Spendthrift Snollygosters

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You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

One of the curiosities of American politics is that even though there’s much talk about how bipartisanship is a good idea

And how divisiveness doesn’t get anything done in Washington,

There’s also an attitude that a centrist is just somebody who doesn’t have a strong conviction and who can’t be trusted.

That idea is perfectly crystallized in the expression far center.

Far center is a political position in which a politician is so committed to compromise

That they please no one.

It’s a radical compromiser.

That’s great.

I never heard that.

Far center.

Yeah, it’s somebody who is,

They’re not in the far right.

They’re not the radical conservatives

And they’re not in the far left.

They’re not the radical liberals.

There’s somebody who is kind of alone

Right out there in the middle

Because they’re making nobody happy.

I have an older political term for you.

This one comes from the mid 19th century,

Which was a time of great linguistic inventiveness,

As you know, and it’s snallygoster.

I just love this word, snollygoster, S-N-O-L-L-Y-G-O-S-T-E-R.

It means a corrupt politician.

It’s a term that got revived last year in Britain when one politician called the other, his opponent, a snollygoster.

And I just love that for corrupt politician.

We’re not sure of the derivation of it, but it may come from an old word for a kind of evil spirit that preys on chickens and small children.

Snollygoster.

Well, if you’d like to talk about new language or old, words and phrases, grammar and slang, old family sayings, or whatever, give us a call 1-877-929-9673 or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Yes, hello, this is Claudette calling from Waukesha, Wisconsin.

Hello, Claudette, how are you?

Hello, hi.

Welcome to the program.

I am just fine, how are you?

Super duper.

Swell as well.

Well, here’s my question.

A couple of months ago, my husband and I heard about some research that was done where it talked about couples who are marrying their opposites in terms of spending habits.

And so in this research, they said that people who were tightwads tended to marry spendthrifts.

And, you know, the word tightwad is kind of easy, you know, to wrap your head around.

But spendthrift just kind of stuck in my craw, and I just couldn’t get it out of my mind because it makes no sense to me.

Why the word spend would be put together with thrift, and that would result in a word that means a person is spending a lot of money.

-huh.

When it should, in my mind, it should be a person is spending in a thrifty manner.

I can see the confusion there, because it seems like the thrift is describing the act of saving or not spending, right?

That’s right.

It seems contradictory or oxymoronic.

It does seem contradictory.

So I was just curious about where this word came from and why we’re hanging on to it.

I’m sure I’ve talked to other people, and they’re just as confused as I am.

Well, Claudette, you’re right. It sounds a little contradictory, but there’s an easy answer here that I think can explain everything.

Okay.

And it’s that the meaning of thrift has changed.

There’s an old meaning of thrift that we use only in isolated and rare circumstances today.

Okay.

And that is thrift to mean savings or accumulated wealth.

You are actually, when you spend your thrift, you are spending your savings.

You are spending your savings.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so we only find it today really in the jargon of finance.

A thrift bank, for example, is another name for a savings and loan association.

So it’s like a savings bank.

Although they don’t use that themselves.

They do. Actually, they do.

Do they?

Yeah, within the financial industry, they do use thrift in a very specific and contained kind of jargonized way.

Yeah, and Claudette, this thrift is related to the word thrive.

Thrift is the result of your thriving.

So it’s your savings and your prosperity.

Okay.

So in your marriage, who’s the spendthrift and who’s the tightwad?

Well, you know, we both looked at each other and said, you’re the spendthrift.

Oh, hello.

Not me, it’s you.

And then we both did it.

I think in our situation, we tend to go back and forth depending on what it is we’re spending on.

So we each have our things that we like to spend on versus things that we’re quite thrifty on.

That makes sense.

Okay, well, Claudette, thanks for calling.

Thanks, Claudette.

Oh, thank you, Martha and Grant.

We listen to your show all the time.

Excellent.

Oh, that’s so nice.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Well, Claudette was on to something.

English is confusing.

If you’re confused about something in English, give us a call, 1-877-929-9673,

Or punch us up an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Jeff Boyes from Boone’s Mill near Roanoke in Virginia.

Hello, Jeff.

Hi, Jeff.

You don’t sound like you grew up there.

That’s true.

That’s true.

As a matter of fact, I was born in Australia,

And I’ve been living in America for the last 30 years.

Okay.

Well, what can we help you with?

Well, growing up in Australia, early in the 1960s and earlier,

There was a lot of English migrants coming out to Australia.

I think there was some sort of assisted passage.

And they were put in hostels, and Australians referred to them as pommies.

And it was semi-derogatory, but I don’t think they…

Now it’s obviously not derogatory, so I’m sure they’re not upset about it.

And it was just recently, I was always told that Pommie meant prisoner of Mother England, P-O-M-E.

But that didn’t sound sensible for the way an Australian would pronounce P-O-M-E.

We’d say P-O-M-E or something.

Then my son said that he heard that it was P-O-H-M, prisoner of her majesty, that they had on the back of their garments.

And that this is where Pommie came from.

And so I was just wondering whether you could solve the problem for me and let me know where it really came from.

We can come close.

And the first way you can come close is to talk about some of those acronyms.

So one of the theories was that it came from P-O-M-E, Prisoner of Mother England, right?

That’s correct.

