South End of a Chicken

Even though this is a recorded podcast, you can always call us anytime. The number is 877-929-9673.

Leave your questions and stories about language, and you might just end up discussing them on the air with us.

Thanks for listening.

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

And I’m Martha Barnette.

One of the fun things about having books, besides reading them, is making what’s called a bookmash.

Now, Grant, you know what these are.

Yes.

These are when you stack the books with their spines facing out so that their titles create a kind of found poetry.

I was reminded of this when I was reading the blog called Sentence First.

You know this one. It’s by Stan Carey, who’s based in Ireland, and blogs about language.

And lately he’s been posting photos of bookmashes, and I enjoy them because they’re often oddly poetic.

I mean, you have to picture this pile of books.

He had a photograph of this on his site.

On the top is a book called Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes by Daniel Everett.

And underneath that is a book called Bugs by Theodore Roszak.

And then there are four other books.

And if you go down this stack, the titles read sort of like a poem.

It goes, Don’t Sleep.

There are snakes, bugs, creatures of the earth.

In the shadow of man, myth makers and lawbreakers, defining the world.

Oh, that is nice.

Yeah, and you know that last book.

Found poetry, definitely.

Yeah, Defining the World by Henry Hitchings.

After I looked at Stan’s blog, I happened to glance up at my own bookshelf and I turned my head sideways and I could already see this accidental bookmash taking shape.

And it started with Dave Wilton’s book, Word Myths.

So here’s my accidental bookmash, Grant.

Check it out.

Word myths.

Grammatically correct.

The language of flowers.

Getting things done.

Nice.

What does your bookmash look like?

Give us a call, 877-929-9673, or you can send a picture and email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Neil Morgan from Sherman, Texas.

Welcome to the show, Neil.

Well, thank you.

What’s going on?

Well, I have an expression that comes from my wife’s family,

And I don’t know if it just originated in their family

Or if it is something regional from the Mobile area where her parents grew up.

Oh, good. We love these.

Yeah. So the expression is dirt road sport.

What’s a dirt road sport to you?

Well, the dirt road, the first time I heard it used was my mother-in-law describing her son’s new motorcycle.

And it was a beautiful motorcycle.

And I was expressing admiration, and she said, oh, yeah, he’s a dirt road sport.

And it made sense to me, you know, even though it was a street bike, that, you know, it had to do with, you know, a vehicle or something.

But then later on, I always go there on vacation, and we have an evening tradition,

Which we weren’t going to be able to observe because we had run out of gin.

And I had to go to the store to get a bottle of gin so we could have our eyeball swappers.

Eyeball swappers?

Yeah, our eyeball swappers.

That’s a gin and tonic in the Patton family.

I see.

Eyeball swappers, that’s great.

Right next down, eyeball swappers.

You swap your own eyeballs or you swap with somebody else?

Well, we never drink alone, so I don’t know.

I guess it could be with someone else.

Take one down, pass it around, right?

Right, right.

So anyway, I went to the store, and being the guest,

I just bought the best bottle of gin in the store and brought it back.

And when I took it out of the bag, then Miriam, my mother-in-law,

Looked at that, and her eyebrows went up, and she said,

Well, aren’t you the dirt road sport?

And I realized then that it meant something else.

And basically, it seems to mean kind of reaching beyond your station in life.

-huh. Yes.

And buying something above what you ordinarily would be able to afford.

Oh, Neil, that’s great.

Can I read you a definition of dirt road sport from 1976?

Sure.

A country boy showing off in a Saturday afternoon town.

It’s exactly what you said.

It’s somebody who thinks he is the hottest thing on two legs.

And when he goes to the big city, he still acts like it.

And everybody’s like, look at you, dirt road sport.

Right.

Okay.

But, yeah, there’s elements here.

It’s definitely somebody who’s putting on a little show, trying to be just a little slicker and a little more polished than they actually are.

Reaching above.

I like that.

Reaching above, yeah.

Okay.

All right.

The sport part is really interesting.

It used to be a fairly common just kind of way to refer to a young man in general,

Just the same way you might say Mac, buddy, or pal.

Yeah, what are you doing, sport?

You’ll hear sport today.

Usually it’s an intergenerational thing, older generation talking to a younger generation.

Not nearly as common.

That is the same sport, though, as in dirt road sport.

So it’s somebody who is the cock of the walk on a dirt road.

Okay, right, right.

All dressed up.

All dressed up.

Got the feathers combed back and the spurs are jangling.

Well, that makes a lot of sense.

And so is it regional to Pensacola or Mobile?

It’s southern.

It’s southern in general.

And it’s not that common, but you will find sprinkles of it all throughout the south.

And I think somewhere around the Mason-Dixon line, there’s an electromagnetic field that pushes it back.

As far as I know, it’s not used in the north.

Okay.

But they still have dirt road sports there.

They do.

They call them something else.

I don’t think I can say it on the air.

Okay, all right.

But those young men, that particular kind of young man who is not quite aware that he is not the awesome fellow that he thinks he is, is fairly universal.

Yeah, yeah.

But I guess it should be a compliment when you’re in your 50s to be called a dirt road sport.

You can tell yourself that.

Yeah.

That’s fine.

Sure.

