Strange Spelling Bee Words

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

And I’m Martha Barnette. Grant, I have a quiz for you.

Oh, please.

Here we go. What’s the common thread that unites all of the following phrases?

Pour out your heart, a still small voice. A man after his own heart turned the world upside down.

Any guesses?

No.

No. I’ll give you some more clues.

Okay.

Okay. These are more phrases in the same category.

Fell flat on his face, the root of the matter, from time to time, the skin of my teeth.

Are these cliches that come from Shakespeare?

Not cliches.

Sayings, expressions?

Close.

Close.

Here’s one more.

To everything there is a season.

From the Bible.

Yes.

There we go.

Yes.

These are all classic phrases that were introduced into English or popularized by the King James Bible.

And it’s the kind of thing that you can learn from a very cool exhibit that’s now traveling across the country for the next couple of years.

It’s going to schools and libraries, and it celebrates the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible.

It’s called Manifold Greatness, the Creation and Afterlife of the King James Bible, and it’s funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

And to find out where the exhibit is now, you can go to their fabulous website, which is manifoldgreatness.org.

Manifold greatness being a poetic phrase from the Psalms.

Oh, pretty cool.

And if you forget the web address, you can go to our website, waywordradio.org,

And we’ll have more information about the exhibit as well.

And we’re taking your calls about language, 877-929-9673.

Send them to us in email to words@waywordradio.org,

And find us on Facebook and Twitter.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi there. This is Nikki Riggs. I’m from Waco, Texas.

Hi, Nikki. Welcome to the program.

Hi, Nikki.

Hey, nice to talk to you guys.

All right. What’s shaking in Waco?

So, hey, I’m a wedding photographer, and I was telling a story to my family a while back about, you know,

That crazy drunken groomsman that always happens to be at every wedding.

How does he keep getting invited? This one guy shows up everywhere.

Everywhere. And I don’t think that he’s actually a wedding crasher.

There’s a separate one at every wedding.

He just knows a lot of people. He’s got a million Facebook friends.

Exactly. So anyway, in describing this guy,

That happens to be at every wedding.

About this particular wedding, I said, you know,

That this particular groomsman by noon was three sheets to the wind.

And everybody just kind of looked at me and goes,

Where did you hear that phrase?

And I said, well, hello from my family, from you guys.

There was this discussion about where I had heard that phrase,

Why I would ever use that phrase,

And what exactly it means and where it comes from.

Obviously, everybody knows that it means, you know,

Kind of falling down drunk.

My grandfather, being a sailor, claims that it’s a nautical term.

And him having the experience with, you know, enough drunken sailors, I’m inclined to believe him.

I figured that I should probably ask you guys because he will be probably our best.

So do you have a reason to know a lot of terms for drunkenness?

I don’t personally, other than the wedding aspect.

But she thinks we do.

Three sheets to the wind is a nautical term.

Yeah.

Sounds pretty likely.

It sounds likely.

What else did he tell you about that?

And he didn’t really have any sort of answers for it other than, you know, he had heard that it was a nautical term,

Something, you know, kind of old time when you were, you know, still sailing with actual sails.

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

The sheets on a boat, you would think it would be the sails because they look like big sheets,

But the sheets are actually the lines that hold the sails in place, the ropes.

But I think on a ship you call it lines.

Yeah, yeah, you don’t call them ropes.

They know you’re a lover if you do.

Okay, well, these lines that are holding the sails in place.

And so if one sheet gets loose and starts flapping in the wind, the sail’s going to go a little wobbly.

Two sheets, it gets even more wobbly.

Three sheets to the wind, and the sail is just…

The boat could do anything, right?

Yeah, yeah.

The boat’s just lurching around like a drunken sailor.

Yeah, it could climb up on the beach and order a drink from the fruit stand, right?

Excellent.

So just envision a boat just like veering all over the place, pitching and yawing and under no control whatsoever.

That makes so much sense.

And it is the perfect term.

I’m so glad that I used that term to describe this particular groomsman.

Well, it’s funny to me that you think that you learned that term from your family.

And they’re like, huh?

We don’t know.

You know, sometimes, you know, people just don’t really want to be called out on the idea that they know a lot of terms for drunkenness.

Right.

Well, we learned this one from the dictionary.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, really.

Sure.

The life of a wedding photographer sounds like it might be exciting.

You know, it is.

I have a good time.

It’s not all partying like a rock star.

Like, everybody seems to think there’s a lot of the business in that goes into it.

Yeah, but there’s always the bride’s over, right?

Oh, sure.

But Saturday night comes around, and regardless of what’s going on, it’s always a good time.

Yeah.

You’ve got a guaranteed party to go to, right?

Exactly.

Nikki.

Yeah.

You sound really cool.

Thanks for giving us a call.

Thanks so much for having me on the show.

I really appreciate it.

Yeah, our pleasure.

Take care.

Okay.

Rock on.

Bye-bye.

Thank you.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

words@waywordradio.org.

And hey, what do you know?

We’re on Facebook and on Twitter.

Look for us.

I got a couple of Australianisms for you.

Great.

Do you know the word sake?

Sake?

Yeah.

It means lacking in spirit or self-confidence.

I was feeling a little sake when I took the test.

So I drank some sake and then I felt better?