And that’s the assisted passage you’re talking about?

Assisted passage meaning that they were a criminal and they were shipped to Australia in order to straighten them up?

Oh, yes. The First Fleet was all basically criminals from Britain.

And there was another acronym, P-O-H-M, and there have been some others that have been proposed as well.

Unfortunately, there’s no evidence at all in the written record that these things are true at all.

These acronyms probably are apocryphal.

Somebody came up with them after the fact.

Yeah, sounds like it to me.

The best theory that we have, Jeffrey, and it’s a pretty good one.

It’s not 100%.

It’s that it’s simply a reference to the fact that the newcomers didn’t know enough to wear hats.

And so they tend to get sunburned heads, and their heads looked like pomegranates.

And so they called them palms or palmies for short.

And it’s not 100%, but I think it’s a far more reliable story and far more possible story,

And certainly within the kind of humor that Australian slang tends to have.

Yeah, well, I can imagine them putting an IE on the end of everything, like put another shrimp on the barbie.

And so if it was a pom, then pommy would be a natural alliteration from that.

So, yeah, maybe so it was because they’re sunburned heads.

Yeah, it’s possible.

You know, the sunburned heads looked like pomegranates.

And this expression goes back to at least 1913.

It’s probably a little bit older.

And it’s interesting to hear you say that it’s not really offensive anymore

Because most of the dictionaries that I checked indicate that it’s usually derogatory or still considered offensive.

But you’re saying that in colloquial everyday English that people don’t mind so much anymore being called pommy.

Well, it never offended me.

Oh, I see.

I did marry an English wife at one point, and she didn’t worry.

But, I mean, the British have been labeled with more names, I think, because in America here you call them limeys, right?

Yeah, that’s old-fashioned, too, though.

Is that so derogatory, limey?

It’s a sort of similar way.

It’s semi-derogatory.

I guess it was because they ate limes when they were on the boats.

Yeah, something like that.

To avoid scurvy.

I want a fruit name for us.

You guys have pomegranate.

They have limey.

No, they just call us septics.

Septic tanks, yeah.

Yeah, the Australians had a terrible saying for Americans.

They’d call them septic tanks.

Oh, that’s right.

And then they shortened it to septics.

And, of course, it was an alliteration of yanks.

Right, rhyming slang for yanks.

That’s right, we’re septics.

I forgot about that.

I wouldn’t use it over here.

Probably a good decision there.

Right, right.

So that’s the best that we can offer you on POMME.

How’d we do?

Oh, we did well.

That satisfies me.

That makes more sense than P-O-M-E.

So I hope there’s not hundreds of listeners calling in offended now.

No, no, no.

We’ll be fine.

We’ll just forward the calls to you.

Is that okay?

Yeah, that’s right.

When I first came to America, I had a lot of fun with the accent here.

And the first one I did was I was mowing my grass and I needed some.

I went down to the gas station with a can and I said to the guy, I want some oil for me mower.

And he looked at me and I said, I want some oil for me mower.

And he said, oil for your mower.

And I said, yeah, you know, cut the grass.

And he said, oh, you want some oh for your more.

I learned very quickly that the R in Virginia is highly accentuated.

Oh, that’s priceless.

I’ve survived since anyway.

I love the show, and it was very fascinating,

And I enjoyed listening to it on Radio IQ here in Roanoke.

Fantastic.

It was our pleasure to have you on the program, Jeffrey.

Thank you for calling.

Thanks a lot.

Thanks very much.

Bye-bye.

Yeah, that reminds me when I worked in information technology

For an advertising agency in New York City,

And one fellow Scotsman called up the help desk and said,

Grant, someone has nicked my lead.

It took me several seconds to figure out what he meant.

Somebody had stolen the cable for his computer.

Nick my lead.

Yeah, palmy, palmy.

Yeah, it’s not something that we use.

It’s interesting to have those derogatory words

That are kind of like between two cultures.

It’s between the Australians and the British,

And it’s not something the Americans participate in,

The use of the word Palmy.

Exactly. Interesting.

Call us with your insults and your derogatory statements

And your inflammatory comments, 1-877-929-9673,

Or send your offensive remarks to words@waywordradio.org.

Martha, how would you describe an older woman who has a knack for finding men who are her age that she can date?

Extremely successful?

No, you say she has an excellent graydar.

I came across that recently.

It’s another coinage on the line of radar equaling gaydar equaling whatever dar.

Dar on top of a word means that you’re good at finding that thing.

Oh, I love that.

And did you see where Kate Moss streaked her hair with gray?

Oh, did she now?

That’s the new thing is gray highlights.

Yeah, another season Sontag’s gone.

There’s a role to fill.

If you have an observation about language, call us 1-877-929-9673

Or send those emails to words@waywordradio.org.

Coming up on A Way with Words, it’s a visit from our other quiz guy, Greg Pliska.

Stick around.

You’re listening to A Way with Words.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

And, well, I’ll be darned if it isn’t our other quiz guy, Greg Pliska.

Greg.

Oh, Greg.

Hello, hello.

You know, I take exception of that.

John is the other quiz guy.

Oh, John is the other quiz guy.

That’s right.

You say that like other woman.

Greg, how have you been?

You never write.

You never call.

When am I going to get grandchildren?

