Sour Pickle (episode #1576)

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. On our Facebook group, BC Cornish asks, is there a phrase or word in English that conveys the idea of buying an object and then using the object for a lesser purpose or an unintended purpose, e.g. buying a treadmill and then using it to hang clothes? And Grant, I don’t know that there’s one singular word for that kind of experience, but it does remind me of a really cool Japanese expression that I came across just the other day, which is mikabosu. And mikabosu literally means three-day monk. And it refers to the kind of person who starts an idea, you know, they get all excited about something. Maybe they buy a language app and they’re going to become fluent in this or that language, or they get all excited about some fitness program or diet, and then they’re only on it for three days. The idea in Japanese is that, you know, somebody gets excited about becoming a monk, but they can only last for three days. Mikubosu. I love that term. Oh, I know that. My son goes through that with video games. He makes a list. He watches videos about video games. He learns the ones that are great. He decides what he wants. He figures it out. He saves his money. He obsesses about when it’s going to arrive.

It arrives. And then he just plays it for as many hours as we’ll let him. And then he’s done. But it’s not just the video game. It’s the whole process that he enjoys. He enjoys figuring out the games, discovering what other people think about it, deciding which ones to buy, making the list of games, ranking them, then buying it. So it’s a whole. He’s a three-day monk about the whole process. And then he’s on to the next thing, right?

Yeah. Well, he’s a three-day monk about the next game. Yeah. You have your weird obsessions. We have ours. What are your weird language obsessions? 877-929-9673. Or just share your thoughts and stories about how you communicate with the world. Email us words@waywordradio.org or talk to us on Twitter @wayword.

Hello. You have A Way with Words.

Hello. I’m Corinne, and I’m joined by my student, Mara, and we are calling from the University of North Alabama.

Oh, excellent. Well, welcome to the show. So you’re here with a student. What are you teaching?

Well, I teach in the academic English program. We help international students develop their English language skills as they prepare to enter a degree program here at the university.

Oh, lovely. Well, what’s on your mind today?

Well, recently in speaking class, Mara was demonstrating a recipe and she referred to peanut butter, but she used a term that I had never heard before. She called it peanut leg. And I asked her about that, and she immediately spelled it for me, and it was, as I suspected, L-E-G. And she explained that, as far as she knows, it’s common usage in her home country, which is the Democratic Republic of Congo. But I did a quick internet search and just wasn’t able to find any easy answers to my questions. I’m curious about the origin of the expression and also how widespread it is. So peanut butter as peanut leg, L-E-G. All right, we’ve got to talk to Mara about this.

Okay. Hello. Hi, Mara. How are you?

Fine. How about you?

We are good. Tell us about the expression peanut leg. Where did you learn that, or where did you hear that?

Yes, I was translating from Google, and then I just saw the translation like that.

So you were translating from French.

Yes, because in French we say pat dahashid, which means peanut leg. Like, it’s the same meaning.

Oh, Google tricked you, Mara. Google has let you down. Google failed you.

Because what you’re saying in French is pat-a-chid, which means peanut paste. And it’s spelled P-A-T-E, and there’s a circumflex, a little hat on the A. And in French words, that means it used to be spelled with an S. So it used to be spelled P-A-S-T, but now it’s spelled P-A-T-E. But you translated the word P-A-T-T-E, which means paw or leg of an animal.

So you translated, so they sound almost the same, pot and pat. So Google failed you. Google let you down on this. Not quite the same.

Mara, this is a great warning to other people who use Google Translate. Sometimes it lets you down.

Yes. I have experienced it many times. When I translate something, it gives me the wrong, I mean, the meaning that it’s not the same. It’s different from the context that I’m trying to use.

Right, right. Well, you’re smart to be skeptical about that.

Yeah. It’s better to use a bilingual dictionary because that has been carefully checked. Each entry has been carefully checked by a human being, whereas the Google Translate is programmatically done where every translation is not checked. It’s just assumed to be correct by the computer.

Okay. Thank you.

You’re welcome. Thank you so much. And good luck with your studies.

Oh, thank you so much. Thank you for having me.

I’ve done that. I was a young French learner once. I made those mistakes, Martha. It’s all part of the process, isn’t it?

Yeah, it sure is. I should note that even though pat, P-A-T-T-E, can mean leg or foot in French, it’s used for animals. It’s not used for humans. But jambe, J-A-M-B-E, is used for the leg in humans.

We welcome calls from folks who are learning English as a second language or maybe a third or fourth, and we love calls from teachers as well. So if you have a question about language, call 877-929-9673 or send the story and email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hey, Grant. This is Tori Paulson. I’m calling from Wyoming.