No, no.

S-O-C-K-Y.

Sake.

Sake.

Yeah.

Interesting, right?

Sort of like a limp sock?

Yeah, I guess.

I don’t know.

This one’s a little more…

Toey.

Toey.

Toey.

Okay, toe.

T-O-E-Y.

It means nervous or aroused.

Toey.

Right, right.

You might be a little frisky even.

Oh, really?

Yeah, yeah.

Just kind of like not very well-centered.

Mm.

Toeys are us.

Toeys are us.

877-929-9673.

What words have you found in your reading?

Let us know.

words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi.

Hi, who’s this?

This is Barb Shaver.

I’m from Wales Elementary.

I’m actually in my classroom right now, ready to ask you a question.

Oh, wonderful.

Where is Wales Elementary?

Wales Elementary is in Wales, Wisconsin.

Okay, very nice.

And so you’re in the classroom now.

Are you surrounded by young, bright minds?

Well, unfortunately, they’ve been kind of waiting eagerly, but they went off to lunch right now.

But I do have two of my fifth grade students here right now.

They are waiting.

Okay, yeah, we can’t really compare against lunch, I’m sure.

Unfortunately not.

It’s pizza day, right?

Probably.

Well, what’s on your mind there?

Well, part of our word study program here involves having some of our students learn Latin and Greek roots.

Excellent.

Wow.

Yeah, isn’t that fun?

Yeah.

And my students, me and Sarah, came to me one day and wanted to ask me a question about one of the words and the roots.

And I gave them my suggestion, but I said that perhaps they’d want to contact you and ask the question.

Oh, great.

Okay, yeah.

They’re there with you now.

Right.

So could I have Mia talk to you on the phone right now?

Sure.

Okay, here she is.

Hi, I’m Mia.

Hi, Mia.

How are you doing?

I’m Martha, and that’s Grant over there.

Hi.

Hi.

So you’re in the fifth grade?

Yes, I am.

Okay, great.

And what are you studying right now?

Greek and Latin roots.

Yay!

That’s right.

Okay, very good.

So which one are you asking about?

You know, I’ve got an expert over here on the other side of me.

Her name is Martha.

She’s studied this stuff for years.

Well, the root spear, that’s S-P-I-R, means to breathe.

Right.

But the word conspire means something entirely different.

So I’m wondering how does spear go with conspire?

Aha. Excellent question. I’m really glad you asked that.

And so the first part of the word, Mia, C-O-N, what do you know about its history?

I have no idea about that history.

I think there might be a clue to the answer in that.

Okay. And yes, the Latin root spirare means to breathe.

And you’ve probably seen that root in other words, right, Mia?

Yes.

Respiration.

Perspiration.

Right, right. And the S-P-I-R there means to breathe.

And so respiration is breathing again and again, which is a good thing, right?

Yes, it is.

To inspire somebody is to breathe into…

Yes, to breathe in an idea.

There you go.

Wonderful.

Okay. And so you’ve got this great question about conspire, which has that same root, but really means to sort of plot or make a secret agreement, right?

Yeah.

So you’re saying, what the heck does that have to do with breathing?

Yeah.

Okay. Well, I think we can help you with that, because if you go back to the early, early, early Latin word, conspirare, which is the source of conspire,

It means, well, imagine being really, really in harmony with somebody, Mia.

You’re really close.

You’re really united.

You agree on everything.

You finish each other’s sentences.

You’re so close that you even breathe together.

That’s the idea, that you’re very, very close and in agreement.

And over time, that word that involved agreeing with somebody or harmonizing with somebody

Took a little turn and meant to agree to do something

And then to agree to do something like a plot.

It just changed a little bit.

And the con is with, so breathing with, literally.

Very interesting.

That’s very interesting.

So it could be like, say your best friend, you do everything together.

Like my best friend is Sarah, but I don’t really plot together to do stuff with her.

But if we were, like, really, really super close and then we turned evil, say somehow.

Never.

Then that would be what we would do.

Exactly.

Yeah, bingo.

That’s exactly it.

You would be conspiring.

You would be so close.

You’re breathing together and figuring out, you know, what to do.

Very good.

Thank you.

Well, you must be doing really well in school, Mia.

Yeah, I get A’s.

Excellent.

Well, that’s what we like to hear.

Excellent.

A Martha in training, clearly.

Mia, drop us a line sometime and let us know how your studies are going.

If you’ve got any stumpers, I’m volunteering Martha’s help, okay?

Okay.

Okay, thanks a lot.

Thank you. Good luck.

Okay.

Can you put your teacher back on?

Yeah, sure.

Okay.

Hi.

Well, you must be a great teacher, Barbara.

We appreciate your calling.

Thanks, Barbara.

Thanks for helping us out.

Our pleasure. Bye-bye.

Take care.

Okay, bye-bye.

Wow.

That’s great. That’s fantastic.

Yeah.

There are people out there in the front lines struggling to make young minds even brighter,

And she’s one of them, right?

Give us a call.

It doesn’t matter how old you are or what you’re doing,

As long as it’s got something to do with language, 877-929-9673,

Or tell us about an email, words@waywordradio.org.

We were talking earlier about the King James Bible.

Grant, do you know what the Wicked Bible is?

Oh, I don’t know.

