Springtime Twitterpation (episode #1394)

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. Grant, I know you love learning new words as much as I do.

I love that look on your face when you hear one you’ve never heard before. Your head kind of cocks like a little dog.

Huh?

Exactly. And you remember the last time that you and I were expert spellers in a spelling bee, in an adult spelling bee?

We learned some new ones that we’ve never heard.

Every time you’d think you know a lot about language, we get accused of knowing a lot about language.

Yep.

Ooh.

Yep.

These were completely new to us.

One of them, remember, was Langlauf.

I didn’t know that one.

I had no idea.

I vaguely guessed it was German, but…

I thought I meant to laugh a long time or something.

But no, no.

It’s spelled L-A-N-G-L-A-U-F, and it means cross-country skiing.

Just any kind of cross-country skiing or a particular kind?

Langlauf.

Langlauf kind.

Okay, there we go.

Very good.

And then there was Ostroform.

Remember Ostroform?

Something related to some kind of shellfish, the shape of a shellfish of some kind.

Shape of an oyster.

Oyster, there we go.

Yep, can you spell it?

No.

O-S-T-R-E-I-F-O-R-M.

See, tricky in the middle.

I know.

This is where they get you.

This is where they get you.

And we’ve participated in these adult spelling bees a few times now.

And they’re nerve-wracking no matter how old you are.

I know, everybody starts the evening jokey and kind of laughing.

We’re all in this together, but by the end it is tense.

And the teams that drop, they’re no slackers.

The journalists kind of fall out of it.

The professional copy editors are done.

The people who write for a living, they’re all out.

And you’ll be left with like the marketing department for a bank to be the winners.

And everyone else is like, oh, next year.

Yeah, there’s that awful pregnant silence, you know, when you’re waiting for the next letter.

But I do love the opportunity to learn new words.

And this is what we do on the show.

We’re part of it anyway.

It is.

We want to talk about all kinds of words on this show.

So call us, 877-929-9673, or send your stories about language to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Tina Marie calling from sunny San Diego.

How are you?

Well, hello, San Diegan.

Welcome to the show.

What can we do for you?

So as long as I can remember, going back as far as maybe my high school years, and I’m not going to tell you when I was born, but I graduated sometime in the 80s, I’ve always been interested in this word that I’ve only heard one time, and that was in the movie Bambi, and the word is twitterpated. And I always used to describe that feeling of in between a crush and full-blown love, and it kind of relates to the work I do. So I thought, gosh, I would love to find out where the word came from. So the word is twitterpated.

Twitterpated, and it relates to the work you do?

Are you in the love business?

I am in the love business.

You’re like a matchmaker, right?

I am a relationship and dating coach for women.

So when I’m coaching them a lot, you know, meeting someone like, you know, higher quality people and falling in love, I kind of use that word to describe that space that they’re in.

And sometimes people are like, well, where does that word come from?

So I thought, well, you guys are the wordsmiths.

You’ll be able to tell us.

Yeah, the first time that we see Twitterpated seems to be in that movie Bambi, where the wise old Al, maybe you remember this part.

The wise old owl is talking about young love in springtime.

Yes, that’s my favorite part of the movie.

That’s why I’m like, so that’s the first time the word is actually used in our.

Yeah, yeah.

The owl says you begin to get weak in the knees, your head’s in a whirl, and you feel light as a feather.

And before you know it, you’re walking on air.

And the other little animals go, gosh, that’s awful.

That sounds terrible because they’ve never heard of this before.

And then all of a sudden they all fall in love.

Remember that part?

So Twitter-pated, we can break this word down.

It’s got some meaning stored in there, right?

Yeah.

For a long time, pate has meant head.

Like if you’re addle-pated.

Oh, bald-pate you’ll find sometimes in kind of fancy speech.

Yeah, bald-pate.

Yeah, yeah.

But the Twitter part, it sounds sort of goofy and giddy, doesn’t it?

It sure does.

Twitter-pated.

Yeah, it means besotted, right?

Yeah.

To be a Twitter.

Yeah.

You might find that word being used.

Exactly.

It has nothing to do with the online short messaging service.

No, no, nothing.

I was just wondering about that.

Like, wait a minute.

Well, no, the Twitter that we’re talking about goes back to the 1600s.

And it kind of refers to, I believe, to the kind of nutty craziness of twittering birds in the springtime.

Yeah, goofy and giddy.

And Twitter-pated is sort of only the way that Walt Disney can do, you know, in a cartoon with a little fluttering and the music.

And the owl, he’s kind of bombastic.

He uses big words and he pretends to be the big authority on everything, right?

Yes.

And so he throws these words around, and all the innocent, wide-eyed animals look at him in awe because he seems to be so learned.

In fact, he’s making a lot of it up as he goes.

Yeah.

But it’s a great word.

That’s all he would love.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, you can totally relate to it.

You must have Twitter-pated clients all the time.

Well, I hope so.

I mean, I just love the word.

I love the way it feels when you say it.

And it’s just so descriptive.

So I’m surprised.

I’m happy to hear that it actually goes back even further.

Well, the Twitter part does.

Yeah, the Twitter part.

Twitter-pated.

The little bit of the paid part, but it put together in 1942 in that Disney movie.

That is so cool.

Well, Tina Marie, thanks for calling today.

Good luck with the dating world out there.

Thank you.

Good luck, and I appreciate so much you’re taking my call.

