Spicy Jambalaya (episode #1501)

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

We recently spent a couple really nice days in Huntsville, Alabama,

And one of the things that happened there was that Martha and I went to Lee High School.

Some amazing kids and teachers, just real education happening there,

And it’s always nice to hang around with that kind of big energy in one room.

But one of the things that we asked the kids, what’s your slang?

What are the words that you use that you don’t think we’ll know because we’re old people and not from here?

And you know what?

They gave us 610 submissions.

610.

So this is about 100 kids.

It was fantastic.

I’m still going through the cards.

But one of the slang words that the kids at Lee High School in Huntsville, Alabama, put on there more than any other word is the word FORF, F-O-R-F.

And do you remember what that means?

I do.

It refers to a person who doesn’t do what he says he’s going to do.

Yeah, yeah.

A flake is often how it is.

They often described it to me when we were chatting.

They said it was a person who said they would go to a party but didn’t

Or that they would come somewhere with you and didn’t go.

Or a liar, just to plain out someone who tells falsehoods.

Sometimes you see it as a verb.

Sometimes you see it as a noun.

A forf is a flake.

To forf is to flake or to lie or to not execute your plans.

Not come through.

One of the cool things about this word FORF, F-O-R-F, is that it seems localized to Huntsville, maybe in the surrounding communities.

But I cannot find concrete evidence that the word exists anywhere else in Alabama or the American South or anywhere in the United States in this particular form.

It’s great.

Even the few mentions on Urban Dictionary, most of them mention Huntsville if they have any kind of location information at all.

So it dates to about 2009.

And one theory is that FORF, F-O-R-F, is a shortening of forfeit and perhaps comes from sports where to forfeit is like the worst kind of defeat because you didn’t even get a chance to try yourself completely on the field, right?

Another theory that one of the kids shared was that it means somebody who goes back and forth on their opinions or back and forth on what they say they want to do.

So Forth is a version of Forth.

And in fact, I did see one person on Twitter who wrote it as Forth, F-O-R-T-H.

In any case, cool slang coming out of Huntsville.

I loved it.

Thank you to the teachers and staff and students of Lee High School.

We had a wonderful time there.

And thanks to WLRH in Huntsville for inviting us.

We’d love to hear about the slang in your area.

So give us a call, 877-929-9673.

Or you can send it to us in email.

The address is words@waywordradio.org, or find us on Twitter.

We’re at Wayword.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Jared calling from Liberty, New York.

Hey, Jared, welcome.

What can we do for you?

I’m curious about the phrase, forget about it.

We’ve all heard it before.

It can be used in a number of ways, always with a Brooklyn accent.

And I’m just kind of curious about its origins.

I’ve always known it to be kind of a mob kind of thing.

Like in Donnie Brasco, they use it a lot in that movie.

I’m wondering if you have any more information about where it came from.

Forget about it.

And how are you spelling that?

I don’t even want to guess.

As a writer, it’s like Hanukkah.

There’s probably eight different ways to spell it.

It is totally like Hanukkah.

I think I have 11 different ways, but there are probably more.

Yeah.

So forget about it.

So you saw it in Donnie Brasco.

That’s a 1997 movie, right?

That’s right, yes.

And I know it was definitely used by 1999 when The Sopranos started.

It pops up in that series.

I don’t know if it popped up right away.

And then there’s a kind of forgettable movie called Mickey Blue Eyes from 1999 that also used it.

In any case, a lot of films have used this, and that’s where the popularization comes from.

But what is the origin?

You know, it’s this thing about a phrase where it catches on, and you’re not quite sure why,

But there’s usually a point of origin.

And for this one, what we do know for sure is that forget about it meaning, not necessarily to forget about it, but to meaning no question.

For example, you might say, like, the horse is going to win the race.

I’m going to be a rich man.

And everyone around you is like, forget about it, meaning, yeah, the horse is going to win the race.

Or it can mean no problem.

And somebody says to you, she’s like, I’ll give your mother a ride to the hospital, right?

And you’re like, forget about it, meaning I’ll take it.

I’ll take her to the hospital, no problem.

Jared, is that how you use it?

Yeah, so there’s a number of contexts that could be used in.

I think the one through line is that they’re all in a jovial sense.

It’s kind of dismissive, you know, like you can take the trash out, forget about it,

But always, always with a Brooklyn accent.

You have to use the Brooklyn accent or it just doesn’t seem to fit.

Or a New York metropolitan accent, maybe.

Sometimes it’s a New Jersey accent, right?

Yeah, okay. I’ll do that.

And you’re right. It’s jovial. There’s no menace in it.

Even if it does come out of the mouths of mobsters in movies.

So we’ve got some written uses of the full phrase as a sentence

Or a phrase not come smashed together as one word,

Going back easily into the middle part of the last century

Where people are using it exactly this way.

But by 1985, there’s a story in the Washington Post,

An interview with Martin Scorsese, the filmmaker,

Where they quote his funny laugh,

Because he apparently does like a barking laugh,

And they quote him saying, forget about it is one word.

And if he isn’t the source of popularization for forget about it showing up in films, portraying New Yorkers and New York, then I will eat my hat.