Hi, Tori. Welcome to the show.

Hi, Tori.

Hey, Martha.

I had a word that came up recently. We live in a small community in Rollins, in Wyoming, Rollins, Wyoming. My wife works for the city here in Rollins, and they were discussing maintenance on city parks, and she referred to a bowery at a park that needed maintenance, and no one else knew what a bowery was. They all referred to it as a pavilion, which we know as well, but the word bowery has never been used by anybody around here. We’re originally from Salt Lake City, Utah, and bowery is a common term down there. We looked it up in the dictionary, and it’s not even listed in the dictionary in the way we use it.

How do you use it?

As a pavilion.

Bowery is equivalent to a pavilion where we grew up.

So a covered sitting area, something like that, or a covered performing area?

A covered area with open sides.

Well, Tori, I’m so glad you brought up this word because it has a really interesting and kind of surprising history. The word bowery comes from an old Dutch word that sounds similar. It’s bowery, and it means farm. In the 17th century, the term bowery was applied to an area of lower Manhattan that at that time had a lot of farms. And it was mostly Dutch. For a time after it got built up some, the bowery became this very fashionable area. It was a really desirable place to live. And at that same time in the 18th century, this term that originally meant farm was moving across the northern part of the United States. And it began to acquire a more specific meaning, exactly the kind of thing that you’re talking about, an open structure. And sometimes it had a roof of tree boughs or vines that was used, you know, to keep people out of the elements at a big temporary gathering like a concert or a wedding or a party or something like that.

You’re absolutely right that the term bowery for pavilion is pretty localized. You hear it in the north and north midland of the United States, and particularly in the Rocky Mountain area. So I’m not surprised that you grew up hearing it in Utah. And then there’s the overlap with just bower, right, Martha, which is kind of a woodland shelter, kind of away from the noise and the sun, kind of a, I don’t know what you say, kind of a recess or a secret area.

Yeah.

But that’s a separate word.

It took a different path.

And so there’s probably some overlap and reinforcement there of the Bowery from New York and from the Dutch and then the Bowery of kind of a secret quiet place in the woods or in the garden.

Excellent.

It sounds like she surprised everybody with that term.

Yes, nobody else had even heard the term before, and it seemed so common growing up in Utah.

Yeah.

Yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised if other people in Wyoming knew it, though.

As Martha said, much later in the Rocky Mountains, people, the term kind of stuck more there than it did in the rest of the country.

I mean, it’s never been all that common, but it did kind of last there more than it did other places.

And it seemed to be centered more around a religious background because churches having a Bowery behind the church was very common.

How interesting.

Well, that’s what we know.

Maybe she’s going to introduce it and Wyoming will become a hotbed of Bowery speakers.

Perfect.

Yeah.

All right.

Well, thanks for taking my call.

It’s our pleasure, Tori.

Thanks for calling.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Yeah, that word Bowery from the Dutch is spelled B-O-U-W-E-R-I-J.

And it goes back to the early days of New Netherland and New Amsterdam when the Dutch had a foothold with a colony in the New World, which didn’t last very long.

And Peter Stuyvesant was the governor of that colony in the mid-1600s.

It just goes back a long way.

It was his farm, which the Bowery led to, one of his farms anyway.

And so it’s got that word, the Bowery, boy, hundreds of years to get to this meeting at a parks department in Wyoming.

We’re all about those connections.

Give us a call, 877-929-9673.

In one of our recent newsletters, we were talking about the fact that astronomers reported earlier this year that they’d been looking at an area of the universe where they thought there was one big black hole, but it turned out that there were a few dozen smaller holes.

And they were trying to figure out what’s the collective noun for a lot of black holes in the universe.

And we got a lot of responses about that.

Leslie Campbell suggested that the collective term for black holes would be a baffle, which I think makes sense.

Oh, I like that.

Because what are they?

Sarah Hashmi said a sink, like a sinkhole of black holes.

Lillian Barron suggested that a bunch of black holes could be called a density or a vacancy or even a loneliness.

A loneliness of black holes.

Yeah, I like the melancholiness of that one.

Yes, I do too.

And by the way, if you want to receive our newsletter about once a month, go to waywordradio.org slash newsletter and sign up.

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 by that handsome, dashing man, John Chaneski, who happens to be our quiz guy. Hi, John.

Hi, Grant. Hi, Martha. I just happened, what a coincidence, I just happened to be a quiz guy, and it’s time for a quiz right now.

You know, guys, I hate to repeat myself.