Our pleasure.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Twitter-pated.

Twitter-pated.

You know, even if you didn’t know the etymology of the word, it makes sense, right?

And he does it.

You just did it.

You did what the owl does in the movie.

He flaps his little wings.

Yeah.

I also like how they have the little characters thumper and flower the skunk and Bambi.

They’re all horrified by this notion.

You know, what in the world?

Boy, there’s a lot of places we could go with the horrifying things that later become normal.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi, guys.

This is Kyle calling from Denton, Texas at the University of North Texas.

Hello, Kyle.

Hi, Kyle.

What’s up?

So recently I went to England to visit someone that I was dating at the time.

And at tea time, they asked what type of tea I would like.

And I said, I would love some herbal tea.

And they all kind of laughed and they said, don’t you mean herbal?

And I said, no, herbal.

And they’re like, well, there’s an H in front of it.

Why wouldn’t you pronounce the H?

And I was completely baffled and I had no answer for them.

And I knew someone that I could call.

So that’s why I called you guys.

So did you ask them if they were being honest?

Yes.

But that would make sense because we don’t have the H there either.

Well, here’s the story, and it’s pretty simple.

I think you can memorize this for the next time you go to England and you have tea, all right?

You should probably plan your trip now just to have this moment.

Okay. Awesome. I already am.

Originally, the word was in Latin, and it meant grass or green things or herbs, herbs, and it was borrowed into Old French with the H intact.

And in French, though, they don’t pronounce the H, so the pronunciation was herb, right?

That’s the way the French do it.

They do not pronounce the H at the beginning of a word if it’s followed by a vowel.

And the British, however, used to say herb and herbal as well, right?

So it was borrowed into British as herb and herbal.

And it was this way for the longest time.

But then the British in the 1800s noticed that there was an H in the word.

Right.

It took them a while.

And started to pronounce it.

And they started to pronounce it herb and herbal.

But by this time, the word had already transferred itself to the English speakers in the New World,

And we hung on to it.

We kept the old H-less sound here in North America,

Because some Canadians pronounce it that way too,

And never went to the H-ful sound.

This is called linguistic conservatism.

We have conserved something that historically was in the language,

Whereas other branches of the language have not conserved it.

They have not retained that feature.

And therein lies the tale.

We actually have the older pronunciation of the word, and they have the newer one.

But if you tell them this, they will deny it,

Because the British believe that they have the oor, the purest version of English,

And we have the bastardized stepchild version.

Exactly, of course, because we just are waiting to negate letters from our words according to them.

But, you know, the H is a problem, child, as you pointed out with honest.

You know, in the word human, we get emails frequently about the word human because there are certain people who don’t pronounce the H.

For example, Terry Gross says human without the H.

So next time I come, I will tell them that we’re actually the older speakers of the language.

Yeah, yeah, and they do have a hard time believing that, but that’s because they don’t know the history.

And it’s on a case-by-case basis.

So for some things, we have conserved the tradition.

In some cases, we have innovated.

And therein lies the disagreements that we have.

They also have conserved some traditions and they’ve innovated some different features of English.

So we are not in agreement on everything.

Exactly.

That’s for sure.

Well, Kyle, thanks so much for calling and happy travels.

Thank you so much for having me.

All right.

Take care now.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Goodbye.

So have you picked up a word in your travels that you’d like to talk about?

You can call us at 877-929-9673 or send it an email to words@waywordradio.org or find us on Facebook or Twitter.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Debbie Stein from Dallas, Texas.

Hi, Debbie. Welcome to the show.

Hey, Debbie, how can we help you?

Well, as a child and even as I grew into an adult in Texas, after a big rain, your friends would say, wow, that was a real toad strangler.

A toad strangler.

And I just wondered about the origin of that.

Do you say it? You sound a little uncertain about it.

Yeah, absolutely.

I guess as an adult in the professional world, it would not come out of my mouth.

But amongst close friends and family, you might hear me say, wow, that was a real toad strangler.

Yeah, it’s pretty straightforward.

It has to do with strangling toes because the rain is just coming down in sheets.

And there are lots of variations of this, like frog strangler.

I’ve heard that one.

And goose drownder is another one of those.

Goose drownder.

Yeah.

Gully washer is the one I would think of.

Yeah, gully washer is very common in the South.

And trash mover.

I’ve never heard that one before.

Trash mover.

I’m looking at Dictionary of American Regional English, and yeah, trash mover.

Alas, that is probably very common, right?

Well, yeah.

Because there’s trash in your ditches.

Yes.

Well, as my aunt would say, if you have a question, you should call and speak to Grant and Martha,

Because they’re going to tell you how the cow ate the cabbage.

Oh, yeah.

I got my answer.

How the cow ate the cabbage.

That’s a good Texas expression.

That’s right.

Tell them how the cow ate the cabbage.

Debbie, thank you so much for calling.

Oh, you’re so welcome.

We love your show.

Thank you.

Thank you.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Yeah, lots of terms for a drenching rain here, like sod soaker and belly washer and water spout and drencher.

If you’ve got a word that we haven’t mentioned for a big rainstorm and what it does when it hits the ground, let us know.

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

And, you know, there’s a really lively community on Facebook and Twitter.

Grant, please spell Yanigan.

Yanigan.

Y-A-N-N-I-G-A-N.

Yanigan.

Yes, that’s right.

What does it mean?

Don’t ask me to define it.