I just think that the man has had such an impact on filmmaking and indirectly through the films on culture.

He’s mentored so many people in the film business.

I think he’s got to get some credit as the guy who spread it around amongst screenwriters

And among people working in the entertainment business, you know,

Who brought genuine New York Street cred to Hollywood.

Well, that’s been very enlightening.

If it comes from Marty, that’s got to be the origin because everybody loves his films

And he’s the quintessential mob movie maker or a New York movie maker for that matter.

So thank you for that background information.

That’s very enlightening.

We appreciate it, Jared.

Forget about it.

Yeah, forget about it.

Can you say it as you’re welcome?

You can say it as you’re welcome, sort of?

It’s kind of a never mind sometimes.

Yeah, forget about it.

You say it, though, Jared, right?

It’s part of your language?

I do use it sometimes.

You know, I live about 100 miles northwest of New York, so I’m in that sphere.

But it’s a national thing because of those films.

So I just was, I imagined it did come from this area.

And I’ll definitely buy the Scorsese thing because it comes up in these movies too.

Yeah.

All right, cool.

That sounds good to me.

Call us again sometime.

Really appreciate it, Jared.

All right, thanks for that, Martha.

I appreciate you taking care of that thing we talked about.

Yeah, no worries.

Sure.

Sure.

Forget about it.

All right.

Take care now.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

877-929-9673.

I was once traveling around in Argentina, and my friends said, let’s go to the Montaña Rusa.

And I’m thinking, why would we go to a Russian mountain here in Argentina?

Do you know what that term is?

Yeah, yeah. It’s a roller coaster.

Yeah, it’s a roller coaster. Do you know why?

Because it looks like mountains? It goes up and down?

It looks like mountains, yeah.

But the earliest roller coasters were Russian winter sled rides.

Oh, I see.

That were specifically constructed out of, you know, hills of ice and then scaffolding.

And you would get on those and go down.

And then eventually people added wheels to those carts.

So you need snow and ice.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so in the Romance languages, the term for roller coaster literally means Russian mountain.

And what’s even more surprising is that the term in Russian for roller coaster is American mountains.

How interesting is that?

Yeah.

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

Hello.

Welcome to A Way with Words.

Hi.

It’s Pearl.

I’m calling from Massachusetts.

Well, we’re glad to have you on the show.

What can we do for you?

The other night at dinner, my mom was making something and she said, I’m using turmeric.

And I always heard it turmeric, so I said she was wrong.

And I was wondering what it actually is.

So clarify for us.

Your mom says?

Turmeric.

And you say?

Turmeric.

Turmeric.

Oh, interesting.

And what was she cooking?

I don’t know.

It was something with, like, kale and turmeric and chickpeas.

And I wonder where she learned turmeric.

Did you ask her about it?

I think she just grew up, like, talking with that word.

-huh.

And where did you learn your pronunciation?

I think probably from my dad and just, like, my friends and parents.

Okay.

Gotcha.

Well, Grant and I are both very interested in how your mom came up with that pronunciation

Because yours is among the correct ones.

Yeah, and there are many pronunciations for the word,

But turmeric isn’t one that’s recorded in any dictionary that I have.

That’s what I thought.

Yeah.

Pearl, are you saying the R there before the M when you say the word?

I’m not sure I’m hearing it.

No, I don’t think so.

I think I’m just saying turmeric.

Turmeric, because there is an R there that many people pronounce.

Yeah, like turmeric.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And if I’m looking at my dictionaries here,

I count at least six pronunciations of this word.

And are any of them turmeric?

No.

None of them are turmeric.

That’s why we were wondering about how your mom learned that pronunciation, because she’s putting the stress on the second syllable.

And we just don’t see that in any of the dictionaries.

Yeah, usually people say it with the stress on the very first syllable, like you’re saying it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, and sometimes that happens when people learn words from books rather than hearing them from other people, which it sounds like you did, hearing it from your dad and from your friends.

Yeah.

Or maybe cooking shows. Do you watch cooking shows?

Yeah, sometimes.

Oh, you do?

And I started asking people after my mom said that, how do you say it?

And all of them said turmeric.

Turmeric.

I like that.

A little field work.

I appreciate that.

You’re going out there and being a scientist to figure this out.

Yeah.

Well done, Pearl.

So how are you going to talk with your mom about this?

I think I’m just going to ask her where she has ever heard that.

There we go.

That’s the right attitude.

Instead of criticizing her, you’re going to look for more information.

I like that.

So, Pearl, thank you so much for calling.

It was good to talk with you.

Okay.

Thanks.

Thank you very much.

Take care.

Thanks.

Yeah, I think for a long time I didn’t realize that it has that R in the first syllable.

Yeah, T-U-R-M-E-R-I-C.

And so this is a spice that comes from India, right?

Yeah.

Interesting.

Yeah.

I wonder how that was with the kale and chickpeas.

Kale and chickpeas.

I’m envisioning a decent dish here, right?

Yeah, sounds good to me.

Maybe a nice lemonade on the side.

Have you had a dispute over pronunciation?

You can always call us about it, 877-929-9673,

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

Another slang term that I picked up from the kids at Lee High School in Huntsville, Alabama, is snack.