Neil, you’re great, man.

That is fantastic.

You’re entertaining us.

Martha’s even got a rosy cheek here.

I want to do some eyeball swapping.

Yeah.

All right.

Well, we’ll come down there sometime and do that, all right?

Thanks, Dia.

Okay, that sounds great.

Take care now.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Okay, you too.

Bye-bye.

Now, I wonder if eyeball swapping is unique to their family.

We’ll have to look that one up.

Eyeball swapper, yeah.

I don’t know.

Call us and swap some language stories, 877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Melissa from Littleton, New Hampshire.

Hi, Melissa.

Welcome.

Hey, how you doing? What’s up?

Yeah, I was calling because I love your show, first of all. Thank you.

I had a question about texting in everyday language.

So I catch myself using NBD, oh, that’s TMI, or BRB all the time.

And it’s quite humorous to me, but my question is what your thoughts were on how we’ve evolved into using abbreviations in everyday language and texting in general.

So you use this all the time in your daily life?

At a business meeting or in conversations with friends or home?

No, way more casual.

With business associates, it’s more off the cuff in a joking manner,

But it just seems like a very funny thing that NBD has the same amount of syllables as no big deal,

Yet I’ll catch myself doing that.

And I know other people that will use it in casual conversation all the time,

Not really on a business sense right now, but it’s just kind of funny.

Oh, yeah.

So I thought it would be an interesting question.

So you’re calling because you feel a little bit like maybe you shouldn’t do that?

Not necessarily.

I’m calling because it’s just funny to me that where has our language come from,

And are we going to continue to abbreviate, and how far down can we abbreviate?

It was more of just something really funny I thought of, and I wanted to get your take on it.

That’s a good question.

There’s one thing that I want you to take away from us, one important thing, which is language things are weird while they’re new.

And once we grow used to them, we wonder how we did without them.

And so, for example, in business, we have a zillion acronyms like initialisms, like CC and ASAP and things like that.

And those are completely ordinary now, right?

Or W-R-T.

Yeah, well, if you look at IOU, like IOU money, that goes back to 1618 at least.

It’s handy, right?

It makes perfect sense.

So there’s a second thing here, which is a little less important, but also worth mentioning.

We play with a language.

That is part of what makes language work.

If you don’t have a playful spirit about language, then your language probably is not that great.

You’re probably not a very good speaker or writer or reader, that sort of thing.

And playing with language by using acronyms and initialisms in places that they don’t belong is part of that.

And it brings a vitality and liveliness to your spoken language.

You mentioned texting specifically.

And I’m thinking that some of the text-isms are actually things that are older than text.

They are.

Yeah, many of them are.

Many of them we think is new and they’re not.

Yeah.

They’re just simply in a new medium.

No, and I thought of that as well because I may have used when I was a kid,

Are you going to be my BFF today for best friend?

But that’s older and now before there was texting and now there’s texting.

So I do agree.

It’s just kind of one of those playful things, I guess.

Yeah, it’s playful.

And I encourage it as long as the situation is correct.

And you may actually find that it will ease a business meeting.

You might find that a slightly lower register of language can make people a little more comfortable

As long as you’re not dropping them every other word.

I was wondering if you use OMG, because that one seems self-conscious to me.

That one is a little played out.

I’m not going to lie.

I will get even more playful with these, and I’ll say OMGG if I’m really trying to exaggerate.

I like that.

I’m telling you, I think it’s funny, and how I will use them in everyday language,

Probably mostly to make my friends laugh and to give myself a little chuckle.

There’s a third thing that I want you to take away.

We know from what happened during the telegraph era that most of this shorthand language doesn’t last.

Very little of it sticks and remains a permanent part of English.

But when we look at the influence of texting on language,

What we find most of all is that these abbreviations and initialisms and acronyms are going away.

And the answer is very prosaic.

The reason this is happening is very simple.

It’s because our technology is getting better.

Our typing on small keyboards is improving.

The software is guessing better.

We are all becoming better typists in general.

And we’re finding even things like the input field where we put the words is larger and easier to use.

Therefore, we don’t have to abbreviate.

And so we don’t.

We just write plain, normal English more often now than we did 10 years ago.

I’d hate to see lol leave the language, though.

I mean, I don’t say it out loud, though.

Except for lolcats.

Some people say lol out loud.

It sounds weird.

I say raffle.

I say raffle for sure.

I was raffling over that, rolling on the floor laughing.

Yeah, raffle copier.

That’s awesome.

Yeah. Hey, Melissa, thanks a lot for calling.

Thanks for having me. Take care.

Thank you. Bye-bye.

Okay. BRB.

Bye.

Bye.

877-929-9673.

Grant, we’ve talked before about the terms for that fatty bump at the end of a chicken or a turkey on a plate.

The Pope’s nose.

The Pope’s nose. Sometimes it’s called the Parsons nose.

Sometimes the bishop’s nose, and the French call it le solilesse.

Only the silly person leaves it.

But I came across another one in the Dictionary of American Regional English that I hadn’t seen,

Which is the south end of a northbound chicken.

Oh, yeah.

Or the north end of a southbound chicken.

Well, I’ve heard variants of that.

You talk about your rumpa urea, right?