You want to define it?

It’s a member of a scrub team in baseball.

Oh, okay, okay.

This is ringing some bells.

Is it?

I’ve paged through Dixon’s Baseball Dictionary before.

Okay, a Yanigan.

A scrub team.

So these are the guys you bring in when the lead is like you’re 20 points up and you just want to give everybody a shot at the bat.

Yeah, the scrub team.

So do you know where it comes from?

A particularly poor player from the 1800s?

I don’t know.

Joe Yannigan?

A comic, probably a comic strip in 1920.

It sounds like it, doesn’t it?

We don’t know for sure where it comes from, but it may be an alteration of young one.

Young one, Yannigan, Youngen.

Those Yannigans hanging out in front of the 7-Eleven.

So young one becomes Yannigan?

Yeah.

I can see that.

Yeah, I can see it too.

How about that?

Yannigan.

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

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

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 once again by our quiz guy, John Chaneski.

Hello, John.

Hi, Grant.

Hi, Martha.

Hi, John.

I’m back.

What’s cooking?

I’m here to quiz you again.

Okay.

I was going to give you guys a quiz where you had to identify groups by three sample members.

Oh.

Okay?

Okay.

For example, if I said Sneezy, Doc, Grumpy, they’re members of Disney’s Seven Dwarfs, right?

But you know what?

Yes.

You guys are just too good.

-huh.

Sure.

So I’m going to make it harder.

Okay.

I’ll give you three words that rhyme with the things in the group.

You have to go the extra step.

For example, I would have said breezy, lock, and stumpy instead of sneezy, doc, and grumpy.

Oh, Lord.

Okay.

Okay.

Let’s see how we do on this one.

Actually, I’ll give you a general category if you need one.

Okay.

That’ll help.

Okay.

Okay.

Let’s talk about art.

Okay?

Okay.

Head, fellow, preen.

Red, yellow, green.

Red, yellow, green for the category color is very good.

Right.

There we go.

Category games.

Darts, flubs, maids.

Darts, flubs, maids?

Yes.

Suits of cards.

Yes, suits of cards.

Can you name the suits?

Hearts, clubs, and spades.

Yes.

Very good.

Nicely done.

Let’s talk about astronomy.

Pattern.

Spars.

Genus.

The planets of the solar system.

Planets.

Name the planets, please.

Saturn, Mars, Venus.

Yes.

Patterns, Mars, Genus.

Science.

More science.

Pickle, bread, bold.

Nickel something gold.

Yes.

Lead.

Lead.

So it’s elements.

Yes.

Very good.

Nice teamwork.

Pickle, bread, bold.

Nickel, lead, gold.

Or metals.

Yes.

How about measurement?

Shower.

Fear, reckoned.

Shower, hour, year, second.

Yes, very good.

All right.

Nature.

Let’s talk about nature.

Brian, pita, peppered.

Brian, pita, peppered?

Pita, like a pita bread?

A pita.

Yeah.

Leopard, leopard, cheetah.

Lion, leopard, cheetah.

Yes, well done.

The leopard kind of looks peppered.

Yes, it does.

I feel a limerick coming on.

What a coincidence there.

Very good.

Yeah.

Again, let’s talk about the arts.

Goose step, mango, false.

A two-step tango and waltz.

Yes.

Three dances.

Well done.

More nature.

Here we go.

Wand, tweak, motion.

Something, a creek, ocean, wand.

Pond.

Pond, yeah.

Bodies of water.

Good teamwork here.

Yeah, you guys are doing great.

Finally, we have the category of sports.

Packet, luck, pleats.

Racket, puck, and cleats.

Yes, sports equipment.

Nicely done.

All right.

Anyway, you guys did great.

Congratulations.

That’s it?

No more?

That’s it.

The tyranny of John is over?

Oh, that’s good to leave him wanting more, right?

Thank you.

I think that’s got a lot of potential for future quizzes, John.

There’s a lot of playing room there.

Definitely.

Great.

We’ll do it again, yeah.

All right.

Thanks.

We’ll talk to you next week.

And if you want to talk with us about language,

Call us 877-929-9673

Or send your stories about words to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, my name is Celia from Arlington, Texas.

Hi, Celia. Welcome to the show.

Hi, Celia. What’s up?

Well, I’m home with bronchitis.

Oh.

You use this as an opportunity to get to listen to your show.

Okay, I’m sorry.

Yeah, I’ve been there with bronchitis. It’s no fun.

Well, I have a question about a childhood game called Hide and Seek.

I grew up in northeast Iowa, and when we gave up and wanted people to come out of their hiding places, we said a phrase that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

We said, ollie ollie oxen free.

Ollie ollie oxen free.

Yeah, and I assume that was just a phrase that was part of the game.

You know, kind of like abracadabra and magic, olly olly oxen free made those hiding people appear.

Right.

So this is part of the game. People are still out there. You can’t find them. You’re giving up. You shout olly olly oxen free, and then they come in.

Right.

You call the spies in from the cold.

However, a friend of mine who grew up in the panhandle of Texas said that she was told to say, all that’s out, come in free.

Oh, wow. Almost the perfect, pure, original version of it.

That’s pretty cool.

Well, what you were saying is actually the corruption, basically, of what your friend says.

Okay.

But it seems like everybody says that corruption.

Well, not just that one. There’s a lot of corruption.

Oh, they’re all over the place.