You sound like my wife’s mother.

I’m good.

I’ve been traveling.

I’ve been to London and the Dominican Republic, and I have an adorable baby.

What else do I need?

Did you bring us anything?

Nope.

That’s it.

See you later.

Bye-bye.

Thanks for calling.

Where’s that Chaneski guy?

Of course I brought you something.

I brought you a little quiz.

Oh, hot dog.

No, this week’s quiz is going to be all about the presidents of the United States.

All right.

I’ll see you guys later.

Bye-bye.

But, well, you know, because this is A Way with Words, I’m going to make all the questions have something to do with the alphabet, spelling, or other word play.

Oh, great.

Okay.

I think.

I think.

Yeah, you suckered into that one.

So this is basically the quiz is open topic, open form, open answer.

Everybody wins.

Everybody gets a ribbon.

Well, no, all the answers are the names of presidents.

Oh, okay.

Specifically, I think the last names of presidents of the United States.

Okay.

But since there is a variety of wordplay at work here, rather than go through an example, we’re just going to jump right in.

Oh, my goodness.

Okay.

There are five presidents whose last names are also English verbs.

Now, one of them is an uncommon usage of the word bush to mark or plant with bushes.

So we’re not going to count that one.

How many of the other four can you name?

Okay.

Wow.

This is a big, tough monster of a question, right?

Yep.

I have one.

Okay, Martha.

Number 14.

Franklin Pierce, right?

Pierce.

Very good.

Yes, to pierce something.

Franklin Pierce.

And to Hoover is to vacuum.

Oh, good.

To Hoover.

Very good.

A little Britishism.

Yeah, mainly British usage.

Good, good.

Let’s see here.

One of them was said even before we started this quiz.

Really?

Yeah.

Really?

Well, it’s the last name of a president, but it’s also a first name.

The last name of a president?

It’s the last name of a president, but it’s also the first name of one of the three of us.

Oh.

Grant.

Grant.

To grant somebody something.

Grant and Ford.

Ford is another one.

And Ford is another one.

Those are the four I was looking for.

Is that all of them?

That’s good.

That’s all of them, yes.

The verb to Martha hasn’t made it into the dictionary yet.

I was like mentally running through all the presidents, which is why I was sad.

Me too.

It takes a while.

All right, here’s a tricky one.

One president’s last name becomes another president’s last name when you change the first vowel sound.

Who are the two presidents?

One president’s last name.

Well, it’s kind of a trick because many people know that Roosevelt and Roosevelt were two different pronunciations of that name.

That could be.

That’s not the one I’m looking for, however.

But you’ve got the right idea.

You’re changing the vowel sound.

It would be like changing grant to grunt.

You just change the vowel sound.

Did we have a President Cooter?

Carter Cooter?

No, we didn’t.

Oh, man.

Taylor and Tyler?

Taylor and Tyler.

Very good.

Thank you.

Let me give you this one.

If you count Y, there are seven presidents whose last names end with a vowel.

How many can you name?

Okay.

Obama.

Yep.

Obama.

Kennedy.

Kennedy.

Oh, good, good.

What are we going for, seven here?

Yep.

Well, there’s Monroe.

There’s Monroe.

That’s an E, yep.

Oh, McKinley, McKinley.

Sure, yeah.

If I had a list of presidents in front of me.

Well, that’s…

And there are three left.

They all end with E.

Oh, okay.

That’s easy.

All silent E’s.

That’s easy, she said.

Pierce.

Pierce.

Fillmore.

Fillmore.

And another 20th century president.

Another 20th century president.

Coolidge.

Coolidge.

Oh, very good.

Very good.

Take a presidential last name, which is also a noun.

Add an R and rearrange the letters to get a synonym for the original noun.

Whoa.

What is it?

Bush, shrub.

Bush and shrub.

Oh!

Look at that.

How did you do that?

That was supposed to be a hard one.

Oh, my gosh.

People called him shrub, the first President Bush shrub, all the time.

Yeah, but were you anagramming his name?

No, I just wrote it down here.

Wow.

Started with that one.

It was the first one that came to mind that was a noun.

That’s how it works.

There aren’t that many of them that are nouns.

Very good.

He’s very good.

No, no.

I just got lucky.

You’re both very good.

All right.

Well, I’m going to try this one.

This one is totally unrelated to wordplay.

Oh.

Okay.

But it’s just a cool fact, so I felt like I had to include it.

Okay.

The shortest and longest-lived presidents so far, in other words, the people who had the shortest lifespan and the longest lifespan,

Who also happened to be presidents of the United States, were born roughly four years apart.

Who were they?

Oh, really?

Oh, interesting.

The shortest term was William Henry Harrison, right?

Kennedy and Reagan.

Oh, you’re very close, Grant.

Kennedy is the shortest-lived president.

He died at the age of 46.

Ford?

And Ford, very good.

Ford, okay.

He died at the age of 93, and they were born just four years apart.

That is a great fact.

Well, that was a great quiz.

That was fantastic.

Yeah, I learned some stuff, too.

Yeah.

Thank you so much, Greg.

It’s always a pleasure to be with you guys.

And it’s a pleasure to have you on the show.

We’ll talk to you next time.

You bet.

All right, bye-bye.