So it’s got like the satanic verses in it or something?

No.

I don’t know.

This is a version of the King James Bible that was published in 1631 by the unfortunate printer Robert Barker and his co-worker Martin Lucas.

Poor guys.

They accidentally, in this edition of the Bible, left out the knot from the commandment against committing adultery.

We can link to a picture of that particular page on our website.

Both of them were fined for the offense.

That’s got to be the typo of all time.

The only way it can be worse is if the tablet that Moses held actually had a typo on it.

Maybe they were true to the source.

Yeah, maybe there are some people who would.

Anyway.

Call us with your language questions, 877-929-9673.

Or send them an email, words@waywordradio.org.

The Word on Words continues.

Stay tuned.

You’re listening to A Way with Words.

I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

And joining us from New York City is John Chanesky.

John!

Hi, Martha. Hi, Grant. How are you guys today?

John, you’re still our quiz guy, right?

Of course. Of course.

Because I’ve got so many of them. I have to get rid of them somehow.

Coming out your ears.

Piles of them. Exactly.

Here’s one called curtailments.

Now, we’ve done curtailments before, I think.

They’re a common form of wordplay, especially in the NPL, the National Puzzlers League.

They’re quite simple.

You take a word, remove its last letter to get another word.

Curtail one word to get the other.

For example, star is a curtailment of start.

Got it?

Right.

So let’s start, you stars.

I’ll give you a clue that indicates two words.

The first is always a curtailment of the second.

For example, Vincent van Gogh was presumably in possession of a lot of the first.

And once he cut off his ear, he had a lot of the second.

Paint and pain.

Yes, paint and pain, right.

Very good.

Very nice.

Let’s go on to the first one.

Here we go.

Okay.

If you view a particularly beautiful sunset, you might say, what an amazing first, and then heave a contented second.

Sight and sigh.

Sight and sigh.

Thanks, you’re on me, though.

Very good.

If you meet someone and get along with them very well, you might say you feel a first.

But if you don’t get along, you might get into a ring and second.

Ooh.

Get into a ring and…

Fight? Box?

Punch?

When you get along with them, you feel a certain first.

But if you don’t, you might get into a boxing ring and…

Je ne sais quoi.

It’s sort of practice boxing.

Spar and spark.

Spark and spark.

Very good.

I like this next one.

My niece is great.

She’s a first in junior high, but she likes that Hello Kitty stuff,

Which I find so second.

I’m going with childish, but that doesn’t work for anything.

She’s a…

She’s of a particular age.

Tween?

She’s a tween, and Hello Kitty is twee.

Yes.

Oh, very nice.

Tween and twee.

Here’s another one.

Everyone ultimately earns a black belt when they learn first,

Except for the Donald, whose belt is 24 second.

Carrot.

Right.

And karate.

Karate and carrot, yes.

Nice.

You tend to do the second one first, which is fine.

But it’s great.

Here’s another one.

When you’re in rehab, sometimes the rules can seem quite first.

For example, you’ve got to second all ties with bad influences.

Severe and sever.

Severe and sever, very nice.

When it gets really cold in the winter,

My family and I gather around the first,

And I think, you know, home really is where the second is.

Hearth and heart.

Hearth and heart.

I was thinking fire and ire.

Depends on the family.

That’s the difference between us, Grant.

You would think the salespeople would find it weird

That I like to first the cashmere sweaters at Macy’s.

But the truth is, in New York, nobody’s second.

Caress and cares.

Caress and cares.

He saw a celebrity

Flipping out on the highway first.

He should have called the police.

But he called the second.

Oh median and media.

Yes.

Don’t call the media.

Call the police.

Now those spooky sounds

We heard from the first.

We thought it was huck.

But it turned out to be second.

Those spooky sounds we heard from the first,

We thought it was…

Huck.

Huck as in Huck Fen.

Right.

But it turned out to be second.

Is this another character from the novel?

Oh, the tomb and Tom.

Tomb and Tom.

Very good.

Okay, here’s the last one.

Storm is coming, and just in case you first,

You should sail your boat to safe second.

Well, Safe Harbor and…

Not Harbor.

No.

Port.

Haven’t and Haven.

Yes, Haven’t and Haven.

A little tricky one there with a contract.

It was tricky.

That’s the quiz?

That’s the quiz.

Awesome.

That was great, John.

Terrific.

And if you have a question about wordplay, language, grammar, slang, regional dialects,

Call us 877-929-9673.

Or you can send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Brianna calling from New York, New York.

New York, New York.

The city’s so nice they named it twice.

Welcome to the show, Brianna.

Well, I have a number of questions, but the one I want to ask today is,

I’m looking for a word that I don’t think exists,

And so I’m wondering if you all could help me out.

I’m looking for a word to describe when a gift is not a gift.

So, for example, my partner’s parents, in effort to be generous, were going to fly her home across, fly her to see them across the country and used their frequent flyer miles.

And if you know anything about trying to cash in on frequent flyer miles, you don’t have a lot of control on how to get to where you want to be.

So what could be a fairly direct five-hour trip turned into an all-day circuitous trip throughout the country.

And so while it was a gift, it ended up being quite inconvenient.

So that inspired some thinking.

That was one type of inconvenient gift.