A snack is an attractive person.

Like, you look like a good snack.

And even better, I love what you are.

If you’re better than a snack, you look like a whole meal.

But snack is fairly widespread in the United States.

I just had never heard it because I’m in my 40s and out of touch with you slang.

So thanks, guys, for helping me keep up.

I really appreciate it.

We’d love to hear about the slang in your area.

You can give us a call at 877-929-9673 or send it to us in email.

That address is words@waywordradio.org.

This show is about language.

Examine through family, history, and culture.

Stay with us.

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

And we’re joined by our quiz guy, John Chaneski.

Hello, John.

Hi, Grant.

Hi, Martha.

Hi.

It’s a pleasure to be back once again.

You know, if I had a dime for every time we did a quiz based on rhymes, I’d have enough for a subway ride, maybe.

But instead of doing rhyme time, I thought we’d try something a little different.

This is called rhyme and time.

In the following answers, the rhyming words are separated by the word and.

For example, if I gave you the clue, this is a technique for narrowing the aspect ratio of a widescreen movie so that it’ll fit on your TV screen.

You might know that that technique is called pan and scan.

Oh, yes.

Yeah, they pan the movie.

They find where the action is, and that’s the part they use.

Pan and scan.

So it’s going to be blank and blank, and the two words will rhyme.

Here we go.

Speaking of techniques, it’s a technique for courting someone.

You take them out frequently for drinks and good food.

Wine and dine.

Yes, wine and dine.

It’s a pretty good technique.

You’re not likely to make many friends with an attitude like this one.

You’re a pessimist who focuses only on the negative aspects of any situation.

Groan and moan, moan and groan, moaner groaner.

That’s something, but I don’t think it’s something I’ve heard regularly.

Doom and gloom.

Yes, doom and gloom.

I would also accept gloom and doom.

Both of them are used.

Now, you won’t make many friends if you’re not there for them.

It may sound like an advantageous position to be in during a flood, but it really means you need help.

High and dry.

Yes, high and dry.

Very good.

A better way to live your life is to be honest and straightforward when dealing with people.

Be equitable.

Be a parallelogram.

Fair and square.

Yes.

I was going to say true and blue, but no.

Oh, that’s true and blue.

We can make that a new thing.

I like it.

This term is often used for an event where fans can encounter celebrities in person.

Now, it sounds a little redundant to me.

How can you do the first and not the second?

Meet and greet.

Meet and greet, yeah.

Meet someone and then not say hello at least.

I don’t know.

Yeah, exactly.

The internet age and spam emails, social media, fake news have given new life to a form of securities fraud.

It involves artificially inflating the price of a stock with misleading positive statements and then selling your overvalued shares.

Pump and dump.

Pump and dump, yes.

Very good.

Wall Street term.

It wasn’t until Jenny was pregnant with our firstborn that I heard this phrase,

The parents who use it are actually doing some good re-overpopulation.

One and done.

One and done.

Yes, exactly.

Whereas Jenny and I, we are two and through.

That’s something I came up with.

Now, while this rhyming term can describe several flags,

Including the flags of Syria, Honduras, Venezuela, Texas, even the U.S.,

It’s typically used as a nickname of the flag of the Confederate States.

Stars and bars.

Stars and bars.

Lots of flags of stars and bars, but that’s the stars and bars.

Finally, this phrase described what my genes have been through.

In some places, they’re so thin you can almost read through them.

In others, you can read through them.

Wear and tear.

Wear and tear, yes.

And on that note, I’ve got to go buy some new genes.

Okay.

You guys were great.

Take care.

Thanks, John.

We really appreciate it.

Thank you.

We’ll talk to you next week.

Bye-bye.

See you then.

Bye-bye.

And if you’d like to talk with us about any aspect of language whatsoever, call us 877-929-9673 or send your comments and email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Peg O’Day-Lippert in Papillion, Nebraska.

Hi, Peg. Welcome to the show.

Thank you.

What can we do for you, Peg?

Well, I recently read all 12 volumes of Winston Graham’s The Poldark series,

And these stories took place in Cornwall, England, between 1783 and 1818.

And they had an interesting phrase.

Upon meeting friends or acquaintances, instead of like we might say,

Oh, how are you? You look great.

They would say, you’re looking brave.

I was just so fascinated by this that I wonder what the origin and, you know, true meaning of that phrase is.

The word brave has been used in centuries past to mean not only courageous, but finely dressed or looking good or handsome or splendid.

Oh, interesting. Or healthy.

Yeah.

Well, that would fit then to look healthy and well-dressed both.

I guess that would be a double brave, wouldn’t it?

Yeah, back in the 16th century, there was a reference to the lilies which are braver than Solomon,

Which I just love because it’s not as if the flowers are really courageous.

They’re more finely dressed than Solomon himself.

Yeah, one of the Scots dictionaries, the Dictionary of the Scots Language,

Particularly the part of it which is before 1700, suggests that this comes from the Italian bravo,

Which besides meaning brave also could mean excellent.

So we’re looking at something that’s at least 500 years old and borrowed from one European language into another one.

So you’re looking excellent. I like that.