Well, if you’d like to talk with us about language history or grammar, slang, punctuation,

Words, and how we use them, give us a call, 1-877-929-9673.

Or send us email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hey, Grant and Martha, this is Tim from Baltimore, Maryland.

Well, hello, Tim. How are you doing?

Hi, Tim.

Pretty well, thanks.

I have a question for you guys, and I’m hoping you’ll be able to help me with it.

It’s about homophones and homographs.

We know what they are in English, like there, there, there,

And when they’re spelled the same, homographs.

But what is it called when you have a word that is a homograph

Or a homophone with another language?

Mm—

And do you have some examples of that?

Oh, I have plenty.

Okay.

The word in Dutch and German for wall, it’s wand,

They pronounce it Vond, but they spell it W-A-N-D, which in English means a stick or a baton or a magical device.

In French, their word for bread is pain, which is pronounced pain, but it’s spelled P-A-I-N, which to us is pain.

There are so many of them that I encounter, and they always stick out to me because I think it’s so strange.

Yeah, where do you encounter them?

Usually, well, I do news reporting, and a lot of times I have to take articles from other countries

And translate them into English via whatever methods I can.

And, you know, a lot of times words will, you know, stick out to me,

And I’m like, oh, I’ll see if it’s in, you know, the Latin alphabet,

And it’s written the same way as a word in English, I always take note of that.

So you’re looking for the word for those words that are in other languages and look like they’re English words.

But don’t mean the same thing.

Like gift in German is another one.

Yes, poison.

Yeah, you don’t want me to give you a gift in German.

And soy, soy in Spanish and soy in English are very different things.

Oh, yeah, sure, sure.

Or, you know, if you go to a restaurant where they speak Spanish

And you order tuna, you’re going to get prickly pear cactus

Or edible cactus.

So you have to be careful about those things.

And R-E-D means network in Spanish, but it means the color in English.

So, yeah, there’s tons of this stuff.

Right.

I’d say, Martha, wouldn’t you, that these are some kind of false cognate or false friend?

Yes, false friends is the term that I’ve seen before.

Or faux ami in French, as I learned it in French class.

But usually when we talk about false cognates or false friends between languages,

They actually do tend to have an etymological root,

But the word has taken a different path in the two languages.

Okay.

French and English, of course, because their shared history has hundreds,

If not thousands of these words that are not quite the same thing in each language.

And it goes both ways.

It’s not just French words that became English words,

But English words that became French words tend to be transformed in their meanings as well.

And so you can really make a fool out of yourself.

Yeah, I remember reading about a product called Mist, something mist.

Maybe it was Canadian mist or something that they tried to market in Germany.

But in German, mist means dung or filth.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

That doesn’t work at all.

But, Tim, I don’t know of any more technical-sounding term than false friends.

I think that’s the one that you’ll find.

In fact, if you Google false friends, pretty soon you’ll come up with and Google for the images.

There’s a pretty funny picture of an ad in Dutch of this little kid looking up in this field.

And it looks like the ad is saying, Mama, die, die, die.

But, of course, the little kid in Dutch is saying, Mama, this one, this one, this one, or that one, that one, that one.

So you do have to be careful about those false friends.

That is fantastic.

Cool. Thanks for calling, Tim.

Thanks, Tim.

Thank you very much, you guys.

Bye-bye.

All right. Bye-bye.

Bye.

Oh, man.

Well, I bet folks listening probably have a lot of great stories about false friends, too.

We’d love to hear about them.

Not your friends who are false to you, but those words.

So let us know, 1-877-929-9673, or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello. You have A Way with Words.

Hi there.

This is Linda.

Hello, Linda.

Hi, Linda.

Where are you calling from?

Well, I live in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Oh, there we go.

I know that town.

I have friends there.

Welcome to the program.

Well, thank you so much.

I’m delighted to be with you.

Great.

What’s on your mind?

My mother had said something over the years that I just took for granted,

And the expression actually was TL.

She would say this, and it meant that we had to come up with a compliment for her before she would reveal what she had heard.

And the reason it was driving me nuts most recently was that I mentioned it to a friend one day we were chatting, and she’s about my age and a university professor.

And when I mentioned that I had a TL for her, she gave me a very blank look.

And I was astonished that she didn’t know what it meant.

And then, even worse, I couldn’t tell her what it meant.

So you’re trading compliments then?

You said the letters were T and L?

That’s correct.

Okay.

So you would say to her, I have a TL for you,

And this is a compliment that you heard from somebody else?

Yes.

-huh.

And so she had to tell you a compliment that she heard about you from somebody else,

And then you would tell her, right?

It’s a little complicated, yes.

But back in the days when people had more conversations, it wasn’t so weird.

And so where did you first hear this expression?

Well, my mother was born in Canada and came to the U.S. When she was 12.

So I heard it all during my youth back in the 50s and 60s.

I mean, maybe once a month, but it was something we all just sort of laughed about.

And we would find, you know, a compliment and then finally get her compliment.

But the fact is that it seems to have vanished now.

I can’t say that I heard it a lot.

But I was just so astonished that this contemporary of mine had never heard it.

Had never heard of a TL.

Right.

She grew up in a different part of the country, and I kind of thought it was maybe a Canadian thing.

Okay.

Well, Linda, we can clear up this mystery for you.