But others that we’ve come up with have been when somebody gives you something that has a specific time limit on it, so you feel a pressure to use it.

Or when they get you something like a gift card or such that should be used on something specifically, like where they dictate how it should be used.

Yeah, I feel that way about all gift cards, frankly, because they buy them for a particular store.

And you have to go all the way across town.

Right, right. And a lot of times they don’t even know if I have that store in my town, you know?

Good point. Good point.

Oh, this is interesting.

Well, when you first said that the gift that was burdensome, the first thing I thought of was white elephant.

You know the story of the white elephant? Why we use that term?

I don’t know why we use that term.

Well, in ancient Siam, the king of Siam, whenever he wanted to burden somebody or annoy them or punish them, he would give them the present of a beautiful white elephant.

They were very rare and considered holy.

And it would be this gift that would actually be a kind of curse because the upkeep would be awful.

And that’s where we get the term white elephant because you’re stuck with it.

And, you know, thanks a lot.

So I thought white elephant, but then I like this whole larger category of an inconvenient gift.

You know, a gift, not a gift with benefits, but a gift with…

Obligations.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We can make a portmanteau.

How about something that’s a blessing and a curse?

Maybe call it a blurs?

That sounds like some kind of blouse purse.

How about a clessing?

Oh, yes.

Your parents gave your partner a clessing.

Yes.

Or a blurs.

I had thought of a few that I’m not sure if they’re really going to take off.

So I thought instead of a gift, it’s a gaffed.

I like that.

And the other one, this is really dependent on inflection.

I thought, well, the word resent is already in the word present.

So maybe if we could just pronounce present like a present or a present.

Or a p-resent.

I kind of like p-resent.

A p-resent.

A p-resent.

Yeah, I like a p-resent.

And they tried to come up with an inconvenience.

You put a lot of thought into this.

Yeah.

I didn’t want to be ill-prepared.

Of course.

Of course.

Oh, those are all really good.

It’s certainly something that deserves a term.

I like gaffed.

I think that’s the best one that you’ve got there.

It’s easy to say.

I think it’s transparent, gaff plus gift.

It occurs to me that the German word gift, G-I-F-T, means poison.

Oh, it’s German.

But white elephant, that’s a great story.

It’s a gift that’s not quite a gift.

It’s got obligations and strings and burdens and clauses attached.

Yeah, it keeps on giving, and you’re going to keep on shoveling.

And it’s not really a gift horse either, right?

No, it’s a gift elephant.

Brianna, you have set our brains to working here.

Great.

Thank you so much for having me on the show.

Our pleasure.

Brianna, it was wonderful to talk to you.

Oh, thank you so much.

And thank you for all of the gifts, not gaff, that you give us.

Oh, well, our pleasure, of course.

We have a ball.

All right, thank you.

Bye-bye.

Thanks, bye-bye.

What would you call a gift that you were given that’s not quite as great as it should be?

It’s got obligations or it costs more than you thought it should or it makes you kind of inconveniences you in an extraordinary way where you can’t get rid of the gift.

You have to use it.

I want to know what those gifts are, too.

I think there are probably some really good stories there.

Send it all to words@waywordradio.org or tell us about it on the telephone, 877-929-9673.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hey, you guys.

This is Brad calling from Grapevine, Texas.

Hi, Brad. Welcome to the program.

Hi, Brad.

Grapevine, Texas. Love that name. Fantastic.

Yeah, yeah.

Okay, this is an etymological mystery that I have had for decades, and so I hope you guys can help me with this.

Oh, boy.

When I was a kid, back in the 60s, there were several network comedy shows that poked fun at backwoods folks, right?

You remember?

And on one of them, one of the characters was afraid that her family was going to get an infectious disease, and she started putting together what she called an asificity bag.

Now, I was in elementary school, so that was a word that stuck in my brain.

I’ll bet.

And so the next time we went up to see my grandparents, I asked my grandmother, have you ever heard of this?

And she pronounced it asificity bag.

Mm—

She had the exact same reaction that the characters on the show did.

This was a stinky thing that people wore around their necks because they thought it warded off disease, but it probably didn’t do anything.

And I have never been able to figure out where that word, well, which one’s right, astificity, astificity, and where that word came from.

Was that the Beverly Hillbillies?

It sure was.

That was Granny Clampett.

Yeah.

Jen!

Martha has her deerstalker cap on over here.

She’s all ready with answers.

Well, she’s jumping up and down too, Brad.

I’m so excited that you asked this question, because my dad used to talk about this.

My dad was a hillbilly from the hills of North Carolina, born in a log cabin.

And they did wear these things.

And he called it the same thing that your grandmother called it, asaphidgety.

So it’s a bag around your neck.

And what does it do?

It has really, really, really stinky stuff in it.

It smells just awful.

What, like frog legs, rotten frog legs or something?

I think rotten feet is pretty much what it smells like.

But yeah, Brad, my dad was made to wear that as a little kid in a little tobacco bag around his neck.

And it’s this folk medicine tradition in the hills that if you wear this, you’re not going to get the flu.

Of course, I would think it would be because nobody would want to get near you because it’s really smelly.

It comes from a plant that’s called asafetida.

That’s the more official name.

Asafetida.

A-S-A-F-E-T-I-D-A.

Yeah.

Slightly different spelling in the UK.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

I know this term.