Yeah, the Scots will often do it without the V sound. It’s more like braw.

Yes, B-R-A-W.

B-R-A-W.

And a few other spellings are more like sometimes like an F instead of a V, but yeah.

Interesting. Well, thank you so much.

That is an enhanced view of what I interpreted to mean.

I like it.

Thank you.

Peg, thank you so much for calling.

Thank you.

All right.

Take care.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

By the way, the Dictionary of the Scots Language is available free online.

877-929-9673.

Hello.

Welcome to A Way with Words.

This is Aya from Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Aya, welcome to the show.

How can we help you?

Well, the two of you have said before on the show that you’re just horrible examples of your own regional dialect on account of you studying language and hearing new phrases and trying them out and all that.

So I want to talk to you about that and how it happened.

Okay, yeah, sure.

Okay.

I went to college in New England.

When you get that many young people with different backgrounds together, like Connecticut, Boston, New York, California, the South, other countries and all that,

They start talking about their own regional dialects of English, you know, Rotary, Roundabout, Traffic Circle.

Oh, you call it pop? I call it soda.

Time and again, I would see people get sort of lost in these conversations.

They’d be listening to people argue about, like, caramel versus caramel.

And then they would look up, confused, and say, wait, what do I say?

This happened to me once with the phrase by accident and on accident, and I simply never got it back.

Ever since then, I feel uncomfortable using either turn of phrase.

I don’t know.

They feel like I’m speaking a different language, whether I use either one of them.

What did you originally say?

I think after a while, I figured out by accident was my original way of saying it.

But it just felt like I was using someone else’s regional dialect.

Like, oh, I heard someone else say and go, oh, I’ll try that.

Does this kind of thing sound familiar to you?

Do you have any advice for me?

Yeah, it’s like clothes that don’t quite fit, right?

In my house, I do a lot of the laundry, and my son is growing so fast that some of his shirts, his T-shirts, for example, are very similar in size to my wife’s T-shirts because he wears them a little large.

And so I frequently accidentally put his shirts in her pile, and they both think it’s a joke and that I’m funny for not figuring this out.

But the language stuff reminds me completely of that.

They both know in their hearts that shirt isn’t right for whoever.

They just know.

They can just look at it, and I have to look.

I don’t know. The tag’s been missing for years.

I don’t know who shit this is, but I get what you’re saying.

The solution I ended up doing, kind of, is I just sort of gave up on both

And came up with my own third thing.

I’ve been saying a for accident ever since.

Oh, really?

Is it a joke? Does everyone get that you’re kind of teasing a little bit?

Kind of. I just started putting just any and all prepositions

Instead of those things, like a for accident, above or below accident.

I recently started doing through accidents.

That one sort of makes sense to me.

You might just try the adverb accidentally.

I was going to say.

But I get the goof is fun, too.

Goofing around with the prepositions in that way is fun.

Yeah, we should probably say that there is a generational divide between people who say on accident and by accident.

If you’re born before 1990 or so, you tend to say by accident.

But there’s a whole younger generation coming up that says on accident,

Maybe a confusion with on purpose.

I still say by accident.

On accident bothers me less and less.

Yeah, I want to go back to that notion that it so bothers you,

You’re not sure which is native to you.

And I would argue that they are now both native to you.

And maybe it’s a question of choice rather than a question of fit,

If that makes sense.

When we look at what happens to the language of people as they get older, in every decade that’s been measured by linguists all the way up into the 90s, people do adjust their own language to suit the circumstances around them.

And those adjustments are often permanent.

And it’s not just vocabulary, but can be all parts of the language, including syntax.

And so it is normal for you to adopt the language of the people around you and is normal for it to have a transition phase where at first it feels strange and then it feels normal.

And then you wonder why you ever were bothered by it.

And then after that, you’ll forget that you ever learned it and won’t remember the day that you learned it.

Sometimes with language, you just have to gut it out and not overthink it.

Aya, thank you so much for your call.

We really appreciate it.

There’s a lot to chew on here.

All right.

Thank you.

All right.

Take care.

Thanks.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

So you’re changing language is a reflection of what’s happening inside of you as well as around you.

It’s a normal thing.

Yeah, that’s a cool thing to think about.

I guess I tend to celebrate that just being at the long, long, long, long salad bar, the linguistic salad bar.

And I just want something from every little…

I have seen you quiz cab drivers and other people.

You were right there with me.

Sometimes when we do this show, I’m like, Martha, you cannot stay on the phone with this Brazilian person another minute longer.

They are not going to tell you everything about Brazilian Portuguese that you want to know in the time that we have.

But it’s the sexiest language on the planet.

877-929-9673.

Nat flat. Do you know what a nat flat is? G-N-A-T flat?

A nat flat? Is that when you sunbathe in the nude and you give them a big target of your behind?

I don’t know.

A nat flat is a really tiny apartment in a place like Hong Kong, which has the world’s worst housing costs.

They’re also called nano flats.

Oh, I’ve heard that one.

Yeah, nano flats and nat flats because they’re so tiny.

And those are about half the size of what we call in this country micro units.

Wow, that’s small.

When you spend like $300,000 for a studio apartment in the middle of Miami Beach that’s the size of two parking spaces.