This is really cool.

TL, get this, stands for trade last.

Oh, trade last.

Okay, that makes sense.

Yeah, and this was a sort of conversational kind of game, really, that seemed to arise in, oh, I don’t know, about the 1880s, 1890s in this country.

And it was very popular for a while, especially among schoolgirls and kids in college.

And the idea was, the idea of a trade last was, let’s trade complements and I’ll trade last.

So that’s the same idea that you’re talking about, right?

I see.

We’re trading complements.

And the use of trade last was pretty widespread across the country.

And then it kind of fell out of favor in the 1940s.

But you heard it in the 50s.

That’s interesting.

You heard TL, which is interesting, too, because it was heard mostly in the Northwest.

So I don’t know if TL bled over into Canada or what.

Northwest as in, well, I’m from Seattle originally.

Oh, okay.

You can hear that, the Northwest.

Okay, okay.

Yeah, because TL was used much more in the Northwest.

In your section of the country, in North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia,

In that area, there’s another variation of it that you may run into there.

Oh, okay.

And that’s last go trade.

It’s hyphenated L-A-S-T, go and trade.

And that’s an expression that means the same thing, but it’s very, very localized.

It’s very interesting that in your part of the country you may hear that expression.

But it means the same thing as your T-L.

Okay, well, I’m really happy to learn this, and I can’t wait to tell my friend.

Excellent.

Well, I appreciate the opportunity to get this cleared up.

Super duper.

Well, Linda, we’re glad to help.

Thank you.

Thank you for calling, Linda.

It was a pleasure talking with you.

Nice talking with you.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

If a word or phrase has mystified you for years, give us a call.

The number is 1-877-929-9673.

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

Hey, Grant, what if there were no hypothetical questions?

What if I don’t answer that?

I like that question.

That was sent to us by Keith in Charlottesville, Virginia, who also sent us this question.

Little food for thought.

Does the Little Mermaid wear an algebra?

You liked it.

It was a pun, and Grant liked it.

Duly noted, Keith.

That’s terrible.

Very good.

Congratulations.

Well, if you’d like to share a riddle with us, call us 1-877-929-9673 or email it to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Maureen calling from North Park in San Diego.

Hi, Maureen, welcome.

Hi, I have a question about the phrase refer back.

I’m a teacher.

I just completed 31 years of teaching in the public school system.

Wow, mazel tov.

Yes, and I’m going to keep going.

And I was discussing with a friend of mine at the dog park who’s a retired teacher.

Of course, we talk about school sometimes.

And as a teacher, we encourage students to refer back to the text when we are discussing literature or when they’re writing about literature.

We tell them to refer back to the text to substantiate their interpretation or their opinion.

And my friend Harriet said, no, that’s wrong, Maureen. Refer back is redundant.

So I did a little bit of investigating, and I’ve come to the conclusion that revert back would indeed be redundant, but that refer back is legit.

What do you think?

Refer back is totally fine.

Let’s just make that clear from the start.

Refer back is fine.

Refer alone is also fine.

But they indicate two different things.

If you refer back, you are referring to something that you have previously done or visited

Or a condition that you otherwise have already experienced.

You are referring back to something that you’ve seen before, right?

That makes sense.

If you refer to something without the back, if you just refer to the book,

Then you may actually be going to the part of the book that you haven’t seen before.

You’re going to check the glossary that you might not have read,

Or you’re going to go to a new chapter and refer to that

Because it has information that you need and haven’t seen yet.

And so there’s a difference there.

And back is a multifaceted adverb.

It does a lot of jobs that are kind of opaque.

And that’s one of the reasons why you can get,

If you think a little too much about back,

You can get into trouble and think, well, what am I using back for?

What do you mean, give me that back?

Why do I need the back in there if you’re saying give me that back?

And actually what you’re saying is,

Restore to me the thing that I previously had.

And that’s what the back is doing.

It’s saying, return me to the previous condition.

And so back is doing the same thing when you’re talking about textbooks.

Okay.

But you would never say revert back because that would be redundant.

You can actually.

Revert back is, you know, I’m thinking about this in a software programming context

Where you often want to restore your software to a previous build

Because you’ve made some mistakes in your new code

And you want to go back to when it was all good.

So I think people do say revert back, but I think revert would be a better use, yes.

Okay. Well, you answered my question. Thank you.

All right. Well, thanks for the call.

Thanks very much. Bye.

All right. Bye-bye.

Well, if you have a question about grammar or usage, this is the place, 1-877-929-9673,

Or send us an email. That address is words@waywordradio.org.

Next up, more of your calls here on A Way with Words. Stay tuned.

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

And I’m Martha Barnette.

We had a call recently from Camille.

She’d been racking her brain for years to try to remember a word that she’d heard in college.

Remember, she and her friends had been trying to pack a car so they could head back to school.

And she thinks that she remembers somebody that day using a word that refers to somebody who’s really good at visualizing where things should go and then packing them.

Remember that?

I remember that call.

We were stumped.

We were.

And she couldn’t remember the word.

And the only thing that she could recall she thought was that somehow the letter V figured prominently in this word.

And you’re right.

We didn’t come up with anything.

But, boy, did our listeners.

We got tons of suggestions.

We heard from people who were saying maybe it’s voyager or volumetrician.