Oh, yeah?

Yeah, the south end of a northbound donkey.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

Hadn’t heard that.

Well, 877-929-9673.

Got a favorite word? Share it with us.

Stay tuned for more.

Support comes from the Ken Blanchard Companies,

Celebrating 35 years of making a leadership difference with Situational Leadership 2,

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You’re listening to A Way with Words.

I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

And joining us is our quiz guy, John Chaneski.

Hello, John.

Hi, Grant.

Hi, Martha.

Hi, John.

What’s up, buddy?

Hi, I’m back.

I have a nice little puzzle for you guys.

Okay.

That’s awesome.

This one, you know, there’s an old chestnut in the puzzle world.

You know, you change one letter in a well-known title and see what you get, right?

Oh, yeah.

You’ve done those before.

Sure, yeah.

However, that’s not all I’m changing.

Well, here’s an example.

Fill in the blanks.

Dear Blank Brown, you’d better lay off the candy bars in the confessional or you’ll only get blank.

Concernedly, A Way with Words.

Dear Blank Brown.

You better lay off the candy bars in the confessional.

Is it Parson?

Father and fatter?

Yes, that’s it.

Very good.

Very good.

Dear Blank Judy, we are the ones who decide who gets into our club, and on this matter, we will not blank.

We remain.

Judge.

A Way with Words.

Judge and budge.

Judge and budge is right.

Very good.

Yes.

I feel properly sledged.

I think you’ll know this one, too.

Dear Blank Quimby, with your huge salary, it’s not surprising you live in a huge blank.

Regards, A Way with Words.

Mayor and you live in a large manor.

Manor is correct.

Good teamwork on that one.

Dear Blank Benjamin, we’re not sure what this has to do with the military,

But like a human, a baboon is a blank.

Best, A Way with Words.

Private and primate.

Private and primate is right.

Very good.

That Benjamin.

Dear Blank Edmund, your dressage video was interesting.

How did you make your horse blank to the music?

Curiously, A Way with Words.

Was it canter for the last word?

No.

No?

Prince and prance.

Oh, very good.

Yes, prince and prance.

Very good.

Let me preface this one.

This one’s a triple.

There are three blanks.

Okay?

Okay.

Dear blank Snyder, we believe your email is a scam.

Are you trying to blank us blank?

Suspiciously, A Way with Words.

Duke.

Yes.

So Duke is the first field.

Are you trying to…

Dupe?

Yes.

Us.

Dupe us.

Blank?

What’s that?

Dude.

Dude.

You trying to dupe us, dude?

Very good.

Dear Blank Cohen, thank you for asking.

Our favorite breakfast side dish is blank.

Hungrily, A Way with Words.

And once again, this is a member of the peerage.

Toast? It’s not toast?

A member of the peerage.

Five letters.

I see.

Five letters.

Bacon?

Bacon and barren.

Bacon and barren.

Oh, there we go.

Lord have mercy.

Blank, blank Jones.

We will be unable to complete this semester of classes.

Sincerely, A Way with Words.

Dear Dean Jones.

That’s it.

Dear Dean Jones.

Nice.

We will be unable to complete this semester.

Thanks, John.

Thanks for the torture, John.

Much appreciated.

Thank you, guys.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Call us to talk about language at 877-929-9673 or send your emails to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Ken Krumpler here.

Hi, Ken. How are you doing?

I’m doing well. How are you doing?

Great. Welcome to the show.

Hi, Ken.

Thank you very much.

What can we help you with today?

I’m here in Richmond, but like so many others here, my parents are from elsewhere.

They’re from down in eastern North Carolina and learned the three R’s, reading, writing, and the road to Richmond.

Richmond, Virginia, right?

Yes, ma’am.

And so with that, they brought a lot of their colloquialisms up with them.

And one, I never heard it outside of the eastern North Carolina area, one that my dad used,

That if you had an injury or pulled a muscle and it was a couple of three days later and it was still sore,

He would refer to it, possibly best to use it in a sentence.

Be careful of my hand there where I twisted it the other day.

It’s still right touches.

Right touches.

And that means what exactly?

It’s still sore.

Still sore.

It’s still tender.

Yeah.

Oh, you know that, Martha.

Oh, yeah.

Okay.

Yeah, from North Carolina.

Yeah.

Yeah, you’ve got roots there, right?

Yeah, definitely heard it there.

No, roots in North Carolina.

But yeah, touches.

It means what you might think it means, that it’s painful to the touch.

It’s physically sensitive.

That’s logical.

Yeah.

And it goes back to Ireland and northern England.

I mean, this is a great relic of the migrations there.

How widespread is it?

It’s in the south, South Midlands, across the south there.

Okay.

Here and there.

Yeah.

So right touches means I’ve got an arm that pains me, don’t make it worse.

Mm—

And sometimes it’s a tetchius, T-E-T-C-H-I-O-U-S, or touchius.

But the version that you use, Ken, is the most common.

Okay.

Like I said, outside of the family in that part of the country, I’d never heard it widely used.

And when I use it around here, just, you know, we all learn from our parents.

When I use it around here, I get more than one confused look.

But they don’t regard you as touchius.

I mean, it can be emotionally sensitive or irritable, easily upset, that kind of thing.

