Space Cadet (episode #1514)

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.

We all have had the experience of doing work that’s tedious or pointless.

And the French have a wonderful term for that that translates as combing the giraffe.

Do you know this one?

Pogner la giraffe, which refers to the idea of doing something that’s just, you know.

Right. How do you get up there? You’ve got to get the ladder.

He’s not going to stand still.

Right.

He doesn’t care very much.

He’s not helping.

I learned that from a new book by Canadian author Mark Abley.

It’s called Watch Your Tongue, What Our Everyday Sayings and Idioms Figuratively Mean.

And Mark is from Canada.

He’s the author of Spoken Here, Travels Among Threatened Languages, which I really loved.

It takes you on a tour of the world’s endangered languages from the Arctic Circle all the way down to Australia.

And this book is a delightful compendium of things like that.

I also learned in his new book that in Korean, the word for of course or absolutely sounds a whole lot like the word for carrot.

So among younger Koreans, if they just want to say of course or absolutely, they just say the equivalent of it’s a carrot.

Tongan or something like that.

And in fact, there’s a video of an absolutely adorable cartoon with dancing carrots singing in Korean that of course they love you.

That I just I’ve watched several times now.

It’s a real day brightener, but it’s a carrot.

So Mark Abley’s book is called?

It’s called Watch Your Tongue.

Watch Your Tongue.

Great.

We’ll have a link to that on the website.

And then a little later in the show, I’ll share a book that I recommend.

Okay.

And if you’ve got books that you’ve been enjoying that you’d like to tell us about so we can share them with the world,

Tell us an email, words@waywordradio.org, or call us 877-929-9673.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi.

Good afternoon.

This is Andrew Smith from Annandale, Virginia.

Hey, Andrew, welcome. What can we do for you, Andrew?

So I have a question for you both, and it started with a conversation I was having with a colleague at work.

We were talking about a business trip that this colleague was planning, and I made the offhanded comment.

I said, is this really a business trip? It sounded like a boondoggle to me, which prompted the question,

Why does everybody say boondoggle when you’re referring to a business trip that has no purpose?

So it sparked a little bit of debate in the office.

I actually happened to have a dictionary of etymology at my desk.

So I was like, let me see the origin of the word boondoggle.

And at least from what I saw, it could be like a braided leather strap, which still left me flummoxed as to the core of the question, which is why do we refer to boondoggle as a business trip with no purpose when it seems to have some other origins?

How did this word evolve, and where does it come from?

Yeah, how did we get from a braided leather strap to a useless work trip that you’re taking just for the heck of it?

Our colleagues at the American Dialect Society spend a lot of time finding first uses of words.

And I did a little bit with boondoggle myself, and a bunch of us have uncovered some uses of the word from 1927 that I think are very instructive here.

It’s clear from the uses in the newspaper, this is in New York State, that they’re referring to a scout newsletter, like a Boy Scout troop has its own newsletter.

And the newsletter is called the boondoggle.

The reason it’s called the boondoggle is because there was a fellow around about 1925 when his son was born.

And his name is Robert Link.

And Robert called his son boondoggle.

And then later he took the word or the name boondoggle

And used it to refer to these leather woven lanyards

That you make when you’re a Boy Scout or a Cub Scout.

Do you know what I’m talking about?

They’re kind of useless.

You maybe wear them on your neck

And they have a design on them

Or you use them as a key fob to put your keys on

Or something else,

But they’re kind of really just make work,

Something to keep the kids busy

To practice their leather craft,

You know, cutting and stamping and braiding

And that sort of stuff,

But really nothing you would ever buy for yourself in the store, not usually.

And then around 1935, this word broke big.

It had its moment.

This is the star is born moment for boondoggle.

In a discussion of public relief in New York City,

Somebody called the whole project, the whole spending of this money, a big boondoggle.

And by that, he meant a waste, a waste of time, a waste of effort, a waste of money.

And in that sense, he kept that notion that this braided leather type lanyard thing was really kind of just make work and useless and a waste of time and a waste of money.

And so that sense of waste or unnecessary expenditure is what has stayed with boondoggle all these years.

So when we talk about some kind of public works where they’re building a bridge to nowhere, that’s a boondoggle.

We’re talking about a trip that you don’t really need to take, but to say you have money in the budget, so you’re just going to spend it.

That’s a boondoggle.

So that sense of unnecessary expenditures is really what’s held on all these years back since the 1920s.

Wow. That’s really fascinating.

And I do think it helps, like, not to extend the metaphor, but to tie it all together.

Tie it all together.

Yeah.

Andrew, we should probably also point out Grant mentioned that Scoutmaster Link, Robert Link, called his son boondoggle.

That wasn’t his real name.

No, it was his big name.

Yeah, he named him Robert Link Jr.

Yeah, it was his pet name.

Now, I should also note, just because I can hear people warming up their hands about to pound on their keyboards,

There are a lot of other theories about boondoggle.