And that flat is about half that size.

Like a double-wide refrigerator size, right?

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

My name is Gary Prober from Santa Maria, California.

Welcome to the show, Gary.

What can we do for you?

Well, I’m hoping you’ll settle an argument.

I’ve been having with a real good friend of mine.

His name’s Jim.

And we’ve been friends for over 40 years, and we do a lot together.

But we like to argue.

About a year ago, he came back from South Carolina,

And he was telling me that he had this wonderful meal.

Had the best jambalaya he had ever had. And I thought, well, okay, I’ll yank his chain a little

Bit. And I asked him if that was anything like a jambalaya. And we’ve been going at it ever since.

Now, my side, my opinion is based on two premises. One is the way it’s spelled.

And I look at it, and I see jamba.

And I don’t see jumbo.

I see jambalaya.

And the other thing is I’m an amateur harmonica player, and I play with some guys,

And we play some Hank Williams tunes.

And when I hear Hank sing jambalaya, I hear jamba.

Jambalaya, not jambalaya.

So Jim won’t give up.

I won’t give up.

And so, oh, a while later, I’m in a southern-themed restaurant, and I see Jambalaya on the menu.

I ask the wait person, hey, how do you pronounce it?

They say Jambalaya, which I like.

I ask them if I can videotape them, send it to Jim.

Well, pretty soon he’s sending me multiple videotapes of multiple wait persons pronouncing it Jambalaya.

And when we’re with a group, we ask people how they pronounce it.

Unfortunately, based on head count, I think I’m losing that battle.

Yeah.

All right.

Well, here’s a couple of things.

First, I think your friend is right.

Most people do say jambalaya.

Jambalaya is incredibly rare.

And even when people do say jambalaya, it’s a super short A.

It’s jambalaya like that.

That sounded kind of like a schwa, didn’t it?

But it wasn’t.

Jambalaya.

The other thing is, all the dictionaries I checked except for one include only the jambalaya pronunciation.

So you can’t go by spelling.

Particularly for a word like that, which is a dialect or probably has foreign origins,

The spelling is only an approximation.

It’s only a rough guide of pronunciation.

You have to go by tradition and culture.

And food words in particular have this problem.

You’ve got to pronounce it the way other people pronounce it.

And that said, if you go to cooking shows on YouTube and look up recipes for jambalaya or jambalaya,

You will find a staggering probably 99 out of 100 people say jambalaya.

And we’re talking cooks and chefs at all levels.

You know, people who run restaurant chains versus the home chef who’s trying to make a name for themselves.

I’ve been losing that battle.

Should we all lose in such a nice way to have a nice plate of Creole food, right?

Yeah.

We even had a dinner party here, and my wife made up a nice big batch of rice and sausage and shrimp.

You’re not going to say it.

And to sidestep the argument, she called it jimbolaya.

That was going to be my suggestion.

The thing is, there are people who say it like you say it, but you’re vastly outnumbered.

And the people who are in the food business that I know and all of the major dictionaries of English, the ones that I think matter for U.S. Pronunciation, all record jambalaya as the standard pronunciation.

However.

However.

However.

There’s always a however.

I mean, we’re talking.

Please give me a however.

Well, it’s a little however, but I’ve heard so many different versions of the song, the really popular song.

And I could swear that people like Emmylou Harris say jambalaya.

They might.

They might say it.

I’m not 100% sure about that, but there’s so many different versions of that Hank Williams song.

Here’s the thing.

I think you guys need to have that dinner, and he pays 25%, and you pay 75%,

Because that’s about the level that you each write.

Okay, I’ll go with that.

Because both pronunciations exist.

I have to find something else now to argue about, though.

I don’t think you’re going to have much of a problem with that, Gary, from what I hear.

I think your wife’s renaming strategy was clever.

Yes.

However, there is a dish called Hopping Johnny, which that word, that name is also sometimes been applied to jambalaya.

So there’s numerous dishes that take the name Hopping Johnny.

So maybe you just call it Hopping Johnny and be done with it.

Hopping John, yeah.

Well, I thank you for settling it.

I think we can let it go to rest.

Okay.

Well, Gary, thanks.

Call us again sometime.

Let us know about future fights.

All right.

Okay.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Take care.

Enjoy that meal.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

877-929-9673.

As we’ve discussed before, a portmanteau word is a word that combines two other words, like smog, for example.

Smoke and fog.

Smoke and fog.

And more recently, we’ve been learning a lot about vog.

Video smog? I don’t know.

Video fog. Yeah, too many videos.

Too many cat videos. What’s the V? I don’t remember

What the V is. It’s volcano.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, it’s a form of

Air pollution. The Hawaii volcano

Or volcanic eruption. Yeah, it’s a kind of air

Pollution that occurs when sulfur

Dioxide and other gases and particles

Emitted by interrupting volcano

React with oxygen.

Vogue. I think I defeated him. I think

He was a final boss in a video game I played.

Vogue. Vogue.

877-929-9673.

Why we say what we say and how we say it.

Stay tuned for more.

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

I came across a lovely poem that I wanted to share with you.

It’s called Instructions on Not Giving Up by Ada Limon.