Or tetchy as well?

Yeah, it’s probably related to that.

We’re not completely sure about its etymology, but probably.

Or at least people associate it with that.

Okay, I never had associated it with an emotional hurt.

It was always a physical.

So I never heard it that way.

Yeah, both ways.

Well, there you go, Ken.

All right, well, thank you ever so much.

Thanks for calling.

Really appreciate it.

Okay, thank you.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Yeah, my toes so touchy I can hardly walk.

Get those legs up on a stool, lady.

877-929-9673.

Email us.

words@waywordradio.org.

Been catching up on my southernisms here,

And here’s one that I hadn’t seen before.

There’s no pleasing her.

If she gets to heaven, she’ll ask to see the upstairs.

That’s pretty good.

Call us with yours, 877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha. This is Renee from Madison, Wisconsin.

Hi, Renee. Welcome.

Hi, Renee. It’s Grant here.

Hi, Grant.

What’s up?

What’s happening?

Well, I have a story to share from a friend that I have a question about.

Okay, from a friend.

Yes.

Is this friend in air quotes, or is it actually from you when you’re just hiding it?

No, it’s a real friend.

Okay.

I have two friends at work with whom I share grammar, punctuation, word usage issues.

And she wrote to the two of us recently and said, so here’s what happened to me.

I was at my daughter’s parent-teacher conferences, and while I’m waiting in line to get in,

I noticed a large poster in the room, laminated, and it said,

Things You’re Thankful For.

Your.

Y-O-U-R.

Oh, really?

Yes.

Laminated?

Yes.

Oh.

Did it have a gold star?

Smiley face?

I don’t think so.

So I think she followed your rules, right?

So she didn’t say, hey, everybody, look, the teacher made a mistake.

She waited until it was her turn, got up to talk to the teacher about her daughter and said, oh, by the way, that poster over there is wrong.

And the teacher said, oh, and moved on.

Oh.

Yes.

So my friend wrote and said, oh, great, two problems.

Now I’m that parent.

Yes.

Correct as a teacher.

And secondly, I don’t think she knew what was wrong.

Oh, my.

Are you sure?

Oh, my.

She didn’t give the impression of saying, you know, because she didn’t say, oh, I’m so embarrassed.

Oh, how could I do that?

Oh, thanks for pointing that out.

Nothing.

Just,

Wow.

Well, my question is, did she do the right thing?

You know, she, right, right, I know the rules.

I’m so proud.

I know the rules, right?

She was right.

She thought it mattered because this is her child’s teacher.

Right.

And she did it one-on-one in private.

One-on-one.

Yeah, that was going to be my question.

Yeah.

Things you’re, Y-O-U-R, thankful for.

Yeah.

Definitely wrong.

Right, right.

Let’s just get that out of the way.

You’re right.

Your friend is right.

That’s definitely wrong.

No doubt about it.

No question.

Yes.

Even here where we’re permissive wafflers.

Not always, but you’re right.

Yes, you are right.

Let’s just not presume that the teacher’s a moron and didn’t know the truth.

All right?

Let’s give her the benefit of the doubt.

Well, can we?

I don’t know if we can.

We can.

Her response was one word, and she didn’t say, I don’t see what you mean.

That is definitely correct.

So she wasn’t curious.

We have to, she’s a teacher.

How many kids does she have in her class?

26, right?

Well, yeah, she might have been moving them along.

Yeah, she.

Okay, here’s a complicating fact.

Okay.

It was 4K.

4K, what do you mean 4K?

4-year-old kindergarten.

4-year-old kindergarten.

Yes, maybe not all states have that, but we have a 4-year-old kindergarten here.

Oh, I see.

Not all states do.

That’s news to me.

And it’s a precursor to the regular 5-year-old kindergarten.

So probably the little kids couldn’t even contest that, right?

I mean, she’s indoctrinating those kids with incorrect information.

No, no, no, no, no.

You make it sound malicious and willful.

It isn’t.

No, no.

Here, let me tell you a different story.

I have a child in kindergarten as well.

I’ve been in his classroom numerous times for family Fridays and other kinds of things.

The room is covered, covered in language, floor to ceiling, even on the ceiling, even on the floor,

Written things everywhere, numbers, words, sentences, alphabets, you name it.

There are mistakes there.

My wife and I, and she’s a linguist and lexicographer as well,

Zipped our lips and haven’t said a word to my son’s teacher.

Part because we don’t want to be those parents,

But also because the magnitude of the work of one woman with no teacher’s aids

Handling 26 kids means her high volume throughput

Is going to have the occasional error in it.

And we are allowing for her humanity and saying,

Okay, she’s got a mistake.

The next time she reads this to the kids, she’s bound to catch it and bound to pencil in a fix.

And so I don’t want to assume that your friend’s child’s teacher,

Just because she gave a one-word monosyllabic response, didn’t know the truth.

I don’t think we have enough information to say that.

Well, that’s a good point. We don’t know from that one word.

I mean, it could have been being incurious. It could have been irritation.

She could have been distracted. She could have any number of things.

I propose she could have just been embarrassed.

She could have been embarrassed.

You know what?

And I’d love to find out if it was changed later.