And trust me, they have all been looked at and examined thoroughly by word historians and people like me.

I’ve done some of it myself.

And none of the other theories, including the Daniel Boone one, including the one about the Scots language, including about the name for a kind of marble, none of them hold water.

None of them have evidence.

None of them have the least bit of support.

So the only one that we know is this story from the 1920s that came out of the Boy Scouts and the weaving of lanyards.

That’s fascinating.

Well, I’m so appreciative that you all looked into it because it’s been the source of a lot of debate.

And I mean, quite frankly, I like told some of the people we had like this big debate in the office.

And I said, well, it just so happened I positioned it A Way with Words.

And everybody was like, you have to tell us what they say.

I listened to that show.

So it’ll be nice to have this settled very matter of factly by you all who are experts.

Outstanding.

Andrew, thank you for your call. We really appreciate it.

Thank you for taking the time. It’s been a pleasure.

All right. Take care.

Thanks, Andrew.

Bye.

Bye now.

Well, we know that you’ve been having a debate at work over some word or phrase,

And we would love to hear about it.

So call us, 877-929-9673, or send it to us in email.

That address is words@waywordradio.org.

A palindrome is a sentence or phrase that is the same forwards and backwards,

Like taco cat or nurse’s run or a nut for a jar of tuna.

But they’re also word unit palindromes.

They’re not as common.

I found several online.

You can cage a swallow, can’t you?

But you can’t swallow a cage, can you?

Oh, so word unit means that you retain the same words in the palindrome.

Yes.

So the letters wouldn’t be the same backwards and forwards.

The words would be the same backwards.

The words.

Yeah, here’s another one.

Fall leaves after leaves fall, which is true, right?

Fall leaves after leaves fall.

The best palindromes absolutely are the ones that are intelligible as senses.

Yeah, yeah.

How about this one?

Did I say you never say never say never?

You say I did.

Those are outstanding.

We’ll have more of those on the website, 877-929-9673.

Hello, welcome to A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Judy Rosenbliss, and I’m calling you from Miami.

Judy, welcome to the show.

Hi, Judy.

Hi.

What can we do for you?

Well, a strange thing happened to me recently. I was discussing politics with a young man, and I used the expression about a politician that she was squeaky clean. And he said, what’s that supposed to mean? And so I explained what I thought it meant, then asked myself, well, is this something that has gone out of the lingo that I’ve been using all my life?

The very next week, I saw the expression in a newspaper article. So I said, no, that’s not the answer. And the next thing I knew, I was shampooing my hair and doing my usual test of does it squeak when I was rinsing it? And realized that I had learned the expression from my mother telling me, you must keep rinsing until it is squeaky clean.

How about that? And I don’t know whether that’s related to the real origin of it or not.

It sure is. Absolutely is. It sure is. That’s the earliest example of that usage, squeaky clean, meaning something that’s really, really, really clean. It may be older than this, but we can find uses in print from the 1930s, and they all talk about hair.

Well, in the 1920s is when my mother was saved.

Oh, there we go. How about that? So they’re all for shampoos or talking about styling your hair and different ways of keeping clean, and they all talk about hair being squeaky clean.

Right, and do you remember those dishwashing liquid commercials from the 1970s?

Probably not. There are a bunch of Ajax dishwashing liquid commercials, and you can find them online, where they say things like, if it won’t squeak, squawk. And they have these women washing dishes and then holding them up and showing you how they squeak because these dishes are so squeaky clean.

Yep.

That’s cool. Thank you so much for your call, Judy. We really appreciate it.

Okay.

Thank you.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

And so we find by the 1970s the figurative use of a person being squeaky clean, being they have no hidden crimes, right?

Right. It’s kind of just after Watergate.

Right. It’s a suspicious coincidence. I’m wondering who that squeaky clean politician was.

Give us a call if you’ve got a question about something you heard in the 1920s or later. 877-929-9673.

Here is a really cool Latin palindrome that’s also a riddle. In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni.

It would take me weeks to puzzle that out. My Latin is so poor.

I heard night in there, did I?

You did.

You did. Did you hear ignorant or knowledge or something?

Igni?

No. Think about what else.

Oh, rocks.

Igneous rocks?

No?

Fire.

Fire.

Like ignite.

There we go. This is a Latin palindrome that translates as, we enter the circle at night and are consumed by fire. Or we turn in circles in the night and we are devoured by fire.

So it can’t be a palindrome also in English in translation. That would be quite a feat though.

Yeah, wouldn’t that be cool?

That would be amazing.

But it refers to moths.

Oh, nice. We enter the circle at night and are consumed. A palindrome and a riddle. Isn’t that cool? How clever is that?

In Latin. Can you give it to us one more time in Latin?

In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni.

And Umberto Eco actually echoed that in The Name of the Rose. And the French filmmaker Guy Debord in the 70s also produced a film that had that same name.