In the work that we quote frequently from the Dictionary of American Regional English, you can look this up.

And I don’t even have all of them here, but it’s probably 20 or 30 variants set around the country for this particular expression.

And all of them originate from something along the lines of all that are out come in free.

I mean, you can come in and you’re not considered it.

To me, it seems the corruption is more fun.

I agree.

In general.

There’s something musical about the way. More like a game than all that’s out come in free.

Yeah.

I agree.

That kind of sounds like you’re playing hide and seek with a queen or something.

That’s good.

Your version is musical. There’s something nice to it.

But there’s some common ones that are set in particular parts of the country.

For example, in the West, in California, in a few of the Western states, they say, olly, olly, A-L-L-E-E, oxen free.

And oxen, O-X-E-N.

So it’s a really complete corruption there.

So there’s a bunch of these that are a little more common than the other ones.

But the long list, all free, home free, all out’s come and free, all in free, olly, olly, in free, come and free, come on in, come on in.

That’s a boring one.

Come on, get with it.

It is, it is.

Only Olsenfri.

You know that was in the Norwegian part.

I thought that perhaps my friend was the only one who had parents who were grammatically correct.

No, that’s the original.

And the reason this happens is really super interesting.

And this is, there’s language that’s transmitted through writing.

And this tends to be transmitted almost perfectly from person to person, from teacher to student, from parent to child, that sort of thing.

But then there’s the language that doesn’t usually show up on paper.

And this language is heavily corrupted.

It doesn’t take very long before the original, it doesn’t look very much like its descendants.

It’s like a game of telephone.

It literally is.

So that I say something to a line of 20 people, and by the time it reaches that 20th person, the message sounds just very different, even if people are trying to be faithful to what they thought they heard.

It sounds like we’re both correct then.

This is making me want to go play hide-and-go-seek.

I haven’t played that in decades.

All right, you go, and I’ll count. I’ll come find you tomorrow.

Celia, good luck and good health to you. I hope everything gets better soon, all right?

Oh, I’m sure it will.

Thank you very much.

Take care now.

Bye-bye.

If you’ve got a question about something you learned as a child and are confused by as an adult, give us a call, 877-929-9673, or tell us the whole thing, an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Well, hello, Martha.

Hello, Grant.

My name is Ross.

Hi, Ross.

I’m calling from Langley Air Force Base in Virginia.

Oh, nice. Fancy place. Welcome to the show.

Yes.

What do you do there?

Well, thank you very much.

Yeah, I’m an analyst. I work with the Air Force as an analyst. I’ve been in for about two years now.

Okay. How can we help you?

Well, I’m calling today with trouble on the word pride or being proud of someone.

Pride and proud.

Recently, my mother got a really big promotion, and I was very happy for her.

And when she and I were speaking about it, I stalled and said to her, I want to tell you I’m proud of you, but that kind of implies that I had anything to do with you getting this job.

And as I said that, I remembered being a groomsman for one of my best friends, and I had a similar problem when I was giving a speech at their wedding.

I was very happy for him, and he had accomplished much.

He had set up his own business. He had found this great girl, and they were starting a family.

I wanted to say I was proud of him, but that, to me, implies that I had something to do with it.

And in both of those cases, of course, I haven’t, and it seems presumptive of me to say so.

So I’m just wondering if that is true, or if there’s another word that is more appropriate than being proud of someone.

I don’t think being happy for someone is sufficient.

I think what, Ross, you’re saying, if I can paraphrase it correctly, you’re saying that you’re looking for a word that’s a little bit more fine-tuned than just proud because proud encompasses so much.

I suppose so, and I think an aspect of it is that I feel like being proud of someone also has a bit of a social hierarchy distinction.

It seems to me that if my mother were to tell me that she were proud of me for what I had accomplished in my life and a job that I had or something I’d done, I wouldn’t feel odd about her saying so.

But if I were to tell her that, I would feel odd.

I don’t feel it’s my place to be proud of her, proud for her. It feels uncomfortable almost.

Interesting.

There’s a hierarchical problem with this thing.

Right.

I’m picturing.

Because it can only move one way.

There’s no backflow on pride here.

It almost feels that way.

I’d like to explore just for a second the idea that you feel that if you say you have pride in your mother or pride in a man who’s about to be married, that somehow you feel like you’re saying that you had some responsibility for that.

I don’t feel pride works that way for me.

I don’t feel that that’s any part of the meaning that I know.

Where do you think you got that from, that idea that pride meant it means somehow that you did something to make that happen?

I suppose maybe there then are two definitions, because I’m thinking if I were proud of an accomplishment of my own, it would be warranted that I own it and that I have been responsible for it.

And so to me, it seems that if I, in turn, take that word and apply it to someone else, that definition still carries over, that I’m still saying, this is something I have accomplished, this is something that I am responsible for, and it is something that I like about myself having done.

It seems to me that it shouldn’t necessarily be this way, and I would like to be able to use pride, and it sounds to me that you’re saying it, that definition doesn’t exist, and maybe that’s just an overtone I have applied.

Although my mother has said the same thing.

It’s funny, maybe it speaks to the relationship I share with my mother, but I congratulate her on the promotion, and then we spent like 20 minutes talking about this word in this way.

We’re like, how weird.

And we both agree there’s an element of responsibility, and she said the same thing.

She doesn’t like telling me she’s proud of me because she feels I’ve done it, and she wasn’t responsible for it.