Is there a way to be helpful here?

Is there a way to say, to pile on compliments and then say, you know, by the way, you might want to change that?

Or are you just saying, just let it go?

Or should she, next time she sees her, say, you know, I felt like I embarrassed you.

I’m really sorry.

I know that that was just a minor issue.

That’s a thought.

You know what?

That opens a new door, doesn’t it, for further help.

And the teacher might say, oh, yeah, you know what?

When I wrote that, I had the cold, but I couldn’t find a substitute, and so I just had to come in that day.

She might even have a backstory, or she might say, you know what?

Thank you for pointing that out.

I need some help in the classroom.

Do you want to come join us?

Yeah, be a volunteer.

There’s all of these opportunities to strengthen that relationship if she feels like it’s been weakened.

Well, I like that idea of turning it into an opportunity rather than a confrontation.

I mean, it sounds like she got halfway there, but maybe she could get a little farther along.

You just don’t know until it comes out of your mouth how it’s going to be received, right?

Right.

I’ve been there.

I do want to thank you guys for the rules.

I have to say, I have learned from them.

I try to execute, but you know what?

It’s a work in progress.

You mean, are you talking about correcting people’s grammar?

Oh, absolutely.

Oh, I have made every one of those.

Let’s say I’ve learned from negative example of myself.

Oh, really?

Join the club.

Yeah.

We’re all there, yeah.

Yeah, well, I think it’s, you know, what’s the larger purpose?

Right, right.

Well, Renee, thanks for calling.

I think this is a really interesting question.

We run at this all the time, right?

Yeah, yeah.

Renee, we’re going to get so much email about this.

Yeah, I would like to hear opinions on either side.

We’ve all been here.

Yeah.

Thank you so much, Renee.

I really appreciate it.

Thanks, guys.

Take care now.

Okay, take care.

Bye-bye.

We know you’ve got a story about wanting to correct someone.

Maybe you did.

Maybe you didn’t.

How’d that go?

877-929-9673 or email words@waywordradio.org.

We were talking earlier about bookmashes and the ones listed on Stan Carey’s blog.

And he said he was inspired to do his bookmashes by an artist named Nina Katchadourian.

And she has a project called the Sorted Books Project, where she takes photographs of books in certain order to make them, you know, to create found poetry.

And on her site, there’s a great series of three books.

They’re really old-fashioned books that you might have read as a kid when you were, you know, in the 1940s or 1950s.

So you’ve got to picture this, and we’ll link to it on our site.

But here are the three books laid next to each other.

Indian History for Young Folks, Our Village, Your National Parks.

I love that.

Yeah, there’s a lot in that, isn’t there?

Yeah, it’s really deep.

Layers of meaning.

Send us your bookmashes to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Frances Barrow from Indianapolis.

Hi, Frances, welcome.

How are you doing?

Okay, how are you guys?

Super.

Doing well.

What’s going on?

Well, I was interested in an expression that my father used to use that I haven’t heard anyone else say ever,

And I just thought I’d check with you guys.

Okay.

And the expression is, we’re in good season.

And he would say it if, like, the family was in the car going someplace,

And my mom would fret that we were running late.

And he would say, don’t worry, we’re in good season.

And I assume that season just is another word for time.

We’re in good time, so maybe that’s not so unusual.

But I’ve never heard anyone else say it,

And I just wanted to see if you guys had heard the expression.

Interesting.

Frances, what kind of work did your father do?

Well, he was an engineer.

He got his degree in mechanical engineering from Purdue University

And definitely had that engineering frame of mind.

But he read broadly and loved crossword puzzles.

So definitely he was a word person.

I asked that because I just wondered if he had an agricultural background

Because that really is the reference here.

Yeah, it’s related to vegetables and fruit being in season.

Yeah, okay.

So June is the time of the year for cherries, perhaps.

They are in season.

Yeah.

And you can find this in dictionaries as far back as Noah Webster’s first dictionaries in the 1820s.

It’s right in there.

There’s an entry for it explained in full.

So at one point, this was widespread enough that the single most read dictionary of the era,

It was in virtually every house, it was in there.

And people probably knew it and spoke it and had it, and it was part of their idiolex.

Okay, so comparing themselves to fruit that’s in seed.

Well, anything that can happen at the right time of year.

If you’re agricultural, there is a time to plant and a time to reap and sow.

How does the Bible verse go, Martha?

Yeah, time to reap, time to sow.

It’s not too early, not too late.

It’s just ripe.

And so if you’re in good season, then you’re right on time.

No rush.

There’s a particular notion there that’s important, and that season isn’t a specific moment.

It’s not 7 p.m. On the 12th of December, you know, 2013.

It is like a give or take kind of period, a little bit before and a little bit after.

It’s in this range of time.

A season is not a specific moment.

So if you’re in season, you’re like, yeah, we’re kind of in the ballpark.

Yeah, yeah, you’re in the ballpark.

Oh, well, that makes sense because when he said that, see, this was a stern and silent man most of the time.

But when he would say we’re in good season, the words just settled on us like a balm.

It was, okay, all is well.

Things are fine.

Everybody relaxed.

Absolutely.

That’s lovely.

It’s such a lovely echo of an earlier time.