Who am I kidding? I love to repeat myself. I often do it.

I’ve gone on repeatedly here about how cryptics are the gold standard of puzzles, and some of these answers are orthographic and some are phonetic.

I never get tired of that one.

Anyway, today I’m going to give you two a chance to repeat yourselves.

All of the following clues can be reiterated in a way that the last syllable is repeated.

Now, what does that mean?

Well, if I said, Mr. Shakespeare, I really admire the textile pattern with diagonal stripes you’re wearing, you could say that as, I like that twill, Will.

I like that twill, Will.

Okay.

Got it?

Got it.

All right.

So you’re going to rephrase my clues so as to repeat the last syllable.

Let’s just say word and avoid all that syllable-ble.

You don’t have to say the whole thing, just the relevant part at the end, okay?

Okay.

All right.

Here in Cambodia, we’re gearing up for a windy rainstorm any day now.

A windy rainstorm any day now?

In Cambodia.

In Cambodia.

Right.

I’m trying to think of all the…

Anywhere in Southeast Asia.

Oh, no.

We’re going to have a, starts with an M, a monsoon soon.

Yes, we’re going to have a monsoon soon.

Right, very good.

I proposed every day for a week, but my Russian girlfriend has not turned me down so far.

She hasn’t said nyet, yet.

That’s right.

Good luck to you, person proposing to the Russian girl.

You look pretty rough after your bender last night.

Are your unpleasant symptoms finished?

Is your…

Oh.

What is it?

Yeah.

Your hangover over?

Yeah.

Is your hangover over?

Hey, you have a nice pet shop here.

I’ll take the beagle, the Abyssinian, a few guinea pigs, and what the heck.

Toss in that beautifully crested bird as well.

The beautifully crested bird.

What are beautifully crested?

Oh.

Martha’s on the ball here, I think.

A cockatoo, too.

Yeah, give me the cockatoo, too.

Why not?

I’ve been sewing this skirt for an hour, and so far I have just a single fold finished.

One pleat complete.

Right, well, the other way around, one complete pleat.

Very nice. Nicely done.

Finally, I’m very particular about my house decor.

I painted my front door a light green, and the digits a reddish-brown.

Umber number.

Oh!

I’ve made the number umber.

Yes, very good.

I think it looks very pretty.

I’m not sure about the green on the brown.

But anyway, you guys did just great.

Congratulations on that puzzle.

Nice job.

Thanks, John.

For a moment there, we had a puzzle muzzle.

Couldn’t think of what to say.

We’ll talk to you next week.

Appreciate it.

Talk to you then.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

If you want to talk about any aspect of language, whether it’s wordplay, word origins, words you use at work, or words you inherited from your family, let us know, 877-929-9673, or send it to us in email.

The address is words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Carol, and I’m calling from St. Paul, Minnesota.

Hi, Carol. Welcome to the show.

Hi, Carol.

Okay, I’d like to know how parents gently inform their small children that the family pet has passed away in a way that softens the cold, hard truth.

Oh, wow.

Have you had to do this?

I haven’t had to personally deploy it, but I have a story to tell about how I was informed as a little kid about a cat passing away.

Oh, please do.

So I grew up in the 1960s in Fargo, North Dakota.

So our cat was hit and killed by a car.

And I was not in the house at the time.

And my brother Jim took care of all the details.

He found Marvin, our cat, and brought him to the yard and buried him.

And then somehow word got to where I was.

I was at a lake cabin playing with my cousins.

And word got to the lake cabin that something happened and Marvin was gone.

Okay.

So I asked, I think it was one of my aunts who told me this, and I asked her, well, where’s Marvin now?

And this aunt just touched my arm and she said he went to Wisconsin.

And so I thought, okay, I was young enough where I bought that, right?

I might have been seven or eight.

And I thought about it for a while and I thought, well, okay, I don’t like this.

I’m sad, but you know what?

He’s somewhere.

And maybe I can go visit him.

Maybe I’ll ask mom if we can go visit him.

And although Wisconsin, from my house in Fargo, Wisconsin seemed like a world away.

She told you that the cat went to Wisconsin.

Right.

Did you wonder why?

Right.

Was he unsatisfied with life in our house?

Visiting family?

Right.

Right.

If he was visiting family, how did he get there?

Did he walk?

Did he hitchhike?

Okay.

But, you know, I took it at face value and just told myself to get used to the idea that Marvin’s not in the house anymore.

Yeah, and he’s in Wisconsin.

And he’s in Wisconsin.

So the theory is there’s a farm in Wisconsin and all the pets go there and they can play to their heart’s content.