Now, I disagree with her on that, but that’s a different issue.

Yeah, and I think I’ve had the same experience, Ross, with peers.

I have a close friend who accomplished something recently, and I kind of tripped over saying, I’m proud of you. Because it feels condescending.

Exactly.

Okay.

I mean, I can buy these. I can totally buy the meanings that you have for pride and proud here, and I think there’s sufficient evidence here that you probably should avoid them because you’re probably not alone in this.

I see a bunch of cases online here where, here’s an example of families eating at a restaurant. The waiter recites the whole order from memory back to the table without notes. And one of the people at the table says, wow, I’m so proud of you. You remembered everything. And the rest of the family jumps on this person and says, how are you proud of her? You didn’t have anything to do with that.

Oh, exactly. And so you guys are not alone on this. It’s interesting. What would you say instead that I am so happy for you?

Yes.

And to me, insufficient. That doesn’t quite encapsulate everything about it. I mean, it’s not just that I’m happy. It’s more like I’m trying to acknowledge the effort and the challenge and the success. You earned this. You deserve this. This is exactly, you’re in exactly the place that somebody who’s as awesome as you needs to be or should be.

I don’t know. That’s a lot of words, though. And I feel like saying I’m proud for you, maybe using just a different preposition would be more appropriate.

I was just going to say that, Ross. Same thing. Proud for you instead of proud of you? Or some variation of the preposition.

Well, you’ve got us a lot to chew on here, Ross. I’m not sure that we got to the bottom of this. I’m really interested in the discrepancy between your understanding of proud and prideful and pride and mine. And I think we have to put this out to the listeners and find out if other people have opinions on this.

What do you think about saying that you’re proud of somebody for their accomplishments? Is that condescending? Does it somehow imply that you had a hand in that success? Let us know. 877-929-9673. Or email us words@waywordradio.org.

Ross, thank you so much. This is quite a one to chew on.

Well, thank you. I’m a huge fan, and it’s an honor to be involved here. Thank you very much.

Oh, it’s our pleasure. Great to have you. Give us a call anytime, all right?

Yeah, thank you. Take care. Bye-bye.

Thanks, Ross. Bye-bye.

Well, we know you’ve got opinions on this. You can talk about it on Facebook with us, a Facebook group, a Facebook page, or give us a call, 877-929-9673, or tell us your feelings about the word pride and proud in email to words@waywordradio.org.

I’ve been reading Grant about a couple of words that create an interesting distinction in terms of time, and these are from the language of Kiswahili in East and Central Africa. In that language, they divide the dead into two categories. There is Sasha, and they’re the recently departed people whose time overlaps with those of us who are still here. And then there’s also Zamani, and those are the spirits who aren’t known by anyone currently alive.

So when the last person to know an ancestor dies, then that ancestor leaves the Sasha and joins the Zamani.

Oh, interesting concept, right?

Yeah. I thought that was a really beautiful way to look at it. I was thinking about the fact that I had put a post on Facebook recently in memory of my mother. And it was just so lovely, the people who chimed in who remembered her.

Right. You know, so that means that she’s still among the Sasha.

Oh, yeah. And will be until all of us who knew her are dead. You could bring together all those people who knew her and still somehow recreate the idea of her and the memory of her.

Right, right. She lives on in a certain way.

Oh, I love that. But I love those two words, Sasha and Zamani, Z-A-M-A-N-I. And it is an interesting thing to go into another language and find that the words perfectly match concepts suited to their culture that we don’t quite have. And also part of the argument for preserving languages around the world.

Exactly. It sort of reminded me of that, you know, that there are sort of Sasha languages and Zamani languages. They contain within them ideas that might not be perfectly executed in another language without a great deal of more understanding.

Yeah, and then a language dies out and there aren’t any more speakers left. Give us a call, 877-929-9673, or email us, words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Teresa Tilcote. I’m calling from Plano, Texas.

Hi, Teresa. Welcome to the show. How can we help?

Well, as you’ve known, we’ve had some pretty bad weather across the United States, and you see on TV the canceled board on the airlines of flights that are being canceled or delayed, and I see sometimes that canceled is spelled with one L or two Ls, and I’m not sure what the proper spelling of it is.

What were you taught?

I was taught one, and when I do spell checks, it usually comes up one, but then I see in other spell checks, like on dictionary, it says it’s two Ls, so I’m thoroughly confused.

Okay. Oh, we can work on this. This is a solvable puzzle. Sorry for all the cancellations, but we can solve this part. I’m interested in that you were seeing this on the boards in, so you’re talking like CNN will have footage and they’ll just show the board with all the cancellations and you’ll see sometimes a double L, right?

Exactly.

Okay. What’s interesting is that probably was a Canadian or British board and not an American board because typically in the United States, we spell the word canceled with a single L. And it’s not the only word that we do that to. When we have words that end in vowel L and then we add an inflection like E-D or I-N-G, we tend not to double the L.

So canceled is, in the U.S., typically C-A-N-C-E-L-E-D. However, in the U.K. and Canada and the rest of the English-speaking world, they don’t do that. They double the L. And so it’s a pretty consistent rule for a wide variety of words that end in vowel L, usually E-L. It’s not 100% foolproof as a rule, but pretty consistent.

Even in the United States, however, the double L spelling has always been allowed. It just hasn’t been common. And this all goes back to that man of letters, Noah Webster, who was the one who institutionalized this spelling, put it in his books, in his dictionaries, which were widely distributed, widely taught from, and widely read for a very long time.