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out of the crabapple tree,

More than the neighbor’s almost obscene display of cherry limbs

Shoving their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate sky of spring rains,

It’s the greening of the trees that really gets to me.

When all the shock of white and taffy,

The world’s baubles and trinkets,

Leave the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,

The leaves come.

Patient, plodding, a green skin growing over whatever winter did to us.

A return to the strange idea of continuous living despite the mess of us.

The hurt, the empty.

Fine then, I’ll take it, the tree seems to say.

A new slick leaf, unfurling like a fist to an open palm.

I’ll take it all.

That was beautiful, Martha.

Can you tell us the name of the poem again?

It’s Instructions on Not Giving Up by Ada Limon.

Thank you very much.

If you’ve got a poem you’d like to share with us so that we can share it with everyone else,

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

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, I’m Rachel calling from San Diego.

Hi, Rachel.

Hi, Rachel.

What can we do for you?

Yeah, so recently me and my husband were playing a very dorky game of who could name more onomatopoeias.

He would go and I would go.

And after quite a while, we were running out, and I offered the word chi-hoo, which we lived in Hawaii for a long time.

And you say it’s kind of similar to like yippee or yahoo when you’re jumping like off a waterfall or excited about something.

And he argued that wasn’t an onomatopoeia, but I argued that it was because it’s just the sound that you make when you’re excited.

Chi-hoo.

So I wanted your take on who was right.

Chi-hoo?

Yes.

How would you spell that?

I believe it’s C-H-E-E-Y-O-O.

So I don’t know how you spell it because you would say like, oh, give them a good shee-hoo at like a basketball game or if you’re jumping off a waterfall.

And I’m really butchering it because you kind of shout it and you go, shee-hoo really loudly.

Yeah, that’s right.

There are a bunch of different ways to spell it.

So you were sitting around playing a game about onomatopoeia.

It sounds like one of our listeners.

Let me ask you, what other words did you come up with that fit into your category of onomatopoeia?

A lot of animal sounds, obviously.

Right, sure, like oink or moo.

Woof.

Woof, good.

And P-R-U drip, which I wasn’t really sure about that one.

Drip?

Yeah.

Maybe drip.

Maybe plop is a better one if we’re going to do liquids.

Yeah.

Yeah, so onomatopoeia is a word that the sounds of the word resemble the sound that it refers to, right?

Mm—

Okay.

And your question is, chi-hoo!

Is that?

I can’t even do it.

Yeah.

It’s a little like the rebel yell or what?

I think Chewy and Han do it in one of the Star Wars movies.

Look up chi-hoo on YouTube.

There are a lot of fantastic examples.

C-H-I-H-O-O is the common spelling that I see.

I think the answer is yes, it is an onomatopoeic word.

That the word spelled C-H-I-H-O-O is an onomatopoeia for the sounds that are made.

And I will tell you why.

Because it’s not originally Hawaiian.

And there are Samoan words for this cry that are nothing like, really, not very much like chi-hu at all.

So it’s sometimes called the fa’amu, F-A apostrophe A-M-U.

Or it’s also known as the Ususu or the Sisusu.

And so this is a traditional Samoan war cry,

And it is kind of spread throughout the Pacific Island cultures.

Some people might think it sounds a little bit like some parts of the haka that they do in New Zealand.

Yeah, exactly.

And then when it arrived in Hawaii, it’s gone through a little bit of a popularization

And I would say a slight corruption.

It is, like you said, nowadays in Hawaii, it’s just kind of a shout of exuberance,

And it’s not necessarily about I’m about to do something brave

Or I’m about to go into battle or anything like that.

So in any case, it’s got its own name in Samoan culture, in the Samoan language,

And the chihu isn’t very much like that.

It really does resemble the sounds of the cry.

Exactly. Yay, I’m so excited. I won.

So it’s a word for the cry itself, like yahoo or yippee.

That’s right, exactly.

Rather than the kind of onomatopoeia like cuckoo or sizzle or buzz.

Well, I would say yahoo and yippee are onomatopoeic.

Well, yeah, that’s what I’m saying is for the word itself rather than something like sizzle or buzz.

Right.

It’s instead of a name like you might say he cried.

Well, cry doesn’t sound anything like crying, right?

You might say he whined.

Whine sounds a little bit like actual the act of whining.

So, yeah, I would call it onomatopoeia.

And thank you for bringing this to my attention.

I assume many of our listeners have never heard the Chihu cry either.

It is amazing.

It immediately fills you with energy, doesn’t it?

Yes.

Yeah, exactly.

So do you jump off lots of waterfalls?

I’m usually the person filming the people jumping off the waterfalls.

You can tell by my not very loud she-hoo.

Playing on a lot of PIA games on the sidelines.

Well, yeah, yeah.

You definitely sound like an A Way with Words listener if you’re doing that.

Hey, thanks a lot for calling.

Thank you so much.

I appreciate it.

Take care now.

Bye, Rachel.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Well, share your nerdy word games with us.

The number is 877-929-9673 or send it to us an email.

That address is words@waywordradio.org.

There’s a South African term that’s spelled S-P-O-O-K-A-S-E-M, and it’s pronounced Spuck-awesome.