Oh.

Yeah.

You know, I remember as a kid being told that my dog Tuffy had gone to a farm.

And it comforted me for years, you know, just thinking, well, there is that possibility that she’s out there romping around.

But I think you raise a really good question.

At what age, basically, do you start telling a child the truth?

Isn’t that the real question here?

Or what level of maturity?

Because maybe age is irrelevant.

Right.

Exactly.

What level of maturity and how hard would it hit this kid?

How hard would the news hit the kid?

So I was a very sensitive little kid.

And you were seven or eight at the time that you lost him.

There are different strategies.

For example, we had a cat die in the last couple of years.

He had terrible kidney disease.

We had to let him go across the rainbow bridge, as they say.

And we’d had him for a while.

And I had to deliver the news to my son, who was 11 or 12 at the time.

And it was hard.

But I was ready because I had done some reading about it and I knew that you have to avoid things like telling them what not to do.

You shouldn’t say don’t worry and don’t cry.

Let them feel what they have to feel.

And if they’re not showing grief, that’s okay too because we’re all different.

And I couldn’t know what was happening inside him.

I had to let him do whatever was happening.

And I had to let him have the last word, which for me is hard, as you know, Martha.

And also I had to remember that not everything required a response from me.

He might not even have known what to say or how to say it,

But it was important that whatever he needed to say,

However he had to say it, that he’d get the words out.

And so I let him do that, and it worked out.

And then we did something really important,

And this is maybe the best thing that I learned how to do,

Is we built the legend of the cat together.

Whopper is now part of our family lore.

We talked about the funny things that he would do or the weird little behaviors that we loved.

And he’s now part of the legend of our family.

And so we made sure not to forget him.

And that’s a really important part of the grieving process is to let the child know that just because the animal is gone doesn’t mean that they’re forgotten.

And that they’re still there in your memories and in your heart.

And that’s very comforting.

That’s a lovely thing to do.

Carol, it sounds like part of your question is what is the language that you use?

What is the vocabulary?

What words do you reach for?

That’s exactly right.

And I’m sure it just depends on the kid, like we just discussed.

How much can this kid take and how close were they to the pet?

Right.

When do you say the pet died or was put to sleep?

How do you phrase that?

That’s a really tough one.

Yeah, and for younger kids, you have to steer away from things like talking about the body and what happens to it.

You have to quickly move on to talking about, you know, the emotion side of it or the feeling side of it.

Because getting down to where the body goes is hard to explain to a child.

So you have to explain that the pet’s time with us here is over.

And we gave it a good life.

We loved it very much.

And it knew that and it loved us back.

And we were lucky to have it as a part of our family.

Carol, I imagine that there are listeners all across the country and around the world who are reaching for their phones or their laptops right now to share their stories and talk about how you do this.

Because, you know, it’s a problem that keeps coming up.

And I’m really curious what other folks have to say about that.

How have you shared the story of a pet dying with your children?

Or how did your parents share the news with you?

Let us know, 877-929-9673, or tell the story in email at words@waywordradio.org.

Thank you, Carol, so much for opening up this great topic and sharing your story.

We really appreciate it.

Thank you so much.

It’s just a pleasure to meet both of you.

Take care.

Great talking with you, Carol.

Bye-bye.

Thanks.

Bye-bye.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Alex calling from Austin, Texas.

Hi, Alex. Welcome to the show.

Hi, Alex.

Thanks. I’m here with my son, and he had a…

I’m usually pretty good at answering his language questions, but he had a stumper for me.

So I’m going to pass the phone to him so he can ask this question.

Okay, great.

Why is it go to school, go to the park, but you say go home?

How old are you?

I’m 11.

Okay, and you’re curious why we say go home, but we say go to the store or go to the park or go to a movie, huh?

With go home, something is missing.

Usually, you’ve probably noticed that the word home functions as a noun, and a noun is a person or a place or a thing.

And a home is a thing, right?

Right.

Usually, you have a pattern of go to the store or go to the park, but instead of saying go to the home, you say go home.

And that’s because it’s a special case of home functioning not as a noun, but as an adverb.

It’s something that gives the location or direction.

And there are other examples of this in English, if you think about it.

Go left.

Perfect.

Yes, that’s a great one.

Go left, go right, go downtown, go north, go south.

There are special cases where the verb is modified by an adverb, and it doesn’t act on a noun.

And that’s one of those cases.

So what other nouns do we have that can become adverbs in those conditions, Martha?

You said a few, like downtown, outside, upstairs, underground, overseas.