The whole palindrome in Latin?

I think so, yeah.

Yeah, the French, man. I wonder how they did it at the box office.

Well, we haven’t heard of it, right? 877-929-9673.

More about what we say and why we say it. Stick around for more of A Way with Words.

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. And joining us now is our quiz guide, John Chaneski.

Hey, John.

Hey, Martha.

Hello, Grant.

What’s up, bud?

Well, this is a quiz on something we’ve done before. We’ve done takeoffs before. That’s where we take off the first letter of a word to get another word.

Now, this time we’re going to make two words by taking the letter E from the start of a word. Okay? Only E now. For example, if I said that the man played the piano’s black keys with skinny, knobby fingers, that would clue the two words ebony.

Ebony and bony.

And bony, yes. Very good. Here we go. I’ve seen some strange, spooky things at one of the Great Lakes.

Eerie?

Eerie and…

Yeah.

Eerie and eerie.

Very good. It seems like the monarch is just barely making a living.

Pop, pop.

No, I was going to say popper, but that’s not quite right.

He’s eking out a living?

Yes, because he is a king.

King.

King, right. Eking and king, right.

It gives me great joy when I show up long after the party is to have started.

You’re elated.

I am. It elates me when I am late. Yes, apparently.

Now, they ran away to get married.

Well, not ran, really. More like moved along with great bounding strides.

They loped as they eloped.

They loped as they eloped. I must spoil that one.

Wow, he can really act in a theatrical manner.

Oh, he just has a little dust in his eye.

He is a moat while he is emoting.

He’s a moat.

Emote, moat.

Now, I’ll make sure you have everything you need for your camping trip, including a witty bon mot.

Equip.

Yes.

I will equip you with?

Equip.

Equip, yes.

Now, this reception was in your honor. You shouldn’t have tried to crawl away through the heating duct.

Escape?

Event.

Event.

Event and vent, yes.

That baby raptor must have thought the tip of my shoelace was a worm and tried to eat it.

Baby raptor?

Eagle and agle.

Aglet.

Eaglet and aglet.

Oh, yeah.

Eaglet and aglet, yes.

It’s unusual to see those star-like flowers in a bouquet for a spring holiday. They usually bloom in the late summer and early autumn.

Easter and aster.

Easter and aster, yes.

Finally, he has such a high opinion of himself.

Let’s leave.

Oh, ego and go.

Ego and go, that’s it.

Very good. And on that note, it’s time for me to go. You guys have been great.

Thanks, John. You always say that even when we do poorly, but we appreciate it nonetheless.

It’s because I love you guys. You’re wonderful.

Love you too, man. Take care.

Thanks, John.

We want to talk with you about language, so call us 877-929-9673 or talk to us on Twitter at WayWord.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Kirk from New Braunfels, Texas.

Hi, Kirk. Welcome.

What’s up?

Thank you. So I was curious about the origin of the word dad. You know, a lot of the names we give our parents, like mom and father, mother, all that, you can kind of relate them back to things, but dad kind of seems to stand alone.

So I wanted to get y’all’s take on that. What do you think? What’s your guess?

I know it’s obscure, but there’s a song called Daedalus, and it’s Icarus’ father. And I don’t know. So they kind of start spelt the same a little bit. And I don’t know if that connection makes any sense, but that’s my first thought.

That’s really interesting. So you know this story well. You thought that’s like the father that people might automatically think of when they think of fathers?

Maybe. I wasn’t really sure, but it was the closest thing to it that I could come up with.

Okay.

What an interesting idea.

It’s an interesting idea. It isn’t the origin of it. There are two words or varieties of words. Let’s call them clusters of words or word sounds that exist across the human species. And there’s a whole category of pa, pa, da, da words. And there’s a whole category of ma, ma, mother words. And one of those words is often used to refer to the father. And one of them is the mother. So these sounds that the baby makes at the presence of the parent. And so dad comes from the da-da-da-da-da noise that babies make. And there’s also the pa-pa-pa-pa noise that they make. So again and again and again, throughout history,

We find that there are pet names and formal names for the parents that often take a P, a B, or a D sound for the father, and often take the M sound for the mother. And so D is just one of those. So, for example, in India, the Baba might be father, Babiji would be father. And in the European cultures, Pa or Papa often be the father. There’s no etymological trace here. One of the sources that I have points out there’s a cross-linguistic similarity, but there’s no common ancestry. That is that these words are separately derived because of the physiology and because of the nature of children trying out sounds of their mouths when they are tiny.

Wow. I never would have guessed that. It’s a lot deeper than I thought.

Yeah, it sure is. But you can take a baby from any culture on this planet, and they will start out with the same sets of sounds.

Okay.

Yeah, cool, right? And one of those happens to often be the da-da-da sound.

That’s really, I would have never guessed. Which later becomes dad, and daddy is a kind of more formal name.

So, yeah, not Greek mythology.

Yeah.