Oh, wow.

Yeah. So, again, it’s pretty consistent. If you want to learn more about this, I highly recommend. You’re going to freak out when I say this. The Wikipedia page on the British versus American spellings, because it’s actually pretty good. It really kind of lays out the inconsistencies and consistencies here. The places where we double the L and they don’t, and the places where they double the L and we don’t.

So next time you have a flight that’s canceled, you have something to do.

Yeah.

Exactly.

Well, thank you so much. That makes a lot of sense.

Yeah, sure, Teresa. Call us again sometime, all right? Take care.

Okay, great. Bye-bye.

Thank you so much.

Okay, bye-bye.

877-929-9673. Email words@waywordradio.org. More stories about what we say and why we say it, right here on A Way with Words. Stay tuned.

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. The other day I was having a conversation with a writer friend of mine, long-time professional writer. And she was talking about how long she misunderstood the word inchote.

Oh.

Inchote.

Yeah.

I-N-C-H-O-A-T-E.

Yes.

Not inchote.

Exactly. It’s inchoate, of course. Meaning imperfectly formed or not quite in existence yet. But she was tripped up by that.

How long did she go with the mispronunciation?

Decades, I think. You know, the word for me, the one that caught me and catches a lot of people, was hyperbole.

Oh, sure. I’d read it. I mean, I was reading above my level, which is kind of how this happens, right? And I didn’t know that it was hyperbole. I kind of understood what it meant.

From all the context that I’d seen it in, but it was hyperbole for the longest time. And I’m sure I said it aloud and probably was gently corrected by a teacher. Oh yeah, right. I have the same experience with Penelope. Penelope. Yeah. Poor Penelope. Penelope. It was just the epitome of epitome, right?

There’s not enough indication there that it doesn’t behave like normal English pronunciation.

Yeah, and you’re right about behavior too. I mean, I have a friend who mispronounces biopic all the time. Oh, biopic. She sees it as biopic because it looks like myopic.

Oh, it sounds like biopsy.

Yeah. Yeah, there we go. Biopic. So what I’m betting is that our listeners have had words like that too. You know, they read for years and years and years. And the thing is, when you learn the new pronunciation, at least in my experience, I still want to go back to the old one.

I mean, we were talking about the word piquant. You used it a couple of weeks ago. And I had always heard it pronounced piquant. And so here at this point of your life, you’re ready to make the change to the proper pronunciation?

Well, I did find that in one dictionary, the Merriam-Webster, it’s the third pronunciation they offer. But, you know, I mean, maybe I hadn’t heard Pequen.

Yes, I did hear Pequen. My mother said Pequen.

Oh, there we go. You get attached to this. Language is really personal.

Well, it’s no hyperbole. If you’ve got a word that you have mispronounced or did mispronounce for a very long time and you’d like to share the embarrassing story about how you found out, call us, 877-929-9673, or tell us in secret an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Grant.

Hi, Martha.

This is Liz calling from Jersey City.

Hi, Liz.

Hi, Liz. Welcome to the program.

Thank you.

What can we do for you?

Almost a year ago, my husband and I got a puppy. Pretty much right from the start, I was in a quandary because I didn’t know how to refer to myself vis-a-vis her. Her name is Donut.

Donut wants to get in on the conversation. We just heard her.

Yeah, yeah. Sorry. What kind of dog is she?

She’s a mutt.

Okay, great. Best kind.

So I remember very early on, you know, when I took her to the vet, I would call up to make an appointment. And I wanted to say, you know, this is Donut’s mom or worse, mommy, because I don’t have any kids. And that’s unfortunately how I think of her. But I felt ridiculous.

You know, other times I’ve referred to myself as her owner, which feels a little bit more professional. Adult, but it also feels sort of extremely impersonal.

Yeah, like it’s a business relationship, right? Like you guys have a contract and she just does work for you and goes home at the end of the day.

My slave, and if anything, I’m her slave. It is how it turns out.

I went online and I’ve talked to other people and apparently guardian is the appropriate term, although that seems very legalistic to me.

You know, I was just playing around with words, and I thought, well, maybe I could coin a new word. I thought of the word, a combination of human and mom. So, humum.

I was wondering, you know, what you thought of that, what your other listeners might think of that. And I’d love to know also, you know, in other countries or in other languages, you know, how they solved this problem, what they refer to themselves as.

All right, there’s a lot to unpack here, Elizabeth. Tons of stuff to say here. Martha, you have cats, right?

Yeah, but I’ve had many dogs in my life, and dogs are wonderful. And I think what’s happening here is our relationship with them is changing.

I mean, you were talking about when we were growing up and we called ourselves owners, and we also fed them table scraps, and now you go and you buy all this organic stuff. Or you’re much more careful about what you feed them, right?

And you can spend a fortune in the pet store. Is this something that’s changed, or is it just that your personal awareness has changed?

Both of you, I ask you, Martha and Elizabeth. I mean, what you observed as a child was probably the barest glimpse of what was really happening around you, right? But maybe you just become a little more aware of.

No, absolutely. Although certainly my parents never referred to themselves as, you know, our then dog’s mother or father.

Right.

I’m Pumpkin’s mommy. She needs to come in for a checkup.

Right.

My cats, I currently don’t say that, but I’m confused as well because I know there are people around me who give me the cocked eyebrow when I say that I owned the cat so that I’m their owner.