Yeah, there are a lot of them.

Yeah, a lot of them.

So what you’re learning here, Sagan, I guess, is that words don’t always stay a single part of speech.

They can put on different clothes and take on different roles, like actors on a stage.

They behave differently in different circumstances.

I see.

Well, thanks.

Thanks for explaining that.

Take care now.

Thank you for asking the question.

Welcome.

Bye.

All right.

We welcome calls from younger listeners.

So if you have one in your household and they have a good question about language, we’d love to hear it.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Oriana Fisher calling from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

Hey, Oriana.

Hi.

How are you doing?

Great to talk to you.

Good.

How are you?

I’m a biochemistry professor, and I was hoping that you could answer some questions that I have about a word that I use a lot at work

That I’ve recently discovered isn’t actually known by most people in the English language,

And the word is aliquot.

Aliquot. It’s not a fruit that grows on a hybridized tree.

No, no.

Tell us how it comes up in your work.

So at work, we use it to talk about like if we have a stock of something

And we want to portion it out into equal pieces to save for later.

We use it both as the verb describing the act of making these individual portions of the thing,

As well as the noun describing each of the portions.

So if I had a solution of sodium chloride and I wanted, I don’t know, like 50 milliliters of it,

And I wanted to make smaller fractions of it, I would say that I’m aliquotting it.

And then if I wanted to use one of those fractions, I would also call the fraction an aliquot of the thing.

So it would be an exact fraction.

So it’d be five, 10 milliliters of the…

Right, exactly.

Okay.

And so that’s A-L-I-Q-U-O-T, aliquot.

Mm—

Do you ever use it kind of generically just to mean just a small sample or small portion that’s not equal to other samples or portions?

Maybe occasionally.

I also, like, have started using it…

I didn’t quite appreciate that it was only a science word, so I started using it sometimes when I’m cooking.

Like if I make a big pot of soup, I’ll say like, oh, I’ll make aliquots of this and use it for lunches later in the week.

And there it’s probably not equal portions, but it’s the same concept.

Yeah, it’s such a great scientific word that really should leap into places like cooking or home carpentry or crafts at school, that sort of thing.

Or dividing a brownie between two kids.

Perfect.

Exactly.

Perfect use of it, yeah.

Aliquot.

Biochemistry is a great use of it.

Obviously, mathematics, medicine, engineering, and even land and water use planning, where they’re talking about dividing lots up into aliquots.

Oh, that makes sense.

Yeah.

And you’ll often find when people are doing things like taking air samples or water samples, they’ll take one large sample and then they’ll divide it up into aliquots.

So each one of these aliquots can be tested in a different way for different kinds of, say, pollutants or different kinds of substances or different kinds of bacteria, that sort of thing.

And then there’s one thing I really love, which I did not know until I looked at this.

You know, aliquot scaling is something I learned about.

Alaquat scaling involves extra wires above the normal wires in a piano.

What?

Oh, wow.

They’re tuned in such a way that they vibrate in sympathy with the strings below, the ones that are actually struck by the hammers.

They’re, like, I think roughly an octave above.

And so it’s amazing.

I didn’t know such a thing existed, but apparently it gives us, like, a magnificent sound.

So when did this word end up coming into at least scientific terminology?

It’s a new Latin term as I understand it.

Really connected to a couple of obvious words in English.

The alias and quat.

The alias part means other.

And we find it in words like alien and alias.

Alias, of course, meaning another name.

Or alien meaning another kind of being.

And then quat, Q-U-O-T, means how many or so many.

And it’s related to quota and quotient, both words which tell you how many of something.

Fantastic, right?

So it’s really kind of perfectly connected to other parts of our language that come through our romance language roots.

Oriana, thank you so much for the conversation.

Really appreciate it.

Thank you so much.

I love your show.

It was great talking with you.

Oh, you’re a delight.

Thanks, Oriana.

Call us again sometime, okay?

All right.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

We heard from Richard Ryder on Cape Cod, who sent us a lot of phrases that belong to his beloved Nantucket grandmother.

And one of them is, we waited for you like one pig would for another.

I love it.

Because they do.

Animals wait for each other, right?

No, no.

Oh, I see.

Well, I was confused too, so I wrote him back.

Oh, meal time.

I see.

Yes, yes.

If somebody’s late to the table, you go ahead.

And in fact, there’s an expression in Mexican Spanish.

Eres tan pacienzudo como un conchinito, which means…

You’re as patient as a little pig.

Yes.

Yeah, so I thought that was lovely that there’s an echo of that on Kit Cod.