No, well, shoot. It was worth a shot.

Sure.

Of course it was. We got to talk with you.

Kirk, thank you very much.

All right. Thank you all.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

I learned a word that’s new to me from our Facebook group. Greg Johnson wrote, when I was a kid helping my father in his workshop, I learned the pride that comes from being able to fetch, by its proper name, any of a box full of tools. I love the obscure, magical nomenclature that differentiated between a claw hammer and a ball-peen hammer, which of course involved knowing what peening was. I could spot an Ackerman Johnson, and I knew what it was for. I knew that Henry Phillips had invented and patented his own type of screw head, and the Phillips screw was by then the most popular screw in the world, and what a Phillips head screwdriver looked like.

I was reminded of all this today when I upgraded my eyeglasses repair kit. There was an item in the new kit I’d never heard of. It turned out that I’d used one before, but had just called it that plastic thingy. Sometimes electronics repair books call it a non-marring nylon black stick tool. But its real name is different and much more direct. I am now the proud owner of a Spudger.

Yep. Do you know this term, Spudger?

I figured you might know it.

Yeah, I used it when I was an IT guy back in the day. We got to crack the case on a laptop to put a new hard drive or more RAM in.

Yeah. Spudger.

Yeah. And that’s one you don’t forget. Once you’ve used a Spudger and you know the word, that’s a word for life.

Well, thank you, Greg, for that.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hey, guys. How’s it going?

Great. Who’s this? Who are we talking to?

My name is Keith. I’m calling from Valparaiso, Indiana.

Welcome, Keith. What can we do for you?

I’d like to preface this by saying my mom has always had an interesting language of her own. Like when we were growing up for our math homework, we would use khaki-laters to help us out.

Khaki-laters.

She’d warn us about the dangers of sitting at the computer too much because you’ll get corporal tunnel syndrome. Who I’m guessing is long-lost cousin of Sergeant Bridge or something.

Corporal tunnel syndrome.

Okay.

All right. So there is, in most people’s homes, in the kitchen, a giant metal thing that you keep food in that keeps it at a colder temperature than room temperature. Refrigerator typically is what people call it. And it has two parts in it. It has a part where you keep your ice and your ice cream and your frozen meats and things like that, which may be like a freezer or something. That’s what I always called it.

My trouble I run into is when I try to talk about that other part where you keep your milk and maybe your eggs and stuff like that. Because growing up, my mom always called it the ice box. And when I say that to anyone else, I say, yo, go get, you know, such and such. I keep it in the ice box. They either go look in the freezer, assuming by ice box, I mean the literal box where I keep my ice, which I suppose is fair. Or they just don’t know what I’m talking about. I was like, what is an icebox? I don’t understand what that is. This is what my mom made up. Are we the only family in the world that calls this an icebox or what? Where does this come from?

Oh, heavens no. No, my dad called it an icebox. It’s still pretty widespread in patches of this country.

Yeah. Where did your mom grow up?

Well, St. Louis. St. Louis, Missouri is where we’re all from. But that’s a common thing still for the part, because we refer to that just as that part where you keep your milk at that, you know, whatever, 40 degrees or something like that.

Right. But I don’t know. Everyone else I’ve ever said it to has not understood what I was talking about.

-huh, -huh.

Yeah, and it’s not so much a regional thing as a generational thing, I think. The term icebox used for what you and I call the refrigerator goes back to the fact that until the 1930s or so, iceboxes were a pretty regular feature in people’s homes. And these were wooden cabinets that were lined with metal like tin or zinc to keep the food cold. And the Iceman would come and deliver blocks of ice. And that’s how you would keep your food cold. And when electric refrigeration came along, then that name was applied to that as well.

Does that make sense?

No, that does. Interesting. I just don’t know why no one else has ever heard of that. So I guess that’s not one of my family’s quirks. Maybe I’ll lay off my mom a little bit for that one.

It’s fading fast. I don’t know how old she is or what generation she’s from, but certainly the last icebox users are probably among us now. And probably 50 to 100 years, it’ll just be an artifact of history.

Okay, interesting. So I guess in a sense, I’m keeping parts of the dying language alive.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

Okay. You know, what’s really weird is that the word refrigerator itself goes way back, not referring, of course, to electric refrigerators, but when you talk about something that has a refrigerating or a cooling effect, that term goes back all the way to the 17th century.

Wow.

Yeah.

Right. So you’re going to lay off your mom a little bit, at least in terms of that one.

I guess through that one. I still don’t let a corporal tunnel slide.

All right. Thanks so much for your call. Really appreciate it, Keith.

Awesome. Thanks, guys. Appreciate it.

Take care.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

On the other end of this, by the way, there’s some evidence that in the UK, some people refer to the freezer as the ice box because, as Keith says, that’s where you get the ice.

That’s right. It may turn out that your family’s not weird. They’ve just got an artifact of history in their speech.

Give us a call, 877-929-9673, or email us, words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, how are you doing?