Somebody suggested pickle packer.

I think that refers to how many pickles you can get in a jar.

Kara suggested caravaner.

A lot of people mentioned the art history term horror vacui, Grant,

The one that means a fear of empty spaces and refers to those ancient vases that just have stuff all over them,

Sort of like the label on Dr. Bronner’s soap, you know?

That’s horror vacui.

But here’s the word that I think is the winner, the word for somebody who can pack something really, really well, really tightly and efficiently, stevedore.

Oh, you think that’s the one?

I think that’s the one.

It means a dock worker.

A lot of people brought it to our attention, and I Googled it, and there are all kinds of similes, like the person has arms like a stevedore, works like a stevedore, eats like a stevedore, sweats like a stevedore.

And I’m betting that this person was told that she packs like a stevedore.

It’s possible, yeah.

I know that term from reading Hardy Boy Mysteries when I was a boy.

Oh, really?

Yeah, yeah.

They encounter some rough fellow who’s a stevedore.

There you go.

Interesting.

So stevedore.

I like volumetrician, though.

Of course you do.

But it’s not as much fun as stevedore.

No, I like stevedore a lot.

So thanks to Carter and David and George and everybody else who sent us that term.

I hope Camille lets us know if that was the term.

Oh, yes, please.

And you can call us with your suggestions at 1-877-WAY-WORD or email us to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello. You have A Way with Words.

Hello. My name is Brian Riddle. I’m calling from Indianapolis.

Hey, Brian.

And I’m calling. I’m curious about the phrase, to keep something at bay.

I’m curious of the origin of kitchen, and so it’s been a topic of conversation for the past few weeks.

And we have a couple of theories about coming from bay leaves and laurel leaves.

I know the Romans used to use bay leaves as a crown, and they have protecting powers.

So I was wondering if it had something to do with that.

Bay leaves?

And why did this come up in your kitchen?

We use bay leaves to season, and obviously we’re very familiar with that term.

And I think someone used it one day, and we just got to talking about it.

Okay, and this is your kitchen at home, or did you say you work in one?

I work in a kitchen, yes.

I see.

So garlic keeps away vampires and bay leaves keep away fairies, pixies, brownies?

Perhaps anything.

Again, I’ve read that the Romans used them just to protect from basically evil deeds or evil things or evil spirits.

Okay, so your theory is that at bay, to keep somebody or something at bay comes from bay leaves.

I’ve got to say, that’s a new one for me, but I could buy that almost if I didn’t know better.

You know, it’s interesting to me.

I always thought at bay for the longest time, I thought it was, you know, a ship in a bay or a boat in a bay that’s sort of protected by those embracing arms of the landmass around it and on either side.

Absolutely.

We had the same ideas.

We had a few ideas.

You did.

But none were very satisfactory to us.

Well, Mistress Martha, have you ever been hunting with a dog?

I have not been hunting with a dog.

You, Grant?

Yeah, yeah, several times.

I used to go rabbit hunting with my father’s beagle.

Oh, my.

Well, do tell.

Well, this gets to the heart of at bay, right?

Right.

It has to do with the baying of the hounds.

Yeah.

So when a dog bays at you, Brian, he keeps you away, right?

Because he’s barking at you.

He’s howling.

Or maybe he’s howling at a raccoon who’s been treed.

Or he’s howling that he’s discovered the rabbit that you’re going to try to shoot or what have you.

And so it’s about the baying of the hounds, keeping you or something or somebody away from somebody or something else.

Oh, okay. That’s very interesting.

Yeah, and it comes from French originally.

The verb in modern French is aboyer, A-B-O-Y-E-R, and ultimately made its way into English as to bay.

But my father’s beagle, what it would do when it would find a rabbit, it has this particular kind of a yelp,

Where if you don’t know what hunting dogs sound like, you think that they’re hurt.

You think that they’ve been wounded, hit by a car, or something dastardly has happened.

And it’s kind of your hair on the back of your neck stands up the first time you hear it.

I remember my mother just kind of really being incredibly uncomfortable

When she heard our dog start baying because she’d caught the scent or sight of a rabbit.

Yeah, so it’s really not a peaceful image at all, the original one.

In fact, you know, sometimes a dictionary definition can just conjure an image.

In the Oxford English Dictionary, it says that at bay is used in hunting phrases

And it’s relating to the position of a hunted animal when, unable to flee farther,

It turns, faces the hounds, and defends itself at close quarters.

I mean, I read that and I just, my heart kind of stopped.

I mean, that moment of fierce desperation is right there.

So we don’t think it has anything to do with bay leaves, although that is a great guess.

Thank you very much for the answer.

We’ll share it with the rest of the people here.

Well, what we want to know is if you’re going to share the food.

Is this Italian food, you said?

French, French Mediterranean and Italian, yes.

We’ll be there in Indianapolis, right?

That’s right.

It’s correct, yes.

Okay.

Thank you very much, Martha.

Thanks for calling, Brian.

Okay.

Bye-bye.

It sounded like he had to get back to his kitchen.

I think he had something burning on the stove.

Yeah, his sauces were spoiling.

Well, call us from your kitchen, and you can send food deliveries, too.

1-877-929-9673, or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Mark Miller listening on WFSU in Tallahassee.