I was just thinking about the way animals do usually, at least domestic animals, tend to be kind of gregarious and hang out together.

Sure, sure.

But yeah, we waited for you like one pig would for another.

Not.

877-929-9673.

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.

Here’s a great quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson.

By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote.

And he’s so right. When you find that perfectly phrased statement that expresses an idea so well, something just clicks into place and you want to share it with somebody else just the way it is.

In fact, that quote from Emerson is a perfect example. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote.

And I’m reminded of this again and again, paging through the new must-have reference work called The New Yale Book of Quotations, edited by Fred R. Shapiro. And Fred Shapiro is Associate Director for Collections and Access at the Yale Law Library. And in 2006, he published The Yale Book of Quotations. Well, the new Yale Book of Quotations is vastly expanded. It has 12,000 quotations, and that’s a thousand more than the previous version 15 years ago. And one thing that makes it notable is the fact that again and again, Shapiro has found that many famous quotes were actually originated by women, but then misattributed to more famous men. For example, the term Iron Curtain is always attributed to Winston Churchill, but it turns out that the person who beat him to that was British activist and politician Bessie A. Stanley. And you know the quote, now I know why nobody ever comes here. It’s too crowded. Everybody associates that with Yogi Berra, but actually the first person to say that was Suzanne Ridgway, an actress who appeared in several Three Stooges movies. So it’s a fascinating book for that alone, but it’s a book that I know I’m going to be returning to again and again and again. Yeah, I’m a big fan of the first edition, and I can’t believe it’s been 15 years since the first. And so I am glomming on to the second edition. I’m a big fan of antedating. That’s where you find an earlier use of a quotation. And I appreciate the dedication to the craft of not only finding the exact version, but the approximate version of the quotation, because sometimes it varies a little bit. And that’s an important part of writing a quotation book, not just getting the word for word version, but the idea behind it and Fred Shapiro and the people who’ve helped him out. And he’s very grateful and gracious about acknowledging the help from the people who’ve contributed to this book so that when you dig into it, you get the sense that there are no new ideas under the sun, that it’s all been thought before. I think somebody said that, Grant.

Yeah, exactly. Nothing new under the sun. Yeah. And you kind of just want to shut up because you’re kind of like, oh, I’m pretty sure that any idea that’s come to my head, it’s somebody else has said before. I’m not as smart as I thought I was. But it’s a little encouraging as well to know that there’s this deep vein of humorous thought, for example, that has this rich tradition and you’re on the tail end of it, whipping along behind, holding onto the coattail after coattail of all these people who are smarter, better, quicker than you. It’s really kind of delightful. And I do appreciate his work to find all these women who said these things. And for example, he’s done a really smart thing in the book. For example, well, we might say that Ronald Reagan said some of these things, but Fred Shapiro attributes them to his copywriter, to his speechwriter, Peggy Noonan.

And that’s the right thing to do.

Right.

If you know who wrote a speech, then they’re the person who deserves the credit, not the person who said the words.

Yeah, and it’s super cool that we’re the beneficiaries of those last 15 years of research because we’ve got all these new quotes from, you know, people as diverse as Beyonce and politicians from today.

But also, we’re all the beneficiaries of the digitization of so many materials that Fred Shapiro didn’t have access to 15 years ago.

That’s exciting, too.

The book, again, is the new Yale Book of Quotations edited by Fred R. Shapiro, and we both wholeheartedly recommend it.

Check it out. And in the meantime, if you want to talk about language, call us 877-929-9673.

Hi there. You have A Way with Words.

Good afternoon. This is Chris Mershrod calling from Ithaca, New York.

Well, good afternoon, Chris.

Hi, Chris. What’s up?

We have quite a few Spanish words in our English language, or American English usage, as you probably know from the cowboy days of the Spanish in the Southwest.

And since then, others have trepped into common usage, like the word nada.

And one word that I think should be part of our general usage is the word vergüenza.

Vergüenza.

Why do you like the word vergüenza for a borrowing into English from Spanish?

Sometimes the translation is shame, no?

To have shame or lack of decency.

But in reality, in the Latin American culture, if your mother says to you, que vergüenza, or veron sozo, right? It has much more emotional weight than shame on you.

And this is drummed into the culture, which I think we can pick up fairly quickly, to the effect that if someone, you know, you’re in a car, someone shouts at you, you’ve seen vergüenza, it means you’ve done something that’s really against the moral fabric and the traditions and the folk ways.

You’re outside of decency, if you will.