My name’s Kurt, and I’m calling from Utah.

Okay, well, great. What can we do for you?

I grew up in the high desert of California in the mid-’70s, and it was obviously pretty hot there. And it was near Edwards Air Force Base, which is where Chuck Yeager broke the speed of sound. And there was the space shuttle going and all sorts of things like that. So as a little kid, I used to love watching the airplanes. But the big thing was we had a pool. And when I would come home from school, I’d come running in from school and run out to the pool. And my mom would always yell at me to cool my jets.

Cool your jets.

And my question for you guys is, is that phrase come from being around an Air Force base? Or where did that phrase come from? I’ve asked my mom, and she doesn’t remember where she got it. So, yeah, I was curious about that.

About what decade are we talking?

The mid-70s.

Mid-70s, okay.

It’s older than that, and I think you’re going to like this story about where it comes from.

It comes from a television show called Tom Corbett’s Space Cadet, which aired in the 1950s on a bunch of different networks.

And this show took the new space race and the new technology of jets and kind of mashed them together in these really absurd stories and histories and very odd tales of people rocketing here and rocketing there.

But somehow they had jet engine on the rockets.

It really didn’t make a lot of sense.

But they had some catchphrases on the show.

But by the mid-1950s, some of these catchphrases had caught on enough where they started to be listed in articles mentioning slang.

For example, plug your jets meant to shut up.

To cut your jets means to quit doing something or to lay off of doing something.

And to blow your jets meant to get angry.

And there was a comic book.

There was a regular book.

There was a comic strip.

I think there might have been one or two little terrible movies, that sort of thing.

But by the 1960s the form of it had become coolier jets and it shows up in high school newspapers.

You know how sometimes small town newspapers will have a section that they give over to the high school like a quarter page or half page and the students write the stories or the students write the news that’s in there?

Well, at Algona High School in Algona, Iowa, in 1967 twice they had a a listing of this stuff.

And one of the entries was cool your jets, meaning to relax or to take it easy.

And so from then on, we really start to see this term pop up repeatedly in the 60s and the 70s, until it becomes so entrenched under culture that we kind of lost the source of it.

But we can, using all these old archives of periodicals, kind of trace it back and see the vague outline of the path back to this one television show, Tom Corbett Space Cadet.

Oh, wow. So it doesn’t have too much to do with the Air Force bases?

No, I’m quite sure that the history and the kind of the passion that people had for jet technology and the hero worship, and of course when the space program brought in all these flyers to be the first astronauts, I mean, the whole thing is just awash in mythology and hagiography and just wonderful tales and a lot of respect for these crazy flyers.

I am quite sure that even though it didn’t come from the Air Force bases, that it definitely had to feed into the longevity of this term.

Gotcha.

Yeah, does that make sense to you?

Well, yeah.

I’m going to have to tell my kids that I didn’t come up with it, which is what I’ve been telling them for the last 10 years.

Oh, no.

But now you have the origin story, and that’s an interesting thing in itself, right?

Absolutely.

Can I leave you with one more interesting fact?

Sure.

So this television show, Tom Corbett’s Space Cadet, based itself off of a Robert Heinlein novel called Space Cadet, which was published, I believe, in 1948.

That’s the first use we know of the term Space Cadet was in that Heinlein novel.

But that novel, but especially the TV show and the comic book of Tom Corbett, this gave us the modern slang term space cadet, meaning somebody with their head in the clouds or somebody who is a space case or very spacey, not really thinking about the earthly affairs or what’s happening here with our feet on the ground.

So this television show also gave us space.

It’s out of fashion.

I guess in the 80s it was more common, but it gave us that slang term as well.

And I’ve never heard of the TV show, but it sure has given us a lot, huh?

Yeah, well, think back to when television was the situation where you didn’t have 500 channels.

You were lucky to have three and to receive them all clearly.

So a lot of Americans watched the same few shows.

And so it was very easy for one show, even if it was terrible, to have a lot of impact.

Gotcha. Well, thank you for clearing that up for us.

That was our pleasure. Call us again sometime, all right?

Thanks for calling, Kurt.

All right. Thank you.

Take care. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Call us with your language question, 877-929-9673, or send us an email.

That address is words@waywordradio.org, or find us on Twitter at Wayword.

We are still hearing from listeners who are talking about different ways to talk about walking, like going somewhere on Pat and Charlie, meaning your legs.

We heard from Tom Moore in Canton, Texas, who said,

When I was in Israel, the Arab high school students would say they were taking bus number 11, the one representing your legs.

Oh, nice.

Isn’t that great?

Bus number 11.

Yeah, taking the number 11 bus to get there.

Talk to us on Twitter, W-A-Y-W-O-R-D.

This show is about language examined through family, history, and culture.

Stick around.

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.

Earlier in the show, I recommended the book Watch Your Tongue by Mark Abley,

Which is light and fun and an easy read.

