin in Philadelphia who said that he has a distant relative in northern England who uses the word sneck lifter in a different way. He says that in his family they use snacklifter to mean a bottle of wine or a box of chocolates that you bring to the dinner party for the host. It gets you in the door.

Oh, interesting. Isn’t that cool? The reason I said snake is that in the online communities where people share cute photos of animals, S-N-E-K is often the kind of cutesy way of talking about snakes. Snack. Yeah, there are a lot of those, right? Yeah, yeah. So snacks, my snack.

877-929-9673.

Hi, you have A Way with Words. Hi, this is Charlie. I’m actually in Lake City, Florida right now on a helicopter detail with the U.S. Forest Service. Now, where is Lake City, Florida? Northern Florida? Yes, it’s north central Florida. North central, okay. What’s on your mind? With the Forest Service, I am a wildland firefighter. I’m also a chainsaw instructor and a volunteer coordinator. And I give classes. I work with fire crews and volunteer crews, which are quite the mixture of men and women. And the question arises when you’re addressing the group, small or large, is how do you address both sexes in the group equally without constantly saying he and or she, he or she?

Well, that’s a good question. Charlie, are you getting feedback from your students? No, not really. It’s just it would be nice to have a creative way that the language could use such a word. You all work pretty well in the South, but you can always work in every situation. Right. And so you’re talking to them directly, and you might say something like, when you first turn on your chainsaw, make sure you do X, Y, Z, right? Mm—

Or I’m trying to think of sentences where you’re running up against this problem. Can you give me some examples? Okay. Let’s say when the chainsaw operator starts their saw, he or she should engage the chain break first. Okay. There is an answer on this. There is an answer for this, Charlie, and it’s the word they. They? Yeah, the word they. They and their. We use a singular they in English and have for 400 years. Now, I know there are some people who are cringing right now because they think that they can only be plural, but English is loaded with words that have more than one use, more than one meaning, heavily dependent upon the context. And they recently has been accepted by many grammar authorities, even the most conservative ones, in many uses, including this very one. This exact usage where the gender of the person you’re talking about is variable or unknown. You can use they as a singular pronoun to stand in for that person.

-huh. I see he slash she in text a lot. Yeah. So it could be written just as well and have the same firm meaning. Charlie, does they feel comfortable to you? No, it really does in all situations, particularly when you’re aggressing a group of, you want to say hello or hey guys or would you guys. And guys usually, this is all right to address male and female, but in itself, guy usually means male in the cases I’m familiar with. That use is grammatically distinct from the other example. But when you’re directly speaking to a group, you are addressing them. It’s called the vocative use. You guys is very common but colloquial in English. And so I understand that some people push back because guys can be in other uses only gendered male. But in that particular use where you are addressing a group, a mixed gender group and talking to them, it is very common even among women to say you guys. So, Charlie, you have our blessing to use they and their in those cases and just focus on the content of what you’re saying about the chainsaws and how to use them. I’m thinking if your lessons are blood free, you’re great. You’re doing well. And maybe the grammar is not quite as important. Yeah, no rangers were harmed in the giving of this lesson. So, Charlie, just relax and convey the content about chainsaw safety. Okay, yeah. All right, and thank you for the work you’re doing, and thanks for calling us. Labor of love. Thanks, Charlie. Take care now. Okay, thank you very much. All right, take care.

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

Hi, you have A Way with Words. Hi, my name is Brittany. I’m from Houston, Texas. Welcome to the show, Brittany. How can we help you? I have actually a quick question about the word skedaddle. Skedaddle. Yes. I have convinced myself that it is an entire sentence kind of squished down into one word. And the best way to kind of describe it is by using an accent. So I think that it sounds like, let’s get out of here. So like, let’s get out of here. Like, let’s skedaddle. Oh, interesting. I have never heard that theory. I have never heard that theory either. So you came up with this theory on your own? Yes, all by myself. And I’m sure that it is probably wrong. Yeah, probably. But it’s beautiful. I’ve never heard that one before. Never heard it before. It’s got some thinking behind it. Get out of here. It’s not. Well, thank you for being nice. It’s not the origin of it. But, you know, you join a huge list of people who think that they’ve come up with the origins of skedaddle, and they are mostly origin unknown. And we’ve had good, reliable etymologists try to trace it to Greek, and that’s not right. We’ve had people claim that it comes from a variety of languages around the world, including Native American languages and Yiddish, and that’s not right. The best theory that we have, the one that is almost certainly correct, is that it comes from a Scots dialect word meaning to spill or to spill in a clumsy way. And there’s one really descriptive citation in the dictionary of the Scots language that says something along the lines of spilling milk on the way to market and then kind of trampling it as you go. It’s like it’s being careless, kind of rushing so much that you’re just making mistakes and stuff. But even then, that’s kind of iffy because the meanings don’t really match up. But the word is skeindaddle or skedaddle. And there’s a variety in other parts of the dialect regions of the UK. There was a skittle is a very similarly defined word.

Wow. Yeah, right? I was not expecting it to be Scottish. That’s pretty awesome. Skendaddle. What probably happened is the word came over to the United States with the Scots and the Scots-Irish. And then during the American Civil War, for some reason, skedaddle became hugely popular. It shows up in letters and newspapers. And it was re-exported back to the British Isles, where it was reintroduced with this new meaning to run away in a hurried fashion. Alongside the older meaning, which had stayed there all along. And there’s probably a lot of that during the Civil War. Yeah, that’s amazing. Yeah, there was an incredible amount of interplay between the British Isles and the American states during the American Civil War. We forget that all this materiel that was coming back and forth and ships and commerce that was kind of rerouted because of the war, a lot of it ended up in the British Isles. So naturally, the Americans and their language went over there. Well, thank you so much for sharing that. Yeah, sure. Thanks for your call. Really appreciate it, Brittany. Absolutely. You guys have a good one. All right. Take care. Bye. Bye-bye.

What word has got you curious? Call us about it, 877-929-9673, or send it in email to words@waywordradio.org.

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Grant and I are out to change the way we listen and think about language, and you’re making it happen.

Thanks also to senior producer Stefanie Levine, director and editor Tim Felten, director Colin Tedeschi, and production assistant Emma Kelman in San Diego.

In New York, we thank quiz guide John Chaneski, and that master of keeping it real, Paul Ruist at Argo Studios.

A Way with Words is an independent production of Wayword, Inc.

From the Recording Arts Center at Studio West in San Diego, I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

So long.

Bye-bye.

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