It sounds like the root is setted.

It is.

Exactly.

It is related to that.

It’s a sap.

It’s a really smelly sap from this plant called azafeta.

So the idea appears to be, if I’m reading these citations from a variety of books correctly, and I’m looking here at just some great tales and stories.

There’s a Booth Tarkington story from 1914 and some tales collected from black folks in Missouri.

I guess the idea is it just scares the disease away, right?

I think so.

There’s a great quote here.

One fellow tells this folklore collector, he says, we didn’t catch colds.

We didn’t catch nothing.

Those asafidity bags scared off everything but the cold weather.

Back in the day, they thought that you could get disease by breathing bad air.

That’s the miasma theory of disease.

There you go.

And so maybe the asafidity bag surrounded you with safe air or something.

Well, it kept others away from you, so you weren’t likely to catch their flu because they were a good hundred yards off.

Yeah, right.

Yeah, Brad, I’m so glad you brought that to everyone’s attention.

Yeah, thanks you guys.

Yeah, sure. Thanks for giving us a call. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Call us, 877-929-9673, or send us an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Grant, I’m looking at our email.

We got one from Danielle Stockley, who’s in New York City.

And she wanted to offer a suggestion for the caller who was seeking a name for someone who doesn’t eat fish.

Remember that?

Yes.

Who eats everything else but not fish.

We suggested non-pescatarian.

She suggests pescatarian.

Okay.

I like that a lot better.

And it sounds nice.

It’s got a rhythm.

Yeah, and it’s, you know, contrary to eating fish.

Pescatarian.

Call us, 877-929-9673.

Send us an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Or if you have any ideas for the show, drop us a line on Facebook or Twitter.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Allison.

Hi, Allison. Welcome to the show.

Hey there, Allison. What’s up?

Hi.

Where are you calling from, by the way?

North Richland Hills, just outside of Fort Worth, Texas.

Okay, great. How can we help?

My 10-year-old son recently won our school spelling bee.

Hey, Mazetov.

Yeah, and he is going to the District B, and they gave us a list of words to study.

And when we got this list, there are a whole bunch of words we just have never seen before in my life.

And may never see again.

Probably not.

How many words are we talking about here?

Oh, a thousand?

Okay.

Oh, my gosh.

Total.

The words that are a complete surprise are a lot less than that.

But I spent a lot of time trying to find out what some of these words were, and I couldn’t find some of them.

So my question is, how do words get taken out of the dictionary?

At what point do they say, you know, we’re never going to use this word again. Let’s get rid of it.

So you’ve got all these difficult words, and I’m suspecting a lot of them are foreign or very rare, right?

Well, a lot of them are German.

A lot of them are German, right.

Well, there’s a couple difficult things happening here.

First of all, all the spelling bees that I know in the United States choose their words from the Webster’s New International Dictionary, third edition, which is a gigantic unabridged dictionary published in 1961.

Once a word is enshrined in a dictionary, it tends not to leave, at least in the unabridged dictionaries.

In the fourth edition of this big Merriam-Webster unabridged dictionary, those words will still be in there.

They may be marked archaic or obsolete or now rare, but they’ll still be in there.

And so you’ve got this kind of disconnect between what’s happening now with a 10-year-old in his life or even you in your life and what was happening in 1961 or in the preceding decades when that dictionary was being put together.

But some dictionaries do take out words all the time, right?

Yeah, but it’s the smaller, non-unabridged dictionaries.

It’s the desk dictionaries or the college dictionaries where it behooves them to keep them small so they’ll fit in a backpack or they’ll fit nicely next to your other reference works on your desk at the office.

And that’s the advantage of online dictionaries, right?

You don’t have to cull from the herd.

Yeah, something like Oxford English Dictionary Online or even just dictionary.com chooses from a wide variety of sources.

Yeah, you don’t have to cull them.

The rareness of these words is what makes them great spelling bee words, though, Allison.

I got to say, because if all the thousand words were words that everyone knew, how would you differentiate the excellent spellers from just the pretty good spellers?

Indeed.

You got to push the limit.

So it sounds sort of like you’re saying the unabridged dictionary is more like a word museum, and the shorter dictionaries are more like the word phone book or something.

A little bit, yeah.

Or Atlas or something.

That’s not a bad way of looking at it.

The unabridged are updated far less often, but they are more exhaustive.

And then the dictionaries that you might have on your desk or put in your backpack and take to school, they’re going to be updated every few years and be far more current and have far less of the words that your son is going to have to spell on this big competition.

And you, if you’re helping.

It’s been great.

I mean, he’s learned some really fabulous new words.

His favorite word now is ersatz.

Oh, nice.

And that’s a good word, right?

It is.

It’s great.

You know, you’ve got to tell us, Allison.

Send us an email when the contest is over and let us know how he did, all right?

I will do that.

Thank you so much.

Our pleasure.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Coming up, more of your questions about language.

Support for A Way with Words comes from National University, where flexible online classes let you earn your degree or credential on your schedule.

More at nu.edu.

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

And I’m Martha Barnette.

So at the top of the show, Martha, you quizzed me.

Yes.

I want to quiz you.

Oh.

It’s a little easier, though. You just have to say what I spell.

Oh, okay.

Okay?

All right.