Spook awesome.

And it means ghost breath, literally.

But it’s a term for cotton candy.

Oh, nice.

Isn’t that cool?

I always liked fairy floss as the Britishism for it.

Yes, fairy floss and candy floss.

So I think I can hear the roots of that word, spoke awesome, like awesome as an asthmatic having to do with your breath, maybe.

But the spook is clearly in there, meaning a ghost.

Yeah, spook awesome.

Spook awesome.

Nice, very good.

Call us.

We want to talk with you about language.

877-929-9673 or send us an email.

The address is words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello.

Hi, who’s this?

This is Cindy Meyer and I live in Virginia Beach, Virginia.

Well, welcome to the show, Cindy.

How can we help you?

Well, the words have to do with my mother who grew up in Asbury Park, New Jersey.

And she was a really social person, liked to do a lot of things.

But she was given a five-year diary while she was in high school,

And she wrote everything that went on.

So to make a long story short, one of the entries says,

Donnie asked me to a dance with him.

I must have been crazy.

I said no.

He felt terrible, so did I the rest of the day.

Tom asked me if I were trying to high-hat him.

Well, I’ve transcribed this, and I went by a million times,

And I thought I’d look it up.

So I found the dictionary meeting, but I had never heard that phrase

And just wondered where that phrase came from.

Trying to high-hat him.

Hat him.

What’s your sense of that?

Well, the definition is to snub or treat condescendingly,

Which seems kind of harsh when somebody’s just asking you to a dance and you say no.

So I had never heard it and just curious about it.

Yeah, that’s the meaning.

I would use, there are softer forms of hi-hat just to give someone the cold shoulder or not give them the time of day or to refuse an invitation.

It pops up in the early 1920s kind of all at once.

There’s a suggestion in at least a couple of the dictionaries, the slang dictionaries, that it might have a theatrical connection.

One of them says that it refers to in theater an affected, supercilious, or condescending person.

But in any case, it comes up and it comes from the idea that if you are hi-hating someone, you might be acting like a person wearing a hi-hat, meaning a top hat, who might be snobby towards people that they considered inferior to them.

So it’s really this calling out this difference that might be a class difference or might be an economic difference or something along those lines.

And the time frame would have been 1936.

Yeah, that would be perfectly appropriate.

Yeah, and it’s very American.

I don’t know that it ever made it across to the United Kingdom.

But there are uses of it throughout the 1920s, 1930s.

It kind of fades after World War II.

And it still shows up in historical fiction in places where people try to resurrect old language.

Cindy, that must be a real treasure trove, a five-year diary.

Did she write the whole time?

She wrote the whole time, and I’ve transcribed the whole thing.

But what she did in a nutshell is like for the first day, you have like four lines.

So she would cram everything into it, which made it hard reading.

Later on, she realized that she could take a day’s activity and let it run for like a month or so.

So it was easier to transcribe.

So what I also did is I edited, I gave footnotes and added photos and just kind of jazzed it up a little.

So it was pretty fascinating.

Well, that’s super cool.

Thank you for sharing that family and treasure with us.

And thanks for calling, Cindy.

We really appreciate it.

Okay. Thank you very much.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

You know what’s extraordinary?

We talked earlier in this show about the slang that we picked up from the great kids at Lee High School in Huntsville, Alabama, right?

Yeah.

One of the terms that I picked up was to cap someone.

And it doesn’t mean to kill or to shoot.

You talk about capping someone or high capping someone.

Is this sounding familiar?

You talk about being braggy, putting on airs, flossing as the old slang has it, or fronting as the old slang has it, or exaggerating about yourself.

Or bragging, you might say no cap, meaning no lie.

And so all of these versions of high capping, high cap, two cap, cap,

And again, it’s not the cap to shoot someone with a gun.

They, I believe, are directly connected to hi-hat.

Something you wear on your head.

Yeah, something you wear on your head that kind of shows off your personality

And perhaps that you have money or that you have the right fashionable cap for the season,

The one that everyone wants from the right team or the right hip-hop artist or that sort of thing.

How cool is that?

Yeah, right?

And just the echoes across the, that’s almost 100 years are amazing.

From high school to high school.

Yeah, high hat in the 1920s to high capping or to capping in the 20-teens.

Oh, that’s wild.

Yeah.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Oh, hi.

This is Toni.

I’m from San Diego, California.

Hi, Toni.

Welcome.

What can we do for you?

Well, I have two very good friends of mine, and one is from New Jersey,

And the other one is born and raised here in San Diego, California.

And they use a term, wooder, for the word water.

I’ve always wondered where this came from,

And since they’re from two different parts of the country, it just wasn’t lining up.

Can you guys help me with that?

Yes, we absolutely can.

Although I’m utterly mystified about the San Diegan who says, who says it’s wooder.

Am I getting that right?

Wooder?

It’s wooder.

It’s like wood, W-O-O-D, and then E-R.

Yeah.

The New Jersey one makes perfect sense.

It’s part of the country, eastern Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, maybe, parts of southern New Jersey, where they do say wooder.

It’s this long-time established pronunciation.

I’ve got records of it going back to at least the 60s, probably earlier than that.