And so the expression que vergüenza or vergonzoso or any derivation of that word, vergüenza, is something that we could really use in the present political climate to really put a word and a description of the unacceptable behavior of people.

So what you’re talking about is more about brazenness or audacity of the person who should be ashamed.

It’s something that they knew was wrong, and they did it just out of pure cussedness or just because they thought they could get away with it.

Well, I’m not sure they actually do it on purpose. It’s a character defect.

Oh, I see. I think I get what you’re saying. So this is about scoundrels.

They act without a conscience, right? They don’t have common decency. Something like that?

Exactly. That’s right.

There’s a saying that I saw in one of my Spanish dictionaries, something like, están sin vergüenza que estafaría hasta a su madre.

He’s such a scoundrel, he would even cheat his mother.

That’s exactly the definition of it, yes.

He would even take his mother for a ride and not think twice about it.

You’re getting here, you’re making a real strong connection to, I think, to the Latin roots of this word vergüenza, which we should spell. It’s V-E-R-G-U-E-N-Z-A,

And the U has boop, the little dots on top of it. And it comes from a Latin word meaning sense of shame or respect, discretion, even awe. And ultimately, it goes back to a word that has the root of feeling respect or to revere or to feel awe of. But in Roman culture, according to the scholar Robert Castor, to have veracundia, which is the word that it comes from, V-E-R-E-C-U-N-D-I-A, that it comes directly from, it was a sense of propriety deriving from knowing your position in society, like knowing who you are inferior to, who you’re superior to, or who you’re equal to, and never violating that hierarchy, being abundantly aware of this was a social virtue and it regulated your behavior in groups.

So it’s really deeper than just like, oh, no, I spilled my drink. I’m so embarrassed.

It’s not that kind of embarrassment at all.

I would add to that context, if you will, entitlement, the feeling of entitlement, that you can just do what you feel to do.

And as long as you’re entitled to it, why not?

Who should complain?

And that’s when the crowd should shout out, sin vergüenza!

Yeah, and, you know, when you talk about somebody being shameless, I don’t know.

That word seems so deluded and watered down.

I mean, it’s just, you know, I think by repetition, I just don’t think saying somebody shameless necessarily has the same, I mean, it’s pretty much a translation, right?

Siem vergüenza and shameless, but it doesn’t feel the same in English to me.

Chris, I got to say, thank you for pointing out that, you know, bilingual dictionaries are interesting.

They can offer you a word-to-word translation.

But, boy, there can be a lot of culture that you can completely miss behind a word without immersing yourself in that culture for a long time.

And television and books and newspapers aren’t going to get everything.

You have to be there and know the people.

And feel the emotion of the whole thing.

And feel the emotion.

And feel the weight of your own errors, too.

Have that shouted at you to really know what a vergüenza truly is.

So you’ve spent a lot of time in Latin America, I guess?

Yes, since 1964.

It’s been a great life, really.

It sounds like it, Chris.

It sounds like you’ve made the most of it.

And thank you for sharing just this little bit of your hard-won wisdom with us.

Thank you.

It’s been a pleasure.

Have a great day.

Take care now. Be well.

Thanks. Bye-bye.

What’s the harshest word for embarrassment or shame that you can think of in English?

877-929-9673.

We heard from Tom Hollinsworth in Onancock, Virginia.

He writes, I’m a homegrown physician on the eastern shore of Virginia, the southern part of the peninsula between the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic.

For years, I’ve maintained a list of eastern shore medical expressions to give to new medical providers.

He sent us a lot of examples, but a couple of them I especially like.

One of them is Old Arthur.

Like if you have a visit from Old Arthur.

Is that arthritis?

Yes.

Old Arthur’s in town.

And another one that really touched me was the phrase out of heart.

He’s had patients use that to mean I’m discouraged or depressed.

Like, yeah, Doc, my wife left me. I’m out of heart.

And I started researching this term and apparently it goes all the way back to the 16th century.

Out of heart in those days meant in low spirits, discouraged, disheartened, despondent.

But it’s such a beautiful phrase.

Yeah, a different kind of, not a synonym for heartless.

No, no, just, yeah, just sort of sad or crestfallen.

I’m out of heart, Doc.

Yeah, those sound like good old-timey phrases to me.

I love them.

You’ve probably encountered phrases in your work, expressions that other people don’t know that you’d be delighted to share with us and the world.

Send them along, words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Karen, and I’m calling from Tucson, Arizona.

Hi, Karen. Welcome to the show.

Oh, thank you.

My daughter and I were visiting a neighbor, and that neighbor had just come home from chaperoning a camp, a youth camp.