Well, and he very well might have picked it up, you know, from people in the area.

We’re from southern Indiana, New Albany.

And certainly he might have heard that expression just in the community.

Great.

Well, Frances, thank you so much.

Thank you, Frances.

Okay, thanks for talking.

Take care now.

Lovely phrase.

Bye-bye.

Sure.

Bye now.

Bye-bye.

We’re in good season for you to give us a call, 877-929-9673,

Or send your questions in email to words@waywordradio.org.

Grant, do you know what it means to spit the dummy?

I do. It’s to throw a fit.

It’s Australian.

Yes, and why?

Because dummy is their word for pacifier or binky.

Yeah, binky.

So if you spit the dummy, you’re spitting it out and carrying on, right?

Yelling, screaming, yeah, crying.

Call us, 877-929-9673.

More word nerditude as A Way with Words continues.

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

And I’m Martha Barnette.

What do you call it when you cut a hole in a piece of bread, drop a raw egg into it, and then fry it all up?

Yum.

Yes, that too. But you may remember, Grant, that on an earlier show we talked about several terms for this, including, what, gas house eggs, toad in the hole, hole in one, pirate’s eye, one-eyed jack, and the incredibly appetizing name for a breakfast treat, spit in the ocean.

Yeah.

I thought we’d covered every single name there could possibly be for that dish, but no, no, we put the call out to you and we got lots and lots more.

Mark Pashayan of Winston-Salem, North Carolina writes,

Camping with Boy Scouts circa 1967 in Connecticut,

We bit the hole in the center of the bread and ate it,

And then put the hole in the pan to cook and called it fish in a pond.

Oh, and they put the egg in the hole that they bit out of the bread.

Yeah.

Okay, fish in the pond.

Yeah, good times.

And then Ed Hines from Roswell, Georgia wrote,

Didn’t realize that the egg and bread dish you talked about had any other name.

In New England, we called this a bread frame egg,

Which sort of fits with the person who wrote to tell us that they used to call them television eggs.

Because of the frame.

Yeah.

Picture in the middle.

I love that.

And let’s see.

Penny Stowherd from Michigan wrote that she learned about these from the La Leche League cookbook,

Where they’re called UFOs, unidentified frying objects.

And we also heard lots more names.

We heard owl’s eye, kitty winky, hobo eggs, a top hat, egg in a nest, bird in a nest,

And one of my favorites, one-eyed Egyptians.

You know, like the ancient Egyptian art, you know, where you only see the one eye.

And great, I guess the larger question here is why so many names for this one dish?

I wonder if it just keeps being reinvented.

And so when you reinvent it, you get the opportunity to name it.

That’s right. Mom’s sick. Dad doesn’t know what to do in the kitchen.

And so he just…

I know. No, it’s the other way around. Mom’s a genius.

She knows how to feed the family something yummy.

Yeah, but I think maybe that’s it, that the wheel just keeps getting invented and invented.

Food and language, they go together like ham and eggs.

877-929-9673.

Email us, words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi.

Hi, who’s this?

This is Sharon Merriman.

Hi, Sharon, where are you calling from?

I’m calling from Indianapolis, Indiana.

Welcome to the show.

Welcome, Sharon.

What can we help you with?

Thank you.

Well, I need to know the derivation or the source of the expression one-off.

One-off.

O-F-F.

Now, we all know what one-of-a-kind is, but one-off appears to be used in the same way,

But I’m trying to figure out exactly how it got there.

Sharon, what made you think about this one?

We had a church board meeting, and towards the end of the meeting, which had gone quite late,

Someone made the comment about someone who wasn’t there that he is one-off.

And we all knew what the speaker meant, but we got into the conversation of,

Gee, where’d that come from?

And everyone, almost in accord, said, well, somebody has to call.

You have A Way with Words.

I guess we all listened.

And I didn’t exactly get nominated.

I nominated myself to call.

A bold leader, a leader of people.

That’s right.

Somebody seconded the motion.

And so you’re asking on behalf of your board what one-off means.

Yeah, well, it goes back to the language of manufacturing, and particularly foundries in Britain in the 1930s.

Because in Britain, they would use the expression off to designate the number of things being produced in this foundry.

Like if you would cast, say, a tool or something, if you would cast 20 of them from a mold, you would cast 20 off.

Or 500 of them, you’d cast 500 off.

And so if you have a one-off, then it’s just one single instance of casting something off of a mold.

It is unique.

There are no more like it.

A prototype, perhaps.

Yeah, they broke the mold when they made that guy.

Okay.

And so it left the foundry business and showed up in everyday English and then came across the pond to us.

Well, that is very interesting.

I did have the opportunity to live in England for a couple of years.

Never heard the expression used over there.

Interesting, because it is more common over there.

Yeah, and it was rare enough, though, for a while in the U.K.

That the well-known writer Kingsley Amos actually thought it was an Americanism

And called it out as an abomination at one point.

But it actually does come from the U.K.

Okay, so one-off comes from manufacturing,

And it means something that is unique because it isn’t part of the run of the manufacturing run.

Yeah, it’s a run of one. They made just one.

Yeah, if they made six of them, it’d be six off, 20, 20 off.