C-O-T.

C-O-T. Caught.

C-A-U-G-H-T.

Caught.

D-O-N.

D-O-N, Don.

D-A-W-N.

Don.

P-E-N.

P-E-N, Pen.

P-I-N.

P-I-N, Pen.

So, it’s interesting.

You have a vowel merger in two out of the three of those pairs.

I beg your pardon?

You should see your doctor.

Hi, I’m Dr. Grant.

You have a vowel merger.

A vowel merger is when you pronounce two different vowels the same in two different words.

In large parts of the country, D-O-N and D-A-W-N are pronounced the same.

Huh.

Usually Don and Don.

Right.

But in other parts of the country, they pronounce differently.

Don and Don.

Huh.

Same for cot and caught and pen and pin.

The last, you did separate them.

And a lot of times people do intentionally separate those if they know what I’m up to.

Huh.

This is the kind of thing that, as you well know, and we talk about this in public and speeches and we give presentations or even at parties, you can soon have a cluster of people gathered around you all trying it out for themselves. And it’s one of the ways that sociolinguists study language change. Where in the country are the younger people pronouncing these vowels the same? And you can map it and create these new maps. For example, around the Great Lakes, you’ll find new things are happening with these vowel mergers. I went to the American Dialect Society Conference in Portland in January, as I do every January. And I saw some great papers about vowel mergers, including in Vermont, where the vowel mergers are moving eastward toward New Hampshire. They’re crossing the Connecticut River. So this area of these sounds, cot and cot, sounding the same, cot and cot, they’re starting, it’s growing larger.

And yet there’s also this pushback because they don’t want to sound like they’re from Boston or from Massachusetts. So the idea that we’re all starting to speak a standard homogenized English with similar pronunciations everywhere is just bunk, right? Well, there’s a little bit to that. We do learn new vocabulary through the popular media, but it’s funny. We tend to learn our pronunciation from our family and our neighbors. And so in one way, we’re growing more like each other. We’re picking up new words. And the other way, we’re growing more different from each other. We’re picking up the sounds of our neighbors.

And some of it’s psychological, the pushback.

I’m from Vermont.

I don’t want to sound like I’m from Massachusetts.

So I’m not going to use my R in a particular way.

I’m not going to say some of my words like they do in Boston.

I want to sound like my people, not like those people from over there, those people from away.

Interesting.

Yeah.

Anyway, if you want to try the vowel mergers, we’ll put a list of them, the more common ones, on the website.

You can try them out.

Maybe I’ll even do a quiz, and we can see if we can map where some of this stuff is going on across the country.

Find us at waywordradio.org.

Drop us a line if you want to share your vowel merger story, because I know you’ve got it, 877-929-9673.

And any general linguistics question can go right to email, words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi.

Hi, who’s this?

Shelly Nolkins in Antrim, New Hampshire.

Hi, Shelly.

Welcome to the program.

Thank you.

What can we do for you?

Well, I’ve had a question for quite a long time, and I’ve never received a satisfactory answer.

I’m originally from Manhattan, and I always heard the term Big Apple to describe the area.

And I always wanted to know where that came from and what it actually meant.

Well, that’s a great question.

Fortunately, I know the men who have come to be the experts on this topic, the ones who’ve done the research, and actually they’ve done a really good job also of keeping the Wikipedia page up to date for the Big Apple.

Barry Poppick and Jerry Cohen.

Jerry is at the, I believe it’s, I forget what it’s called now, the Missouri University of Science and Technology in Ralla, Missouri.

And Barry Poppick is an etymologist in Austin, Texas.

And what they discovered in their research in the old microfilm databases at the research library right there on 42nd Street in New York City is that in the 1920s, there was a writer by the name of John J. Fitzgerald.

And Fitzgerald used it in a column that he was writing about the horse racing scene in New York City and New Orleans and some other places.

And so he first uses it in 1921 just to talk about New York as the Big Apple, meaning the place that everyone wanted to go.

And then he starts to institutionalize this word in his writing.

And so by 1924, he’d used it enough where he’d gotten questions from people.

What do you mean by this Big Apple?

And he explained it.

And he picked it up from the men who worked with horses in stables around racetracks in New Orleans.

They were using it to talk about, you know, if your horse did well in New Orleans, you’d ship them up to New York and run the big races up there in Belmont and Saratoga.

So that’s the really short version.

Now, there are many competing theories.

This is the one that all the language historians that I know buy into.

So, Shelley, it sounds like it came from the world of horse racing then and was adopted by a sports…

Was he a sports rider?

He was a sports writer, yeah.

And then it kind of languished for a while through the 30s and the 40s and would occasionally pop up and be used.

And then in the 1970s, when New York City was trying to revive his image, it became a part of the big campaign to kind of humanize New York City, kind of take some of the scariness away, so make people stop thinking about crime and the city’s debt and graffiti and started to think about a little more natural things and the good things and the wonderful things that New York City has to offer.

Great. Thank you.

Sure. Take care. Thanks for calling.

Bye-bye.

Bye, Shelley.

Is there a word or phrase that’s puzzled you?

Call us about it, 877-929-9673, or you can send an email to us.

That’s words@waywordradio.org.

Hello. You have A Way with Words.

Hi. My name is Chelsea, and I’m calling from Plano, Texas.