And she had on her mantelpiece a plunger that was decorated with sparkles and jewels and ribbons and things like that.

And my daughter asked what that was about.

And my friend said that they had won the award for the cleanest Biffy.

And so we, of course, asked, what is a Biffy?

And our friend said that it was basically a glorified outhouse.

And then my daughter continued asking questions.

And my friend explained that the word Biffy stood for bathroom enforced for you.

And my suspicion radar went up.

I dotted that.

I went to the Internet, looked it up, couldn’t find anything to verify that.

So I thought I’d call the experts.

So this was like a summer camp then where they called the outdoor toilet the Biffy.

Yes.

Gotcha.

Martha, what do you think about that acronym?

Well, I think Karen is right on.

And it sounds like you’ve been listening to enough episodes of the show that you know to be suspicious of acronymic etymologies.

Is that correct?

Yeah, it sounded pretty awkward, but I couldn’t find any information about it.

We can tell you unequivocally that it doesn’t mean bathroom enforced for you.

It doesn’t.

It does not.

Although that’s pretty clever. I like that.

And different ideas have been proposed.

We’ve been asked before if it comes from BFI, which were the initials of a portable toilet company, Browning Ferris Industries, based in Houston.

But the problem here is that that company started in 1968, and we see the term Biffy used for outhouse at least 20, almost 30 years earlier than that.

And some people have suggested that maybe it ultimately comes from bivouac, you know, like military jargon, bivy meaning a small shelter.

But the truth is we don’t know.

Some people have suggested that maybe it’s a little kid’s pronunciation of bathroom or privy.

You’re absolutely right to be suspicious of that acronymic explanation.

What I’m suspicious of is this person actually was displaying the plunger on their mantle.

Proudly?

No, not proudly.

She was saying she didn’t know what to do with it.

But there was some talk of she’s supposed to bring it back next year.

And so what do we do with this thing?

That’s not really the Stanley cup you got there.

You don’t want to pass it from team to team.

It’s a Stanley rubber cup.

Right.

You can stick it on the wall.

Martha, how far back does this go?

I think we both found those 1941 uses.

Right, right.

No earlier than that.

We just simply can’t find it any earlier than that.

I guess we should say congratulations to your friend for their award.

For their award.

Absolutely.

I don’t know how you keep an outhouse, quote-unquote, clean, but, you know, I wasn’t there.

But these days it does tend to be associated with camps, summer camps, scouting camps, that sort of thing, sleepaway camps.

Okay.

All right, Karen.

Well, thank you so much for the question.

Take care now, Karen.

Oh, thank you.

Thanks.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Well, lay your linguistic traps for me and Martha.

We’d love to fall into them, 877-929-9673, or put your devious schemes in email, words@waywordradio.org, or try them out on Twitter @wayword.

Grant, it’s Sauer Gürkenzeit.

It’s Sauer Pickle Day.

Yes, Sauer Pickle Time. That’s it.

What does that mean? Is this the day when we air our grievances?

Is this another name for Festivus?

Well, no, pickle time in German is a period when there’s very little economic or political or cultural activity, usually during the summer months, you know, sort of that lull during the summer when, especially in Germany, businesses close, schools out, you know, they get all that vacation over there. And they refer to that as saueragurkenzeit, which means pickled cucumber time, probably because in late 18th century Berlin, there was a pickle harvest about that time. And that’s when people were, you know, canning pickles.

Okay.

Nothing else to do.

It makes a lot of sense.

It reminds me of summers in New York.

August in New York was always a lovely time because it felt like half the city was away.

Yeah, they left.

Unlike Paris, New York doesn’t really close in August, but it does empty out.

So you can just go about your business and just everything was very unpopulated.

You could get a seat at your favorite restaurant and not worry about getting tickets to a great movie.

And the parks would be, you know, lovely and uncrowded.

It was just a really good time.

But hot as heck.

I was going to say, you sweat a lot, right?

Yeah.

877-929-9673.

Thanks to senior producer Stefanie Levine, editor Tim Felten, and production assistant Rachel Elizabeth Weisler.

You can send us messages, subscribe to the podcast and newsletter, and catch up on hundreds of past episodes at waywordradio.org.

Our toll-free line is always open in the U.S. and Canada, 877-929-9673, or email us words@waywordradio.org.

A Way with Words is an independent production of Wayword, Inc., a nonprofit supported by listeners and organizations who are changing the way the world talks about language.

Many thanks to Wayword Board member and our friend Bruce Rogow for his help and expertise.

Thanks for listening. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. Until next time, goodbye.

Bye-bye.

Thank you.