But linguists didn’t really start to do these atlases in full until the middle of the last century.

In any case, so Wooter makes sense.

I can only guess that the San Diegan has some kind of family connection or school connection to that part of the country,

And that’s the reason they say it, because it is not common for people in California to say Wooter instead of water or any of the other pronunciations.

By the way, just so you know, there are about 15 pronunciations of the word water in this country.

Seriously, I kid you not.

It depends on your dialect and depends on your location and a few other factors.

But yeah, about 15.

Well, thank good for context so I know what they’re wanting.

Yeah.

Usually it’s not an issue.

And most of the pronunciations just kind of slip by unremarked upon.

But there’s a thing that happens.

First, we take the prestige language of the people around us.

Anybody who’s got power or that we admire or somehow influences our life, we tend to adopt their speech habits.

And then in a region, we often have what’s called leveling, where everyone who speaks a little differently kind of modifies their speech so that everyone sounds a little more like each other.

We do this for group cohesion and a bunch of other factors.

In any case, so that’s why you can end up with something like people in southern New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania saying wooder instead of water.

And so they knowingly say it, even though the New Jerseyan is no longer in New Jersey, he’s here in San Diego, he will still continue and get ribbing from it.

Everyone, oh, wooder, what’s that?

Do you say hooder?

Do you say footer?

And he’ll still say wooder.

Yeah, and we hang on to our stuff.

Sometimes we’re proud of it.

It’s who we are.

It’s a form of identity.

Sometimes we can’t shake it, and so we just own it because we can’t really get rid of it.

We don’t know how to adopt the other pronunciation that people expect from us.

Yeah, we don’t even hear ourselves.

Yeah, sometimes we, yeah.

Sometimes I love that about sociolinguistics research.

When you say to someone, you say wooder, and they’re like, no, I don’t.

No, I don’t.

I say wooder, and you’re like, no, you do, and you show them the tape,

Like the audio file where you can see the waveforms,

And they’re like, yeah, no, that’s not wooder, and I’m like, no, that’s wooder.

So you’re saying that it came from some sort of model

That we would want to pronounce these words.

Are they saying it in kingdoms?

Are they saying it in England, you know, the East Coast?

Where is Wood?

For this particular pronunciation, I don’t have a strong connection to any particular part of the United Kingdom.

However, there are settlement patterns that heavily influence how we speak in this country,

Particularly on the East Coast where the settlement histories are older.

And that part of the country has a lot of Scots-Irish background.

But that’s not to say this is exactly where it came from.

Sometimes these things just occur.

People admire them or like them or adopt the pronunciations just for other reasons, and they build and grow.

And like I said, 15 pronunciations of this word around the country.

If you know where people say water a certain way, you can often narrow their geographic origins down very precisely.

Thank you for the call.

If you find out anything more about this, San Diego, who says, water for water, send us a line, all right?

I sure will.

Thanks, you guys so much.

Love this show.

Thank you.

Take care now.

We’ll see you sometime in San Diego, okay?

Bye-bye.

Sounds good.

Bye-bye.

All right.

Bye-bye.

By the way, if you are a San Diegan who says wooder for water and you’re from here, let us know.

I need more data on this.

877-929-9673.

Or email words@waywordradio.org.

Here’s a term that was new to me, whisker fatigue.

Do you know this term, whisker fatigue?

It’s the reason I grew my beard.

I got tired of shaving.

Whisker fatigue has to do with cats and the fact that their whiskers, or vibrisi, as they’re called, are very, very sensitive.

As you know, they can detect all kinds of things.

And if they have a bowl that has sides that are too steep and it bothers their whiskers, they can get what is called whisker fatigue.

And it makes them irritable around their food.

And so if your cat is sort of reluctant to get to the food and the bowl.

Put it on a plate instead.

Yes.

Or a smaller, yeah, a less deep dish.

You know, this is not really related.

There is a trick that people who pickpocket use when they want to take your watch or something on your hand.

They pull your whiskers?

They squeeze your wrist over the watch where your wristband is, right?

Yeah.

So you feel this extra pressure.

Like they might grab your arm and pretend to be stopping you from going into traffic or grab your arm as a way to get your attention and ask for directions.

But they squeeze so hard that when they let up their hands, it still feels like they’re squeezing.

They can take off the watch.

And because you still feel the echo of their squeezing,

You think your watch is still on your hand.

Oh, my gosh.

It’s like phantom watch.

Yeah, phantom watch.

Exactly.

Anyway, the whiskers remind me of that.

Just this too much stimulus gives you like bad feedback.

Yeah.

Wow.

Interesting.

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Want more A Way with Words?

Listen to years of past episodes at waywordradio.org or find the show in any podcast app or on iTunes.

Our toll-free line is always open, so leave us a message at 877-929-9673 and we’ll take a listen.

We’d love to get your messages at words@waywordradio.org or hit us up on Twitter @wayword and look for us on Facebook.

This program would not be possible without you.

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

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

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

In New York, we thank quiz guy John Chaneski, and that master of keeping it real, Paul Ruist at Argo Studios.

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

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

And I’m Grant Barrett.

So long.

Bye-bye.

Thank you.