And for something more chewy, I’d like to recommend Lane Green’s new book.

It’s called Talk on the Wild Side, Why Language Can’t Be Tamed.

Lane Green writes about language for The Economist magazine, and he speaks nine languages himself.

And his book is a really smart, thoughtful way of writing about a lot of the themes that we discuss here on the show,

About why you shouldn’t worry about language changing and about non-gendered pronouns and split infinitives and why they’re just great.

And he even talks about the decline of the word whom, which I’m slowly letting go of, but not completely.

But one of the things I really love about his book is that he’s got a knack for really memorable lines.

You know, you and I talk about language all the time, but he has a way of phrasing things that’s really arresting.

For example, he says that language is a wild animal like a wolf, well adapted for its conditions and needs.

I love that.

Yeah, isn’t that great?

And he also says scientists have never found a language that has fallen to pieces.

It’s not in language’s nature.

Humans need it to do too many important things.

And he just goes on and on like that.

It’s just a really great way of phrasing the kinds of things that our listeners are going to be familiar with.

It’s a new way of looking at it.

You know, it’s interesting that you said you had one book that was light and another one that was chewy because I have the same kinds of recommendations.

So my son started asking my wife and me about trench warfare.

And I’m like, what?

Would you know enough about anything to be able to ask me at all about trench warfare?

And it turns out that he was reading a series of books called Nathan Hale’s Hazardous Tales.

The series of books is written and illustrated by a man named Nathan Hale.

And just asterisk that for a second.

And they touch on significant events in American history like Lafayette and the Revolutionary War, World War I, World War II, and a bunch of other things.

And he includes the story of the American spy Nathan Hale.

And so just to clarify, the author has exactly the same name as the American spy who was executed by the British, Nathan Hale.

They’re not related, although apparently the author is related to the man who hired the spy back in the day.

So it was really interesting stuff.

In any case, I read the World War I book that Nathan Hale wrote and illustrated.

It’s called Treaties, Trenches, Mud and Blood.

And I enjoyed it.

It’s a graphic novel.

It’s got a little bit of humor.

It doesn’t shy too much away from the dark stuff, but it balances out the truth of the horrible things that humans do to each other with some levity and comedy.

And the big perspective, the bird’s eye perspective that you need to really, 100 years later, kind of grasp what was happening.

And certainly for my son, who was 11, it was exactly what he needed.

Not too much, not too little, didn’t treat him like a child.

And he loves all of these books, all of the Nathan Hales hazardous tale.

The other book, it just so happens that I was reading before this came along, was Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August.

She writes about the lead up to World War I.

She writes about what got us into this major conflict.

And it was funny, these two books complemented each other.

Hale’s book for kids, the graphic novel, was a nice summary.

But Tugmans gets into the details and the hard truths and the real difficult, strange things that had to happen in order to make the world go to war.

These one-off events that shouldn’t have taken place that turned into the reason that we all were firing guns at each other.

In any case, these two books, 100 years after the end of World War I, were both incredibly relevant this year.

And I thought worth recommending to anyone who hasn’t read them or encountered them before.

And that’s Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August.

And then the whole series, Nathan Hale’s Hazardous Tales, which is for kids.

We love your book recommendations.

When you tell us that you’re enjoying a book, a lot of times we add it to our library queue or get it for ourselves or recommend it to our listeners.

Email us, words@waywordradio.org.

Call us, 877-929-9673.

Or talk books like crazy on Twitter @wayword.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Sophia. I’m calling from Naperville, Illinois, and I’m 13.

Hey, Sophia, welcome to the show. What can we do for you?

Thank you. Well, I have a question about this term that my sister and I use, and actually some of my friends.

Whenever we’re going to Google something, we always say, let’s search it up. Let’s search it up on the Internet.

And my mom, who is a speech pathologist, she is always correcting us and she’s saying like, no, it’s not search it up, it’s look it up.

And so we were wondering, like, is it something that just we say? Is it wrong? And yeah.

How long do you think you’ve been saying search it up?

Honestly, since I can remember.

Okay.

It’s what I’ve said.

And your mom, her protest is it’s not the way that she says it so she feels like it’s wrong?

Yeah, she says that it’s look it up or just search it, not search it up.

All right.

Well, one nice thing about this show is we have listeners from all over.

And when I search all of our email or phone calls and stuff, I can find this has come up before.

So I know, even without searching the whole internet, that you are not alone.

And that other people say search it up too, meaning to look something up on the internet.

It can sound wrong to somebody’s ears who’s used to phrases like look it up or hunt it up or dig it up.

But it’s new.

It’s a new language change.

And I congratulate you on noticing it or your mom for noticing it.

And it is literally used by zillions of people.

Zillion is a really big word.

Well, that’s really.

Thank goodness.

But the thing is, it’s language change in motion.

It is language happening right in front of us.

And it does tend to be younger people, typically under the age of, say, mid-20s.