Hi, Chelsea. Welcome to the program.

Hi, Chelsea.

I have a question about a word that I grew up hearing my mom use, and it’s the word sigh.

And she used it a little bit differently than you might expect the word sigh to be used.

She would use it as like a question.

Say if she was asking me a question and I was zoning out or not listening to her, as teenagers are apt to do, she would go, you know, she would repeat her question and go sigh as if to ask me to answer the question.

Or as in, did you hear me, sigh, that type of wording.

And, you know, my dad and I always kind of thought it was kind of odd, and we had asked her about it, and she actually didn’t really know where she got it from.

Her family was from the Tuscaloosa, Alabama area, and we kind of conjectured that maybe it came from say, but we’ve never really had any luck tracking it down.

So I was wondering if maybe you could help me find the etymological root of it.

Really interesting.

So she says something, and in order to check that you were listening or to prompt your response, then she says sigh after it.

Yes.

And she doesn’t have any recollection of anyone else in her family using it?

No.

I mean, she kind of guessed maybe a great-grandmother or something that she had heard it from, but she wasn’t entirely sure.

She didn’t grow up around the family.

They had moved to Texas when she was quite young.

And so after we kind of brought it up, she kind of stopped using it, I think, out of embarrassment of not being able to explain where she got it from.

But I have very distinct memories of that phrase, and I’d always kind of wondered about it.

Can you give me another example of what that would sound like?

Would she be telling you a story and throw it in?

No, it would be more of like asking me a question.

So did you water the dogs?

And I would, you know, not be paying attention.

And she’d go, sigh, Chelsea, sigh, like, tell me, did you water the dog?

Oh, really?

Really?

Because to me what it sounds like is a contraction of said I, which you see a lot in dialect, sigh.

Oh.

Especially if you’re telling a story, you know, instead of saying I said to him, you say sigh.

You see that a lot in Mark Twain.

There’s a lot of, and he spells it S-apostrophe capital I, Psy, like says I.

Wow.

Oh, very interesting.

But it’s usually when you’re reporting what you said at a previous time, right?

Right.

You’re relaying a conversation that you’ve already had.

Right.

Yeah.

That’s interesting.

So she would say it for more emphasis, like are you listening?

Exactly.

Yeah, yeah.

Don’t touch that apple pie, Psy, or something.

Interesting.

Did you hear what I said?

Psy, says I.

That’s what I’m thinking.

I’d be interested to know if any of our other listeners have had that experience.

I would too, particularly our listeners in the South.

We’ve got listeners all through the southern United States or people who are from there and now live elsewhere.

Does anyone in your family use sigh in this way as a way to emphasize something they’ve just said or as a way of kind of asking you a question about something they’ve just said, drawing attention to the need for a response from you?

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

Chelsea, we’re going to have to throw this out to the masses, to the mob, and see what they come up with.

All right, well, thank you so much. I appreciate it.

Thanks, Chelsea. Bye-bye.

Thanks a lot, Chelsea. Bye-bye.

All right, bye.

You know, this quote in the Dictionary of American Regional English from 1930 from Central Kentucky looks like it might be that kind of thing.

It goes, with the Mountaineer, sigh does not merely mean say, but carries the meaning of I said.

Example, sigh, Tom, you better not do that. Sigh, Tom, you better not do that.

Interesting.

Sort of emphasizing what Chelsea was saying.

That sounds like the right thing. Yeah.

Again, the phone number is 877-929-9673. Call us. Write that number down. Call us later if you want. Email us, words@waywordradio.org. Find us on Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus even.

I love this word that I found.

There was a professor railing against his students in their corner gami.

In their what?

He was insisting that they use staples to put their papers together and stop doing this thing where you fold the corner and then tear it because you don’t have a stapler.

He’s like, you’re adults now. Buy a stapler. Stop with the corner gami.

Corner gami.

Right?

Corner plus origami.

It’s great.

I love it.

What new words have you come across?

Let me know.

I’d love to add them to my list.

877-929-9673.

Or tell me about them and email words@waywordradio.org.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Yeah, hey, this is Eric Odey.

Hey, Eric. How are you doing?

Doing well.

Good, good.

Where are you?

Well, I’m kind of near the Puyallup, Washington area in Bonny Lake.

So here’s the question.

I was told decades ago from my father, and so it must be true because my father told me this, that the phrase, in like Flynn, came from Ernest Thayer’s poem, Casey at the Bat, where in the poem, if you remember in the poem, Flynn is hugging third when Casey comes up to bat.

And so the idea is that Flynn is certainly in because, hey, it’s Casey who’s at the bat.

But whenever I’ve gone online to try to verify that, everywhere you look,

That the overwhelming number of people claim that it comes from Errol Flynn,

That the phrase comes from kind of his womanizing ways,

And some people reference it to the court case where he was on trial for a statutory rape.

And at any rate, I still believe that it makes much more sense that it came from the poem from Casey at the Bat.

And as a children’s poet myself, I would love to hear that I’m absolutely right.

But I’ll take whatever information you’ve got.

It’s interesting. I’ve never heard this theory before.

And I take a different tact.

The fact that no one has ever connected it to that poem would lead me to believe that it doesn’t come from the poem.

The superficial similarity between an expression and fin there isn’t enough.