Oh, I can hardly wait to go to my next board meeting.

Call an emergency meeting, quick.

Well, we could do that.

Well, tell them all hello for us, Sharon.

Yeah, thanks for calling, Sharon.

They certainly will, and they all knew immediately where we should go to get the source of valuable information.

Absolutely. What church is this?

It’s also Unitarian Church in Indianapolis.

All right. Well, tell them hello at All Souls for us, okay?

Thank you very much.

I certainly shall.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye, Sharon.

Bye.

Well, if something comes up at your board meeting and you can’t figure it out,

You can always call us at 877-929-9673

Or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

I have a couple of Southernisms I hope you’ll like.

Do tell.

How hot is it?

It’s hot as a hen in a wool basket.

A hen in a wool basket.

You like that one?

Yeah.

How about this one?

Hotter than a goat’s butt in a pepper patch.

Yeah, that’s good too.

Call us with your Southernisms, 877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hey there, this is Ethan from Portland, Oregon.

Hi, Ethan, welcome.

Hey there, what’s up?

Hey, big fan.

Great to talk to you guys.

Great to talk to you.

So I was calling about the overuse, I don’t know if I said it,

The wrong use of the phrase, the thing of it is, is,

Where there’s that second is that isn’t necessary.

And, I mean, I’ve even heard the president use it.

And it’s sort of like it’s an inflection thing,

Because people say, the thing of it is, is,

And I feel like the second is, people feel like the second is is necessary

Because of the way that the inflection of the phrase is said.

So what can you guys tell me about that?

Oh, lots. How much time do you have?

Well, the thing of it is, is, and my thing is, that’s another one, you know, my thing is such and such.

So what’s concerning you is the two ises next to each other.

Right, exactly.

Okay.

Yeah.

This is something that’s been studied since the mid-1980s by linguists,

Although we can find examples of it going back in the historical record much further than that.

And it’s something called the reduplicative copula.

And I know that’s a fancy, wonky term, but copula refers to the verb to be and its various forms and the way that it works in a sentence.

Reduplicative means that you have more than one.

Yeah, because it’s coupling the two parts.

Exactly. Reduplicative copula.

And so what we have here is something really interesting.

Bear with me while I get really wonky with this.

Yeah, please do.

There’s something called a focusing construction.

Do you know what a focusing construction is?

I do not.

Okay, so a focusing construction is when you say the thing is or the problem is or the reality is.

Those are all focusing constructions.

So those are perfectly fine.

But we also have something called a cleft sentence, which is very similar.

A cleft sentence is when you say something, instead of saying the kite is in the sky, you say the sky is where the kite is.

So you kind of take a normal sentence and just kind of reverse it.

It still means the same thing roughly, but it’s a little more awkward, still grammatical, still good English, more or less.

But we have something called the wha, the wha, the wha clefts.

And so these are the ones that have what and where and when and who in them.

And so you say what the sky is, is blue.

And we have these two is’s next to each other.

It’s perfectly grammatical.

No speakers really ever complain about that.

It seems normal to the native speakers here.

What the sky is, is blue.

But then we do this thing where we want to combine the focusing constructions

With the cleft sentences, and that’s when it goes awry.

That’s when we have a problem.

So we end up with things like, the color of the sky is blue.

Right?

It’s a little awkward.

So you do get President Obama saying this.

You get absolutely every public speaker who speaks for any amount of time on the record

Does this because, ta-da, it turns out that most English speakers do this,

But you don’t notice it most of the time.

But when you do notice it, you can’t stop noticing it.

You can’t stop it.

It’s like a loose tooth that you have to wiggle.

Every time you remember that you’ve got a loose tooth, you’re wiggling a little bit.

You’re like, oh, they’re doing it again.

So, wonk city, I know.

But what turns out, what’s really interesting thing, that last bit of evidence that it passes by the notice of most speakers

Might suggest that it is being considered passively grammatical by most English speakers.

That is, it passes muster.

The main thing here is reduplicative copula.

It’s got a name. It’s being studied. Turns out we’re doing it more.

Whether or not you have a problem with it depends on whether or not you understand where it came from.

So I’m picturing this mad scientist with a beaker of focusing construction and a beaker of cleft sentence,

Mixing them together and creating this thing that’s making people like Ethan and me.

Oh, so you were annoyed by it.

If I hear it repeatedly from one person, from time to time, it doesn’t bother me.

But, Ethan, is that your experience?

Well, I don’t know.

I tend to notice grammatical things probably more than the average person.

I’m a little upset about certain things like that.

So I think I notice it every time I hear it, and I go, !

Yeah, there’s certain people who do it an awful lot, and Obama is one of them.

The linguists have suggested, without any kind of real conviction, in my opinion,

They’ve suggested that what you said at the very beginning of this call may be the case.

When we say the thing of it is, we consider that a bundle or one concrete phrase that is indivisible and acts as a unit.

And that kind of explains why it seems normal when we’re speaking off the cuff to throw in that other is right after it.

Because it’s kind of a phrase behaving almost as a noun phrase.

What’s interesting is when I’ve heard the president do it, he doesn’t use that kind of inflection.

He does it straight on.

And he says, the thing of it is, and it sounds odder like that than it does with that upper, that sort of sing-songy inflection that I hear.

