Slang This! with Greg Pliska

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

And I’m Martha Barnette, and it’s time for our weekly slang challenge where we try to stump a member of the National Puzzlers League.

Today’s contestant is an unknown from New York City named Greg Pliska.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait, who?

Greg Pliska from the National Puzzlers League, I believe.

Don’t we usually get puzzles from him?

You know, you’re right. Come to think of it.

Greg, are you there?

I’m here. I’m here, Grant and Martha.

I was going to say, it’s good to hear your voices again.

Great to hear yours.

Yours, too.

How is the baby?

I understand that you have a recent addition to the family.

Yes, she is.

She’s actually six months old now.

She’s absolutely adorable.

She solves crossword puzzles almost as fast as I do.

Oh, my gosh.

She’s at random, right?

She just dabs a little ink here and there, and it’s all solved, right?

Well, she fills them in drool, actually.

All right.

Well, welcome back from paternity leave.

Greg, we have to put you through your paces.

Usually we ask our contestants to give us their favorite slang term.

I know, and I’ve been giving it some thought.

And I think my favorite slang term is the word clam.

Clam.

As we use it in the music business, it refers to a wrong note.

Kind of like catching a crab.

Well, it creates a lot of crabs in the audience if you hit too many clams.

And actually, there’s a term that you hear every now and then called a clam bake, which is, of course, a really egregious performance filled with clams.

Nice. Nice.

You never have any of those, right?

Me, never. No, no, no.

I had the nickname for a while, Mittens Pliska, which… you figure out what that means.

Just when you were playing the keyboards?

Yeah, absolutely.

-huh. That’s nice.

If you just mash them right, the notes will come out eventually.

Well, it’s not like I didn’t hit the right notes.

I just did a lot of wrong notes around them.

Oh, sure, sure.

Well, Greg, let’s see how you do with our quiz, all right?

That sounds good to me.

The way it works is I give you a sentence with a blank in it and two possible answers.

Sounds easy, right?

Sounds like a piece of cake, piece of clam.

Only one of them is correct.

See how you do.

If you need help, Martha’s standing by, although I’ve paid her money not to help you.

All right, here we go. Here’s the first.

If you go around blanking on a girl you hardly know, IMing her, sending her to your MySpace page, asking her for pictures, she’s not going to have a thing to do with you.

So if you go around blanking on a girl, is it dusting on a girl or simping on a girl? That’s S-I-M-P-I-N-G.

Oh, wow.

Dusting or simping?

Simping.

Well, I would never do either, of course.

No, but you did it one time. That’s how you met your wife, right?

Yeah, but that was way before MySpace, Martha.

We’d send notes in class on these quaint things called pieces of paper.

We wrote on with pens and pencils.

Strange. Sounds weird.

So was that dusting or simping?

Dusting or simping.

Well, you know, dusting sounds negative, like you’re brushing her off, like you’re not interested.

So simping, you know, it doesn’t sound much better, but it sounds a little more active.

It sounds a little more like going after somebody.

So I’m going to say it’s simping.

Your answer is correct, but your logic is horrible.

Simping is online hip-hop slang for crushing on somebody that you barely know.

And even then, you only know them online.

You can either simp somebody or simp on somebody.

So if I say to somebody I hardly know online because they have a nice picture next to their nickname on the discussion firm, I say, damn girl, you look great in that photo, then that’s a simp.

So there’s also a noun.

Really?

Yeah, it’s just a way of, you know, guys do this.

They come on.

I hit on every girl that they see online because I don’t know why they do that.

Great word in any case, simping.

All right, well, you got the right answer.

Let’s see how you do on the next one, okay?

Okay.

In the old days, summertime, we’d open up the blank and splash around in the water until the fire department came and shut it off.

So in the old days, would we open up the A, the Johnny Pump, or B, the reverse toilet?

Well, listen, in your neighborhood, pal, it might have been the reverse toilet.

No, we’d open up either the Johnny Pump or the reverse toilet.

Do people still do this?

Now they open up like a bottle of Evian or something.

No, no, no.

People still open up fire hydrants if you go to the right neighborhood.

Right.

If you live in the city like we do.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, you know, my logic is probably terrible once again, but reverse toilet sounds just so on the nose.

And when you slang something up out on the street there, you usually make it simpler.

Reverse toilet’s a big four-syllable thing.

Yeah.

You know, it doesn’t really trip off the tongue, but Johnny Pump, now that sounds like…

Yeah, Johnny, because the three syllables are easier than the four syllables.

Is that what you’re saying?

Yeah, and the cadence of it, Johnny Pump.

Yeah, yeah, I think my dog would be more interested in a Johnny Pump than a reverse toilet.

Although he likes toilets, too.

Yeah, I’ve seen dogs roll around in doo-doo.

I don’t know what you’re talking about.

Yeah, I don’t know where we’re going with the dog here, but…

So, yeah, I’m going to say Johnny Pump.

Well, you know what? I am so disappointed in myself.

I did not make these hard enough.

You’ve gotten this one.

It is Johnny Pump.

Johnny Pump is old-fashioned New York City street slang for a fire hydrant.

See?

You’re right.

That’s two out of two.

Let me see if I can come up with a number three.

Let me just make something.

No, I’m kidding.

Greg, you know your fire hydrants.

It’s funny because I’ve been listening to the slang quiz each week, and I think, oh, my God, I know all of these.

These are easy.

And, of course, today you’re giving me two that I’ve never heard of in my life.

Have I been really making them that easy?

Holy moly.

No, no, just easy for me, Grant.

Oh, I see how it is.

Snark, snark.

Well, Greg, when are we going to have you back throwing some puzzles our way?

I hope very soon.

I’ve got payback now.

I’ve got to get you back for the slang quiz.

-oh.

Give my best to the wife and the baby, smooches all around, and thanks for playing with us today.

Thank you very much, you guys.

It’s great to talk to you, and I’ll be talking to you again soon.

Okay, nice work, Greg.

Take care.

All right, bye-bye.

Well, if you have a question for us about words, language, grammar, slang, or fire hydrants, give us a call. The number is 1-877-929-9673.

That’s 1-877-WAYWORD.

Or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.