Oh, yeah?

Yeah.

So sometimes I’ll just default to saying I’m their person.

Yeah, that’s what I do a lot.

I’m their human.

I’m their human, yeah.

They’re part of our family.

Maybe this is something about Jersey City, but here a lot of pet owners refer to themselves as the dog’s mother or father.

That’s pretty common. There was a survey I see in 19 or 2011, 58% of American dog owners said they call themselves things like mommy and daddy when referring to their dogs.

And 54% consider themselves to be pet parents instead of pet owners.

Oh, that’s great. That’s great. I don’t feel quite as pathetic.

Yeah. And, you know, I think maybe, too, it’s a matter of register because I think certainly at the dog park, I would say I’m Lily’s mommy. But at the vet’s office, I don’t think I’d say that.

Okay.

That’s very helpful.

As far as what they say in other countries, I don’t have any information there. But I think what we really need to do, Elizabeth, is kind of do an informal radio survey and see what other people call themselves when they’re talking about their pets to a third party.

What do you tell your family when you’re talking about your pet? What do you tell the vet when you’re at the dog park? What do you say?

Hi, I’m Grant. I belong to Whopper?

I don’t know.

That would be great if you would do that.

Will do.

If you’ve got an answer to these questions, call us 877-929-9673 or email us, words@waywordradio.org.

All right.

Thank you so much for taking my call.

Thanks for calling, Liz.

Listen in. We’ll see what we find out, okay?

Thanks so much, and I love the show.

Bye-bye.

Thank you.

Thanks, Liz.

Bye-bye.

Okay, bye-bye.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hello.

This is Derek Osgood. I’m in North New York near Saranac Lake.

Okay, great.

Welcome to the show.

I am interested in the history of the word Zugzwang.

Excuse me?

What did you call me?

It’s a chess term. Chess. Zugzwang.

And what got you interested in that?

I actually started studying chess recently, and I came across the word, and it just was so strange to me personally. I figured out what it meant, but I’d just like to know the history.

What does it mean?

Basically, in chess, it means that there’s no good option. You have to move somewhere.

Exactly. Right. In chess, there’s no passing your turn. You have to move a piece.

And sometimes you’re going to move your piece into jeopardy because that’s the only move you have, right?

Right.

It’s not necessarily a stalemate then, which is another chess word, right?

Right.

It’s like you don’t have any good choice.

Exactly. You’re going to make a bad decision either way, like a rock and a hard place.

Exactly.

So we should spell this word, Z-U-G-Z-W-A-N-G, right?

Yeah, and then I’ve also heard it without the G at the end as well.

Oh, really?

Oh, really?

I’ve never heard that.

Yeah. Sücksfang.

And this is clearly not an English word, German word, right?

Any English speaker looking at this word or hearing would know right away we borrowed this from somewhere else.

And we did because a lot of the good chess literature back in the…

1850s or so?

Yeah, it was written in German.

Right, because that’s where the minds were, right?

Yeah, and it’s a handy shorthand for saying what we’re using a lot more words to say.

And I’ve seen it borrowed into geopolitics as well to talk about political positions where you feel compelled to make a move because certain constituencies expect it, but there’s no good move left to you.

Exactly, yeah.

Yeah, there’s a phrase in German that means to put under.

Put under.

Throw under the bus?

No, put under Zuxwang.

Oh, I see.

Put under Zuxwang.

Yeah.

So it’s been in English for how long now?

About 100 years or so?

Yeah, a little over 100 years.

And have you run into Zvishenzug?

Excuse me?

No.

Fishing soup?

I would like some vishy swas.

That’s another chess term.

It’s got that same zug in there, meaning pull.

So the zug suffix is to move or to pull.

Yeah, to move or to, yeah.

And the Zvishen is intermediate, so it’s a move that you don’t expect.

Look that one up.

Okay.

Zvishenzug.

Yeah.

But yeah, thank you very much.

I wanted to know more of the history of it and that other word that seems very interesting as well.

Yeah, check that one out.

It’s fish and soup.

Well, if you ever become a grandmaster, remember the little people, all right?

That would be us.

Well, I will. Thank you.

Thanks for calling, Derek.

Well, thank you.

Bye-bye.

Thanks. Bye-bye.

As Jane Nichols said, English is a language that goes down dark alleys and beats other languages over the head and then rifles through their pockets for new words.

If you’ve got a word from another language you’d like to talk about, give us a call, 877-929-9673, or email us, words@waywordradio.org.

Grant, I have another spelling word for you.

Yes, please.

Umbrology.

Umbrology.

Sounds like his umbrella at the beginning, yeah?

Very good, very good guess.

Something about the study of shadows?

That’s what I was going to guess.

No?

Apparently it’s the study of rain.

The study of rain.

Yeah.

Let’s see.

O-M-B-R-O-L-O-G-Y?

Yes.

Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.

You got it.

The study of rain.

Very good.

Rare word, but it’s in the spelling bee list.

Your questions about language, 877-929-9673 or email words@waywordradio.org.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi.

This is Debbie from Indianapolis.

Hey, Debbie.

Welcome to the show.

Hi there.

What’s up?

Hey, thanks.

We have a little family difference of opinion about some linguistic issues here, and we are asking for you to referee.

It’s a generational difference.

I am in my early 60s, and I have sons who are in their mid-20s and early 30s.