Oh, hiya, Mark.

Hello, Mark.

Welcome to the show.

Well, thank you very much.

What may we do for you?

Growing up, you know, we learned the rule that, you know, you capitalize words, you know, in the beginning.

And what I’ve noticed over time that there seems like to be a proliferation of more words are showing up with capital letters in the middle of them.

Like proper names, sometimes, you know, women in particular, you know, use like Roxanne or Anne-Marie and capitalize the M, but it’s one word.

So there’s a lot of companies now that are using that capitalized letters in the middle of their names.

And I’ve always wondered what the term is for that, if there is a term.

Yeah, the older, more formal name for this is medial capitals,

But that’s kind of boring, right?

Medial, M-E-D-I-A-L, capitals.

And it’s exactly what you say.

It’s a word that has in it somewhere a capital letter that’s not at the beginning,

And the whole word itself isn’t all caps, so it’s a mix of lowercase and uppercase.

There’s some other names, too.

Some people call it camel case.

Have you heard that one?

Yeah.

In fact, I took a software course, and one of the things they called it Camelbacker, if you’re a Camelbacker.

Yeah, yeah.

As opposed to being an underscore when you separated your file names.

Oh, really?

Exactly right.

The phrase itself, Camelcase, comes from computer programming because some computer languages traditionally have not allowed spaces in the code in certain places.

And so in order to indicate that you’ve got two words, you just run them together and capitalize one rather than putting a space between them.

It’s called camel because when you look at the word, there’s a hump in the middle, just like a camel.

Some people call it studly caps, but that’s a little confusing because studly caps is also that kind of wildly inconsistent capitalization that you see

When people are goofing off online and kind of imitating people who don’t know how to type properly,

Where every third letter is capitalized.

Sort of like a ransom note.

Yeah, kind of a ransom note typing. It’s really irregular.

The camel case tends to be just like one letter in the middle is capitalized and not multiple letters.

And it tends to be that capital letter indicates the start of a new word.

That’s why it’s capitalized.

Where studly caps is just you’re just, it’s willy-nilly, whatever word.

FedEx does it and ExxonMobil.

Well, yeah, brand names are the innovators here.

A lot of brand names were doing this as early as the 1950s, maybe even earlier than that.

And it’s slowly grown over the years.

Certainly with the rise of the computer and certainly the personal computer and where computer programming became a thing that you could do in your home as a pastime rather than something you would do for hire for a company, a lot more people became conditioned and comfortable with that kind of capitalization.

So it’s in the 80s and the 90s and the 2000s, and here we are in the 2010s.

We’re finding a lot of people just do this as just a matter of course,

Even on Twitter and Facebook in order to cram words in there and to make it comprehensible.

People just take out the spaces and capitalize the letters instead.

Mark, thank you so much for calling with this interesting question.

Appreciate it. Thank you so much.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Call us with your camelbacks, 1-877-929-9673, or send your camel cases to words@waywordradio.org.

Martha, do you remember skee-ball?

Skee-ball?

Yeah, you go to the fair or the carnival and there’s this ramp.

You roll the ball up and it drops into these circles and maybe you get points if it goes down the hole.

No, I didn’t know what that was called.

And then the machine spits out the tickets and then you go get some piece of junk like a shot glass with a Led Zeppelin logo on the side.

You know what I’m talking about?

I want the giant panda.

Yeah, that kind of stuff.

Well, skee-ball is now a competitive sport.

There are skee-ball leagues in the country.

What?

And naturally, of course, they have a lingo and I’ve been getting into that recently.

I bet. I bet they have drinks that go along with it, too.

There’s a skee-ball league in Wilmington, North Carolina, and I’ve been reading their MySpace page,

And they’re using terms like hundos or hundies, and this is their abbreviation for 100 points.

It’s one of the hardest holes to hit on a skee-ball table.

It’s small and it’s placed difficultly, and if you drop your ball in that hole, you get 100 points.

Oh, wow. So if you do something successfully, you say, I hit the hundo?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. A hundy. A hundy or a hundo.

A hundy. I like that.

And find the 40 is a motto that they’re using, which means go for the easy 40-point shots instead of going for the really difficult 100-point shots because you can just accumulate a lot of 40s and ultimately win the game by the easy shots.

Oh, cool.

Well, there you go.

If you’re not any good at it, at least you’ll know the lingo, right?

Ski ball.

It’s great.

I want to league.

I want to join.

Do you have a pastime or hobby that’s got a cool lingo?

I would love to hear about it.

Give us a call, 1-877-929-9673, or email us at words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, we have A Way with Words.

Hi, Grant and Martha. This is Kurt Basham from Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Hi, Kurt.

Hi, Kurt. Welcome to the program.

Oh, thanks a lot.

What’s going on?

Well, I was searching online for some obscure or archaic insults.

Well, now, wait a minute. Why?

Everyone’s got to have a hobby, right?

You don’t get out much.

I did say this was Grand Rapids, right?

It’s Grand Rapids.

Are there a lot of people you need to insult in Grand Rapids, or what’s the deal?

Yeah, you don’t know the half of it.

Oh, really?

Oh, tell us.

Are you calling from prison?

Are you calling from the next town over?

Oh, yes.

It was not really Grand Rapids, and my name’s not really Kurt.