Not always.

Obviously, these are just ballpark numbers.

And it definitely is on the model of look it up or read it up.

Sorry, read up on it or hunt it up or dig it up.

And there’s an interesting thing happening here.

People are bothered, I think, most of all by the it in there.

People are a little less bothered by search up, although that also sounds weird.

So I don’t see that much difference between search for it on the Internet or search it up on the Internet.

It feels like the same thing to me, except with one little caveat.

Sophia, I have a question for you.

If you were searching for the answer in a book, would you still say, I’m going to search it up?

I don’t think I would.

I think it depends.

You would say look it up?

Yeah, I would probably say look it up or just try to find it.

I don’t know.

That’s interesting.

Yeah.

Yeah, I’m curious because I’ve always had this sense of the internet being above my head and I’m pulling things down from it.

Oh, interesting.

Well, I was going to toss in here.

There’s something interesting with phrasal verbs where we add a preposition or an adverb after another verb and it kind of changes the meaning.

And so up in verb phrases can have several meanings.

And one of them is bringing something to light or revealing something or presenting something.

And think of dig up, look up, show up, dish up.

And so I think that maybe part of what’s happening here with Search It Up is you’re not just searching.

You’re also finding things to show.

You’re looking for results.

And then one of those other connotations for up that appears in verb phrases is this sense of thoroughness or completion or finality.

So close up, grow up, hush up, give up, clear up.

All have this notion of a very completed, obviously done action.

And I think that also is coming to play here with Search It Up.

The up is important in there, and then it kind of makes it feel a little bit more like look it up.

So it follows on the pattern of look it up.

It’s almost like it’s reinforcing it.

I’m thinking about Marc Maron when he tells you to do something on his podcast.

He says, do it up.

Yeah.

And all he means is do it, but it’s emphatic.

Right. Emphatic. Yeah. Like, don’t, don’t, don’t half-ass this. Do it, do it thoroughly.

By the way, Sophia, I can find uses of Search It Up to the mid-2000s, around 2005 or so.

Really? Oh.

I have no doubt at all that it’s older than that. It’s just that I haven’t spent the hours to try to puzzle it out.

Oh, wow. That’s, I was born in 2005, so that kind of makes sense that I started saying it.

Maybe older than you.

Her first words were, serve it up, mama.

Serve it up, anyway.

Sophia, what an interesting question.

Thank you so much.

Thank you for taking the time out of your day.

We really appreciate it.

Thank you so much for having me on the show.

It was so amazing.

Take care now.

Call us again sometime, okay?

Bye-bye.

Bye.

We puzzle out language.

If you’d like to puzzle it out with us.

Puzzle it up.

877-929-9673.

Hello, welcome to A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Phil Smith. I’m in Richardson, Texas, just north of Dallas.

Hi, Phil. Welcome to the show. What’s up?

Hi, Phil.

I don’t have like a fun story. I was just kind of fueled by curiosity.

That’s enough.

That’s great.

So I noticed that there was the word pretend, and it’s kind of fun, but can maybe be insidious depending on who’s doing the kind of pretending.

And then I also found that it kind of shared a prefix with pretension or being pretentious.

And I was just kind of curious. I know that there’s some kind of commonality there.

And maybe you’re putting on airs or something, but I was curious what the connection was.

Well, they both go back to the same Latin word, pretendere, which means to stretch out in front or put forward.

And that’s kind of the same idea, if you think about it, in both of those words.

If you’re pretending, then you’re putting something out there.

You’re putting something forward.

And with pretentious, you know, you’re projecting an image or something like that.

It’s sort of like fronting, I guess.

Yeah.

Wow.

Yeah.

That’s so cool.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So it’s the idea of reaching out or actually stretching.

It goes back to an even earlier Latin word that means to stretch out.

And we get the word tendency, which is an inclination to incline.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And it stems from Latin to put forth.

Yeah, yeah, to reach out, put forth.

How neat.

Yeah.

So it’s beautiful, isn’t it?

All those connections.

Yeah, right.

And so each one of them took their own path from the original Latin and became a little more speciated or specialized, right?

-huh.

It’s funny that there’s even a connection to fronting, which is similar to pretending, and it even has like a Latin trail to it.

That’s so neat.

Yeah. When you think about the psychological space that all humans inhabit, a lot of times our language does follow our relationship to the physical space around its front, behind, up, down, and it works its way into the way that our language works.

Philip, I bet you do this all the time.

Yeah, I really do. That’s kind of what I like about the show.

And what I like about language in the first place is that it grows and there’s these cool relationships between really old words and how they grow.

Like I look at new words added to the dictionary or slang words I’m unfamiliar with.

It’s really neat to watch language kind of as a whole grow and change.

You guys are doing a service to the English language not to put on air.

Oh, thank you very much.

Thanks, Phil.

Phil, and thank you so much for your call.

We really appreciate it.

Yeah.

Thanks, you guys.