It’s one single bit of evidence, and it’s not even rhymed in that way, right?

In the poem.

You mean within the poem?

Yeah, it doesn’t say in like Flynn.

No, it never says no.

Thayer’s poem does not say in like Flynn.

And he’s not even in the position of being in that sure thing.

When we use the expression in like Flynn today, we mean that somebody is locked into a good thing,

Or that it’s inevitable that this thing is going to happen to them,

Or that they’ll be able to win the favors of a lady, which is often the way that it’s used.

When we’re doing the etymological research, working in a dictionary, I say we meaning dictionary editors,

We look for a tremendous amount of evidence in the written record that specifically and explicitly connects a source to an expression.

Where somewhere we would have expected anyway, before 1940s or when In Like Flynn became a common saying,

We would have expected in the previous decades for that to have appeared since the poem is so much older.

And yet it doesn’t.

References to it, yeah.

We would have expected somebody to have said, you know, as he wrote in the famous poem, he’s in like Flynn.

Nobody said anything like that.

There’s no juxtaposition of these two things side by side anywhere in the historical record until you mention it.

And there’s a lot of question about Errol Flynn, too.

Yeah, and Errol Flynn’s not a sure thing.

Maybe that’ll make you feel a little better about it.

Errol Flynn’s not a sure thing either.

When his court case came up in 1942, the expression in like Flynn already existed.

We already have uses of it in the historical record, in newspapers and books.

And there’s a strong bit of evidence that it’s just simple, traditional rhyming slang.

The same way it’s like, what do you know, Joe?

What do you say, Ray?

And all these old style ways of just kind of like using a name just because it rhymes.

And for no other reason at all, except because it rhymes.

Yeah, out like flout became another expression after in like Flynn.

Is that right? I’ve never heard that.

Yeah, it was Ray Dillass.

Out like stout or out like flout.

Yeah, out like stout.

So when Errol Flynn came along, here was this ready-made expression that could be kind of repurposed to apply to this interesting, scandalous and salacious case where he was accused of sexual impropriety and later acquitted.

He was well-known as a ladies’ man anyway.

So to be in like Flynn and meaning to be able to, you know, she’ll say yes if you ask her, you know.

That definitely comes from Errol Flynn.

But the expression existed before his court case.

So, Eric, was your dad really emphatic about that?

No, I think it was something that was taught to him in elementary school.

Interesting.

And he’s, what, he’s 75 or so right now.

Yeah.

Well, I’ll tell you one thing.

Just because I’ve never heard this before doesn’t mean that I won’t come across evidence in the future.

I’m constantly trolling and trawling through the historical record looking for evidence of things.

And now that you’ve brought this to my attention, I can make sure that this is one of those things that should I come across evidence, I’m definitely going to collect it and record it and tell everyone about it.

And if you do, pop over to Facebook or Twitter and let us know.

Yeah, absolutely. All right, Eric?

All right. Well, very good.

Thank you, sir.

Yeah, appreciate you taking it.

Sure. Bye-bye.

Bye, Eric.

If you have a question about language, call us 877-929-9673 or send it an email to words@waywordradio.org.

I probably should do an online survey about this,

But how do you spell cozy as in this foam thing

That you put around a cold can of beer or soda?

Oh, I was thinking a tea cozy, which I would spell C-O-Z-Y,

But I call it a koozie.

A koozie, yeah, and how do you spell that?

I have no idea.

11 different spellings, and I came across a new spelling, C-U-Z-Z-I, which never occurred to me.

I think of a tea cozy as well, but there’s this whole universe of people who don’t.

They call it something else, and it’s the foam sleeve that you slip a drink in to keep it cool.

No, no.

A cozy is where you get in and you turn on the jets and you relax and you drink something out of a cozy.

Put the Barry White music on.

Johnny Mathis.

Johnny Mathis.

Anyway, I was delighted.

You know, we don’t talk about variant spellings that often on the show,

But sometimes when something is more orally transmitted,

It has this immense number.

Because you don’t write that word, really, right?

I was going to say, I’m drinking a beer when I am.

So 11 different spellings for cozy or koozy or cozy,

As in the thing that keeps your drink cool.

Who knew?

I didn’t know.

Now I do.

We need an authority.

Tell us more about it.

words@waywordradio.org, 877-929-9673,

And Facebook and Twitter.

Things have come to a pretty pass.

That’s all for today’s radio show, but the party isn’t over.

Leave us a message anytime at 877-929-9673.

Let us be your linguistic detectives and share your family’s stories about language.

Try us anywhere in the world on Skype using the Skype name Wayword Radio

Or email us, the address is words, at waywordradio.org.

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If you aren’t able to have that driveway moment with fellow word nerds,

You can have your way with us by podcast anytime at all.

Grant and I can’t do this show each week without the contributions of Stefanie Levine,

Tim Felten, James Ramsey, and Josette Herdell.

A Way with Words is independently produced and distributed by Wayword, Inc.,

A nonprofit supported by listeners and organizations who 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.

Thanks for listening. I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

Do svidaniya.

Aloha.

You like tomato and I like tomato.

Potato, potato, tomato.

Support for A Way with Words comes from National University,

Where flexible online classes let you earn your degree or credential on your schedule.

More at nu.edu.

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