I had to disguise my voice and all that.

Anyway, what I found was what could be the motherlode of old-school name-calling,

And I was hoping I could share some of that with you.

Oh, is it safe for air?

Totally.

Okay, go for it.

Rock and roll.

All right, well, it’s a translation from a French novel called Gargantua and Pantagruel.

It was written a whole long number of years ago in the mid-1500s.

So not exactly beach reading maybe or anything like that.

But anyway, in it there’s a paragraph about the bread sellers and how they call everyone these really rude names.

And then he goes on to list like 40 examples.

And some of the choicer ones are scurvy sneaksbees and grouthead gnat snappers.

Oh, yeah.

Nice.

And possibly my favorite, slubberdegullion druggles.

What is a slubberdegullion drubble?

Well, you know, if you told somebody they were a celebrity gullion juggle,

They might not know what you mean, but they probably wouldn’t mistake it for a compliment.

No, not at all.

It turns out, I looked that one up, it’s a filthy, slobbering person.

Yeah, this particular passage that you’re quoting from is just a work of genius.

And you’re quoting the English translation from the French, right?

Yeah, right.

And so the work of the translator in order to anglicize all these French insults is really just phenomenal.

No matter which translation you get, it must be a great fun to do.

It’s a long passage.

He says, how does it go?

I’m reading here.

Prattling gabblers, licorice gluttons, freckled bitters, mangy rascals,

Drunken roisters, sly knaves, drowsy lawyers, slap-sauce fellows,

Lubberly louts, cozzening foxes, ruffian rogues.

He just goes on and on.

It’s fantastic.

And most of these are safe.

I’ve left a few out that we can’t actually say in the air.

Yeah, there’s a few.

There’s maybe three or four that are not really repeatable on the air.

But we can say turdy gut, right?

Why not?

You just did.

Amongst friends, why not?

Amongst friends.

Yeah, and the gaping changelings.

I don’t even know where to begin with that one.

Gaping changelings.

Yeah, I don’t know.

And Dottie Paul joltheads really sounded strange, too.

Dottie Pauls?

But we’ll put this whole passage, naughty words and all, online so everyone else can share in the joy.

These are the kind of things that probably most of them would get past internet filters as well, right?

I would think so.

Yeah, that’s a good point.

So, Kurt, do you feel that we’ve lost the fine art then of coming up with this?

Well, yeah.

I mean, I don’t think anything close to this exists today, you know.

So I was quite taken with some of these in here.

Well, we can make our own.

I mean, these seem to be non-seek coinages anyway.

The translator made these up for Rob L.A. Himself.

I think we’ve lost some of the poetry, though.

I mean, you just don’t have prattling gabblers anymore.

Well, on our show, you do.

No question.

Now there are three of us.

Welcome, Kurt.

Yes, thanks.

I’m proud to be a prattling gabbler.

Well, Kurt, are you looking for more?

Because, weirdly enough, recently for my birthday,

Somebody gave me a box of long-lost insults.

Oh, nice.

A box.

Yeah, they’re on all these little cards with these cute illustrations.

I’m not sure what the appeal of having a whole bunch of cards with insults on them is,

But it’s Forgotten English 3, Long Lost Insults.

And my favorites here are Fustilugs, which is an ill-natured person,

And Nyargle, N-Y-A-R-G-L-E, which means a foolish person fond of disrupting.

You like that?

Nyargle?

I’m going to try and use that in conversation today.

It sounds like a word J.K. Rowling used.

It does, doesn’t it?

Yeah.

Or a high school football team fighting nyargles.

Anyway, well, Kurt, thank you for bringing this to our attention.

We will definitely link to that list of interesting insults.

Thank you.

Thanks, Kurt.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

No parting insult for us?

You flutch calf lolly.

Now, wait a minute.

That one’s for Graham.

Three-eyed, yellow-bellied, lily-livered polecat.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Well, there’s a passage I want to share with you.

I won’t read the whole thing, but it’s from a 1916 book by George Albert Nicholson.

And he’s listing words in English that have E-O-N or O-N on the end of them.

And interestingly, some of them are insults, like celebrity gullion is in there.

And some of them are not insults, but they all sound like insults.

There’s something about that suffix.

So it’s Mergin, Kermudgin, Rampallion, Runyon, Flabbertigudgeon, Flabbergolion, Pansion, Rambolion, Golion, Callion, Huncheon, Hutterdon, Grullion, Dwallon, Dullion, Veteran, Lynchion, Muncheon, Nallion, Nampion, Punyon, Ramalishquan, Rampagion.

Don’t they all sound like insults?

They do.

Most of them are dialect English words that have since fallen out of use, but it’s a fun list.

I’ll share that one online as well.

1-877-929-9673 or send it all in email to words@waywordradio.org.

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That’s our show for this week.

If you didn’t get on the air today, you can leave us a message anytime.

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Stefanie Levine is our senior producer.

Our technical director and editor is Tim Felten.

We’ve had production help this week from Josette Hurdell and Jennifer Powell.

From Studio West in San Diego, I’m Martha Barnette.

And from San Francisco, I’m Grant Barrett.

Thanks to Howard Gellman for engineering our show from the studios of KQED Radio with assistance from Paul Lancour.

Ciao.

Bye-bye.