Slang This with Jack Lynch

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

And I’m Martha Barnette.

It’s time for our slang quiz, and today’s contestant is an expert on the history of the English language.

Jack Lynch has written on everything from the making of Samuel Johnson’s great dictionary to a collection of Johnson’s sharpest insults.

He’s a professor of English at Rutgers University, and his new book is called The Lexicographer’s Dilemma, The Evolution of Proper English from Shakespeare to South Park.

Jack, welcome to A Way with Words.

Well, thanks for having me.

Hey, by the way, do you pronounce it evolution or evolution?

I tend to go with evolution, but that’s because I spent some years in England, and it’s a little more common there.

Okay. All right.

But I’m easy.

Yeah.

Well, Jack, you know, we always ask our contestants about their favorite slang term, and I imagine for you this would be like being asked to choose a favorite child.

But I wonder if you had one favorite slang term to offer us from any century, what would it be?

Well, I like slang when it’s new and fresh, but the problem is by the time people have heard of it, it tends to be just cliché.

For a while, I was very fond of fail and win in their new senses, though they’re probably becoming cliché.

So that means I usually go back to old-fashioned ones like copacetic or brumagem or something like that, where they were clichéd and have long since been forgotten.

Okay, brumagem meaning junk, right?

Brumagem meaning fake, inferior, shoddy.

Right, right. From Birmingham, right?

That’s it.

Originally, yep.

Well, Jack, say hello to Grant.

Hi, Grant.

How are you?

All right. You ready to do this thing?

Oh, probably not. You’re threatening to reveal me as the fraud I really am, but all right.

Yeah, we’re going to make sure every one of your students hears this quiz.

It’s really easy. Here’s what’s going to happen.

I’m going to describe something to you, and it’s going to use a slang term.

Then I’m going to give you three choices of what that slang term might mean, and your job is to pick one.

Martha can help if you need it, all right?

Here we go.

If the chief technology officer of a major corporation says that she wants one throat to choke, does she mean A, she wants a personal assistant who answers only to her, B, she wants to route all of the company’s Internet traffic through a single connection, or C, she wants to deal only with one vendor in solving a particular problem?

One throat to choke.

One throat to choke.

Isn’t there someone who wanted the entire people to be one so he could chop off one head?

But I’m afraid that doesn’t work there.

I’m just going to have to guess since I have no idea.

Let’s go with the first one, the one assistant.

I have no confidence in the answer whatsoever.

Well, unfortunately, the answer is C.

The CTO of this company, she wanted one vendor so she could blame one person.

It’s kind of a positive way of looking at putting all of your eggs in one basket.

If you have one person to blame, it’s a heck of a lot easier when things go wrong.

Okay, I’ll buy that.

All right, we’ve got two more questions for you.

Let’s go on to number two.

Your co-worker comes in one morning recounting a long story about his Friday night out on the town.

He keeps saying the word pickleback, P-I-C-K-L-E-B-A-C-K.

What is he talking about?

Is a pickleback A, the position played by a Polish soccer player he snogged in a bar?

Is it B, a shot of whiskey with a pickle juice chaser, or is it C, the scrap of paper on which he wrote all the phone numbers of all the ladies he met at a party?

Oh, another one I’ve never heard of.

What is a pickleback?

Makes me wish I worked in a place where my colleagues came in and talked about picklebacks.

I have no idea whatsoever.

Any hints? Any guesses?

Do you have a coin there, Jack?

I don’t have a three-sided coin.

Let’s just run through these options again.

What is a pickleback?

Is it A, the position played by a Polish soccer player?

Is it B, a shot of whiskey with a pickle juice chaser?

Or is it C, the scrap of paper on which someone writes all the phone numbers of the ladies that they meet?

Well, the second one probably sounds the most linguistically plausible, but I know that’s what you’d be making up just to trick me.

So I think I’m still going to guess that, again, with no confidence whatsoever.

Yeah, but what you’re forgetting in your calculations is that basically I’m a nice guy.

I don’t want to deceive you too much.

It is B, as a matter of fact.

A pickleback is a shot of whiskey with a pickle juice chaser.

I swear they’re drinking it in New York.

See, the reason I didn’t want to guess that is because it horrifies me to think that people do that.

I don’t know that I want to live in such a world.

All right, here we go to number three.

Let’s see how you do on this.

So you’re at 50%.

Let’s see if you can get two out of three.

Your wife says she doesn’t like her step-ins.

What does she mean, step-ins?

Are step-ins A, visitors who drop by without calling ahead, B, underpants, or C, the in-laws of her in-laws?

Wow.

I can’t say I’ve ever thought of any of those categories before.

He’s never considered underpants.

Consider the underpants.

He goes commando.

You know, he’s a modern man.

Oh, dear.

Again, this is completely out of my ken.

But I’m going to guess C and see what happens.

Oh, unfortunately, C was my little joke.

Because the in-laws of your in-laws are your family.

Well, you can keep going with a chain of in-laws.

That’s true.

That’s true.

Step-ins are underpants, particularly like the larger underpants rather than the little tiny Brazilian things.

Although more common these days and certainly more current, step-ins usually are shoes, just slip-on shoes.

Well, had you offered me shoes, I would have guessed shoes because that seemed a little more obvious.

But no, I’m afraid you got me.

Okay. Well, I’ve got to say, though, I’m more pleased to have you play than I am to have beat you.

Well, next time I will be quietly Googling as we do these things.

And I’m going to say, don’t ever quiz me about the Johnsonelia that you’re an expert in because I will fail everything.

Oh, we’ll feel miserably.

Thank you so much, Jack, for being a great support.

Well, thanks very much for having me.

And if you have a question about the English language, give us a call, 1-877-929-9673, or you can always email us.

That address is words@waywordradio.org.

And I should mention that we’ll be talking with Jack about the lexicographer’s dilemma in a future episode of our online-only content, which you’ll find at waywordradio.org or on iTunes.

We’ll also link to Jack’s website and to his Amazon page for the book.