Slang This! with John Schwaller

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

And I’m Martha Barnette. And now it’s time for Slang This, the game where you guess the meaning of some strange slang terms.

Today’s contestant is John Schwaller from Potsdam, New York. John, welcome.

Hi there.

We’ll say hi to Grant.

Hi, Grant. How are you doing?

Hello, John. What are you doing there in Potsdam?

I am a college professor, and I’m also president of the college.

Well, hello. What college is that?

State University of New York at Potsdam.

Oh, well, there we go. A student college. All right. Groovy.

Wow. Well, now you said that you’re a professor as well as the college president?

Yes. I’m a history and Spanish professor.

History and Spanish. Wow. Okay. Well, do you have a favorite slang term in English or Spanish?

Actually, I have several in Spanish, but the one in English that comes to mind, especially this time of year, is snowsnake. I picked that up when I lived in Minnesota.

Ooh, I like that. I don’t know what it is, but it sounds great. It’s promising. What is it?

Well, when you’re driving down the highway and blowing snow, normally at night you see it more, but in the daytime too, when the snow makes those waves across the road.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Looks like they’re wiggling across the road.

Oh, that’s great.

A snow snake?

A snow snake.

Love it.

All right.

Well, thank you for that, John.

And now let’s move on to our game.

Grant’s going to give you a slang term, and then he will give you three different sentences that suggest what that term might be.

Now, only one of those will be real, and the other two examples are fake.

So, John, your task is going to be to figure out which one of those three sentences illustrates how this particular slang term is actually used.

And chances are you won’t have heard the word before, so the trick is going to be to puzzle out its meaning, to use that professorial deductive reasoning and figure it out.

You got it?

Yes.

I just hope it’s like quizam and snert because those I actually heard.

Oh.

Well, I tend not to repeat, although I’ve been accused of it.

Unfortunately, yeah.

All right.

Well, here we go. Professor, doctor, what do you like to be called?

Whatever.

All right. The first word that we’re going to guess today is donk, D-O-N-K.

And the first clue is, when volcano ash blackens the sky, meteorologists call it donk.

If you wake up right at that moment, you can’t tell if it’s a dark day or a bright night.

And the second clue for donk, I spent my teen years cruising in the donk past the Dairy Queen, around behind the Western Auto, and then back again through the Walmart lot.

Must have done that every night in the old Impala for years.

And then the third clue, someone with a big booty has a badonkadonk.

If you have an itty-bitty booty, that’s just a donk.

So what is a donk?

Is it A, when it’s impossible to tell whether it’s day or night?

Is it B, an old car, especially a big sedan?

Or is it C, a small derriere?

Whoa, John, what do you think?

Whoa, those are tough.

I have lived around volcanoes.

You have?

I lived in Montana, and everyone talked about Mount St. Helens, and I don’t remember that in the conversation.

Oh, okay.

I once was young and used to drive cars like that, but I don’t recall that either.

And similarly, one’s posterior.

This is tough.

Yeah.

I’ll go with a posterior.

Unfortunately, the answer is B.

A donk is just another name for an old beater, for an old car.

Yeah, for a whip, for all the thousand other names that young men have for the cars they inherit from their parents or their grandparents.

I think it’s actually short for donkey.

Oh, okay.

Yeah, because just imagine something that’s kind of…

My son’s never used it on me.

Yeah, slow and recalcitrant and not always willing to do what you want it to do.

That’s pretty much an old car.

But anyway, we’ve got one more for you.

Take a listen to this.

This one is an older term.

I know that for certain it dates back at least to the 1930s.

So I’m sure you’re not that old, but maybe it’s not so new that you won’t have heard it before.

And the term is Baltimore wrench.

Baltimore as in the city of Maryland and wrench, W-R-E-N-C-H, Baltimore wrench.

And the first clue is, well, when the engine seized up, I hauled out the Baltimore wrench, gave it a few whacks, and the thing started up like a treat.

Now I keep that hammer and chisel in the truck in case I need it again.

And the second clue is, during the heyday of the paddle wheel boats, gamblers without enough money to buy back into a poker match would bet the Baltimore wrench, meaning that if they lost, they’d work in the engine room for the rest of the trip.

And the third clue, the automobile inspectors were always susceptible to what we called the Baltimore wrench.

A couple of hundred dollars in an envelope were enough to get you a passing grade.

So what is a Baltimore wrench?

Is it A, a jocular name for a hammer and a chisel?

Is it B, a way of betting labor instead of money at the poker table?

Or is it C, a bride given to automobile inspectors?

Given the way that people like to make fun of their neighbors, calling a hammer and chisel a Baltimore wrench, I mean, would make all the sense in the world for somebody either from Washington, D.C. or maybe from Philadelphia.

I would go with that.

You are absolutely right, and your logic is impeccable.

Indeed, that’s probably what’s happening here.

Another term for it is the Oregon wrench or the canal wrench.

We had something like that when I grew up in Kansas.

It was the Oklahoma monkey wrench.

Yep.

There’s tons of these.

And I pulled this term and a bunch like it from the unpublished lexicon of trade jargon, which was collected during the 1930s.

It’s something I’ve been working with some years now.

There’s another variation.

It’s called the big red wrench.

It’s another name for an assemblyman cutting torch.

So, great. You’re one for two, but you did pretty good, and you’ve been supporting about it as well.

Well, thank you. I wanted to make certain I wasn’t blanked, so I’m glad that I got at least one of them.

All right. Thank you for playing, John.

Now, do I get a prize?

You win a Cadillac, sir.

Or is it just the honor of the appearance?

You get a great big donk.

John, for playing our game today, we’re going to send you a whole book of interesting terms, and I know you’re going to love it.

It’s called Weird and Wonderful Words by Aaron McKean, and it’s a book that is truly ostrabogulous.

Superb.

Indeed.

Thank you very much.

Thank you, John.

All right.

Thanks for playing.

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