Yeah, George W. Bush also did it.

Bill Clinton has also done it.

You’ll find that most people who are talking heads on the news channels, they do it.

I hear it in scripted speeches where the person has decided to wing it a little bit and just kind of winged it a little too much.

Well, great.

That clears it up.

Thanks for the super wonky explanation.

I appreciate it.

My specialty.

Ethan, you’re not the only one.

I think the point is you’re not the only one who’s noticing this.

We’ll try to link to some information that’s comprehensible by non-linguists online

And a few of the really wonky papers as well, all right?

That would be fantastic.

Oh, and I will continue to listen to the show.

Thank you very much.

Oh, I hope so.

Thanks.

You did well enough.

Okay.

We’re being rewarded.

That’s good.

Thanks, Ethan.

Thanks, Ethan.

Bye-bye.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Phew, I was worried.

Do you think everybody else who calls into the show then has to decide whether or not to listen anymore?

That’s the case every time they turn on the radio.

I guess so.

877-929-9673.

Martha, I apologize for the last six years.

You do?

Well, this is going to take a while.

Well, I try not to be a mansplainer.

I do try, but sometimes they fail.

You know what a mansplainer is?

I definitely know what a mansplainer is.

Tell me what a mansplainer is.

Be nice, gentle, please.

A mansplainer, yeah.

I mean, present company accepted, of course.

That’s not true.

But, yeah, it’s a guy, especially a guy, right?

Yeah, always a guy.

He explains something to you that you already know, especially if you’re a woman.

This term got popularized this year among the people I know by this essay by Rebecca Solnit.

Right. Yeah. About how she was at a party and this guy insisted on explaining something about this new book that was coming out that was going to be the big definitive book on a topic.

And he kept going on and on. And it was the book that she had written.

Right. Classic example. I love that example.

And I’ve also seen variations of it, too, like Gay Splain and a couple other splains.

Well, if you’ve got a mansplainer in your life or you want to mansplain to us, email us words@waywordradio.org or call us on the phone, 877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Joe. I’m from West Lafayette, Indiana.

Hi, Joe.

Welcome to the show.

Hi, Grant. Hi, Martha.

How are you?

Doing well. What can we do for you?

Well, I was wondering if you know or could explain why the word penultimate seems to be misused more often than it’s used correctly.

Okay.

You know, of course it means next to last, but when I hear it used, and it’s usually in spoken or I suppose maybe more commonly now also on blogs and emails,

It sounds like the user thinks it means ultra-ultimate or super-ultimate.

Exactly.

And I hear it that way an awful lot.

When I was teaching a couple of years ago, my writing students would often misuse it that way.

So they say this is the penultimate example of whatever, and they mean…

Exactly. Yes, that’s it. It’s the penultimate example.

And I get the feeling I’m supposed to be very impressed by that.

Right, right. And I think you’ve zeroed in on exactly the reason that people think it means super, hyper, ultra, ultimate, the most ultimate there could ever possibly be.

Right.

But the problem here, Joe, is that they haven’t taken Latin.

Because if they took Latin, then they would know that the P-E-N there means almost.

So the penultimate is the next to last.

You see that also in the word peninsula.

The word insula in Latin means island, and so a peninsula is an almost island.

I did not know that.

Yeah, yeah, you know, insula meaning island like insulate and that kind of thing.

So that’s the way to remember it.

You say you used to have students?

Yeah, for a while I taught some writing classes at the university.

I enjoyed that very much.

I think you hit on something when you said that they used it to sound impressive

Because this strikes me as overreach on the part of many writers.

They are writing beyond their understanding and above their abilities.

It’s a common trait with beginning writers especially.

Yes, it is.

Yeah, it’s the same in journalism as well.

The best advice that I’ve ever heard was to write below your abilities but to read above your abilities.

Oh, I like that.

Yeah, that’s good.

Yeah.

Thanks for calling, Joe.

Hey, Joe, thanks a lot.

My pleasure.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

Here is another example of a bookmash, that accidental poetry that gets formed when the spines of books are next to each other.

This one starts with the title of a book of erotic verse, and it’s followed by a book about incarceration, then two more.

And it goes, making love, getting busted, memento mori, leaving Las Vegas in guilt and glory.

That one even rhymes.

And it rhymes.

The walk of shame, the drive of shame.

So stack your books up, see if you can make a found poem out of them, and send it to us, words@waywordradio.org.

Things have come to a pretty pass.

That’s the end of this week’s show.

For more A Way with Words, including hundreds of episodes, a blog, a newsletter, a dictionary, mobile apps, and conversations with other listeners, go to waywordradio.org.

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A Way with Words is produced and distributed by Wayword, Inc., a nonprofit supported by caring listeners and sponsors.

Just as we do, they believe in lifelong learning, better human communication, and the value of a thing well said or well written.

The show is recorded at Studio West in San Diego, California.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. So long.

Bye-bye.

Neither. Let’s call the whole thing off.

You like potato and I like potato.

You like tomato and I like tomato.

Potato, potato, tomato, tomato.

Let’s call the whole thing off.

But oh, if we call the whole thing off, then we must part.

And oh, if we ever part…

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