And I have a tendency, as does my husband, although I think I do it more than he does, when we are talking about going to a store, and primarily a restaurant or like a department store, if the name of that store lends itself, we will make it a plural.

For example, JCPenney.

Instead of saying, oh, I’m going to go to JCPenney, I will say, I’m going to Penny’s.

My sons just break out in hives.

Say, no, you’re not going to Penny’s.

You’re going to JCPenney.

It’s like, well, what’s the difference?

They just, it’s great.

I do it with restaurants.

There’s a restaurant called The Aristocrat, and I will say, let’s go to aristocrats.

Okay.

And Debbie, are you saying that they are plurals or possessives?

I’m sorry, possessives.

Okay, great.

Yeah, I make it the possessives, not plural.

That was my question.

Let me ask you a question about your sons for a second here.

Let’s say that you have a friend who’s a family that you know, and their last name is Obama, and you’re going to go to their house.

Would your son say, let’s go to the Obamas?

They have a great pool in the backyard.

They would, wouldn’t they?

They would, absolutely.

And they would say that about any last name.

Let’s go to the Barnette’s house.

They have a big TV, right?

Yep.

And this is what’s happening here.

Really, it is.

We are treating some names of some businesses as if they were proper nouns.

Exactly.

We are using them in a possessive to refer to the Penny’s store, the Penny’s lot, the Penny’s outlet, or whatever it is, without naming the thing that’s being possessed.

Just like if we were talking about a family’s home.

Without saying the.

Yeah, we’re going to.

I will do that, but they won’t.

Interesting.

Yeah, we would use the definite article if we were talking about a family, as Martha noted here.

But in general, this is pretty consistent throughout the United States.

There are large pockets and sways of people who say Walmarts and Kroger’s and all the different names because they kind of act like the proper noun of a place.

Target’s interesting because Target is so much like a regular common noun.

Target is a Target, right?

That’s right.

It’s impossible really to make it that kind of a possessive form.

The aristocrat is a little different because it probably should follow a little more like Target and a little less like Penny’s.

Exactly.

See, I think I have a tendency to do that.

Whenever it lends itself at all, my ear will automatically just say aristocrats, where the boys, they won’t.

It’s like, no, we’re going to go to the aristocrat for dinner.

Okay.

Interesting.

And Debbie, what do you do when you go to Toys R Us?

It would be, I’m going to Toys R Us.

I wouldn’t put the possessive on that.

So what we’re finding here, and this is what you can tell your sons.

First, mom is always right.

Thank you very much.

But second, you can tell your sons that there is a consistent rule here that if a name of a place tends to behave and feel like, it is about the native speaker’s intuition, tends to feel like a proper noun, like a last name, then it can follow the similar rules of taking the possession to mean everything that belongs to this particular proper noun.

Without having to name the thing.

So it’s not geographic.

It’s not generational.

You will find this.

It’s something I’ve gotten used to.

It’s something they don’t particularly do.

They just don’t do it.

So we just both have our tendencies.

And I don’t think it’s age graded.

In Missouri, where I come from, people of all ages do this.

It happens here in California.

It happens in the South.

It happens in the Northeast.

It happens in the city.

It happens in the country.

There’s no particular geographic or racial or age or anything pattern to this.

It’s just some people do it and some people don’t.

There’s rules about why they do it.

Exactly, exactly.

But what I really like, and the takeaway for this is mom’s always right.

Absolutely.

It’s a little thing.

Just get over it and let’s go.

Yeah, exactly.

I mean, yeah, mom’s always right.

Yeah.

Take care of your mother.

That’s right.

Tell them to go to Kmart’s and buy some hive cream.

Yeah, exactly.

Go buy Kmart’s, get some earplugs if you don’t like it.

That’s exactly right.

Very good.

Well, thanks so much.

This is exactly what I needed.

Take care now.

Glad to help.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

We should point out that you won’t hear newscasters do this unless they’re being ironic or making a joke.

You won’t hear people giving formal speeches do this.

Sure.

Because it belongs to a very casual, homey register of language that you tend not to use outside of very familiar circumstances.

Right.

As you said, it’s based on feel.

Yeah.

It’s very much an intuition about the kind of relationship also that you have with the place, not just with the word itself.

Do you have a language dispute in your home?

We’d love to hear about it.

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

And we’re all over Facebook and Twitter.

Grant, how about the spelling B word, ojival?

Ojival?

Yeah.

Oh, let’s see.

Does it, well, let’s see.

O-J-I-V-A-L?

O-J-I-V-A-L?

Close, but no cigar.

No.

What is it?

No J.

O-G.

O-G.

What does it mean?

O-G-I-V-A-L.

It means having the form of a pointed arch.

It’s like a gothic windows in a cathedral.

I could see that.

O-J-I-V-A-L.

Nice.

That’s a good word to have if you’re in…

In a spelling bee.

In a spelling bee.

Right.

If you’re an architect of churches.

877-929-9673.

Things have come to a pretty past.

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This show is coming to you from the Track Recording Center at Studio West in San Diego, California.

Thanks for listening. I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett. So long.

Bye-bye.

I like tomato, potato, potato, tomato, tomato.

Let’s call the whole thing off.

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

And oh, if we ever part, then that might break my heart.

So if you like pajamas and I like pajamas, I’ll wear pajamas and give up pajamas.

For we know we need each other, so we better call the calling of R.

Let’s call the whole thing R.