I’ll see you next time.

Take care.

Okay.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

What I love about these words, pretend and pretentious, is that they both have this notion of to act as if something were true.

And yet, over the centuries, the millennia, they’ve taken a slightly different angle on that.

So if you pretend, you kind of now have the childhood sense of to act for play or for fun.

Make-believe.

Pretentious is about faking something important or highfalutin or fancy, something that’s not an everyday kind of situation, right?

-huh. That’s a good point.

877-929-9673. Email words@waywordradio.org or talk to us on Twitter @wayword.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Susan in Virginia Beach, Virginia.

Hi, Susan. What’s up?

When I was a young child, my grandmother was mostly raising me because my mother was working.

And, well, she used a saying that I have never heard before.

And she used to take my toes and instead of this little piggy, she would say, this toe tight, this penny white, this toe tizzle, this penny whizzle.

And that’s only four toes, so I never did figure out where the, until I was older, of course, because you don’t know when you’re a child.

But it was something that stuck with me, and I have no idea where it came from.

Okay, let’s hear that again.

This toe tight?

This toe tight, this penny white, this toe tizzle, this penny whizzle.

Okay.

And then there was a missing toe somewhere.

Oh, dear.

But you had all ten toes, is that right?

Absolutely, yes.

Okay.

Well, I think this is a new one from the look on Grant’s face.

This is a new one for both of us.

But there are so many different versions of this, particularly among people who are of Germanic or Scandinavian heritage.

That’s really interesting.

I’m looking at a list of them now.

Here’s one that goes, P.D., P.D. Lou, Ludie Whistle, Whistle Nobble, and Great Big Hobble Tobble.

Wow.

You know, it’s almost like a game of telephone.

You know, that party game where you whisper in somebody’s ear and then they whisper what they think you said to somebody else?

Because there’s so many different versions of this because it’s not really the kind of thing you write down.

It’s just something that you pass on from generation to generation.

And a lot of these end up with the big toe being something like great big hobble tobble.

Like here’s another one from a family of German heritage.

Heedy Peed, Penny Rue, Rudy Rissell, Minnie Tossel, and Big Tom Bumble.

Well, that sounds a little familiar on that.

Yeah, it does.

Okay.

Yeah, and there are, of course, all kinds of sound effects.

And you can start with Tom Bumble and go down to Fod Hassell, Mary Whistle, Penny Rue, and Auntie Pee.

You’re supposed to extend the Pee out there.

Well, I thought I would check it out because I have two twin grandsons that are four,

But ever since they’ve been little, you know, I do these same things that my grandmother did.

And I don’t know, who knows, one day they may wonder where all this came from.

Susan, did you add a rhyme for the big toe?

I did not add anything else.

She used to do another one with slapping the bottom of my foot,

Shoo the old horse and shoo the old mare, and let the little colt go bear, bear, bear.

And that one I do with the kids a lot.

Well, I did when they were babies.

And they just love it.

I mean, they’re fascinated with it.

This is really great, Susan.

And you know what’s funny is when we’ve touched on this once or twice,

And the thing that I remember besides being utterly charmed by these rhymes

Is how many show up in our voicemail.

We’ll get people doing these rhymes for weeks.

And we’ll try to share a bunch more of them.

But thank you for sharing this from your family.

Well, thank you so much for including me on your show.

I really appreciate that.

Oh, it’s our pleasure.

By the way, I want to leave you with two resources you can check for some more of these.

There’s a site called Mama Lisa’s World, and she has an article from 2006 called The Origins of Some Scandinavian Finger and Toe Naming Rhymes.

And her article’s good, but the comments really shine.

There’s hundreds of comments from people sharing their versions of toe counting and finger counting rhymes.

Really?

Yeah, it’s wonderful.

So Mama Lisa’s World, just Google Mama Lisa’s World tone naming rhymes.

And then there’s a book called Counting Out Rhymes because these are usually called Counting Out Rhymes.

The Counting Out Rhymes of Children.

It’s by Henry Bolton and it’s from 1888.

And you can get the whole book on Google Books or archive.org.

Some of it is offensive to the modern ear and eye.

So you want to read it first before you share it with your children or grandchildren.

But it’s very wonderful.

It’s got a ton of this stuff.

Susan, thank you so much.

Thank you.

All righty.

Have a great day.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673 or write it all out in an email and send it to words@waywordradio.org.

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This program would not be possible without you.

Grant and I are out to change the way we listen and think about language, and you’re making it happen.

Thanks also to senior producer Stefanie Levine, director and editor Tim Felten,

Director Colin Tedeschi, and production assistant Emma Kelman in San Diego.

In New York, we thank quiz guide John Chaneski,

And that master of keeping it real, Paul Ruist at Argo Studios.

A Way with Words is an independent production of Wayword, Inc.

From the Recording Arts Center at Studio West in San Diego, I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

So long.

Bye-bye.

Thank you.