Squish and Optempo

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

And I’m Martha Barnette, and it’s time for Slang This, the puzzle where you guess the meaning of some strange slang terms.

Today’s contestant is Craig Molinax from Lawrence, Kansas.

Craig, welcome.

Hey, everybody.

How are you, Craig? What’s going on in Lawrence, Kansas?

Well, I know most of the town is getting ready to watch the games tonight.

Right now, I’m just relaxing at work, talking to A Way with Words.

Are you ready to play a quiz, Craig?

I am very ready.

Okay, Craig, here’s how we play.

Grant’s going to give you a slang term, and then he’ll give you three sentences that suggest what that term could mean.

Only one of those will be real, and the other two are fake.

So, Craig, your task will be to guess which sentence illustrates the slang term as it is really used.

And chances are you won’t have heard the word before, so the trick is going to be to puzzle out its meaning.

And I’ll be standing right here to help if you get stuck, okay?

Excellent.

From my experience, it’s been that almost no one knows these words.

So I’m ready.

You’re right.

They’re all real.

I did not make these up.

But, you know, Smarty Pants, what’s your slang word?

You’re supposed to come to this with your own favorite slang word.

Do you have one for us?

My own favorite slang word is something that I think only high school students in southern Kansas might know it, and it’s chewy.

Chewy?

Chewy.

Chewy.

It’s very similar to a wedgie, but whereas a wedgie is done by someone else to you, a chewy just happens on its own.

A chewy is when your underpants get kind of uncomfortably pulled up between your butnocks.

And the nice thing is if someone has a strange look on their face, you can always ask, do you have a chewy?

Okay, so it’s like an auto wedgie.

It is like an auto wedgie.

It’s common to see someone picking a chewy and just you don’t acknowledge that.

No.

Maybe we better move on to our game, huh?

All right.

So we’ve got two words for you today, Craig.

The first of our two words today is optempo, O-P-T-E-M-P-O, optempo.

And the first possible clue is, the optempo of the war has increased the need for manpower so much that re-enlistment bonuses can reach more than $100,000 for the right person.

And the second clue, doctors at Johns Hopkins called doing surgery with music in the operating theater optempo.

They know when they hit the third course, it’s time to put in the new kidney.

And the third clue.

Op-tempo dieters never sit down.

They sleep only a half hour at a time, seven times a day, and they bathe just once a week.

They claim they not only lose two pounds a day, but get more done in a week than most people get done in a month.

So, Craig, is Op-tempo A, the pace of a war or military operation?

Is it B, a method of using music during surgery?

Or is it C, a high-speed, highly efficient diet?

Wow.

Well, the first two I would say would be operation tempo or occupation tempo, I guess.

I would have to go with the third one, maybe optimum tempo.

So you think optempo refers to a type of dieting in which you manage your time wisely?

That sounds great.

Do you know any optempo dieters?

I don’t, but I work for a nutritional analysis team, and I’m sure that we could come up with something similar to that, that’s all about, like, go, go, go.

Exactly.

Unfortunately, the answer is A.

Op tempo is military jargon for the operation tempo of a war or a military operation.

Sounds like military jargon, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

They’re all about strange language.

My friends from McConnell Air Force Base from near my hometown are going to be very disappointed that I didn’t know that.

Oh, but your friends in the nutrition business will be really excited.

Exactly, a new thing that we can sell.

Listen, we’re going to make a lot of money with this.

You are going to include us on this, aren’t you?

I’ll have my name and then, you know, Grant’s name, Martha’s name, and we’ll kind of mix it together.

What kind of order is that?

All right, one more for you, Craig.

Try this one.

This word is squish, S-Q-U-I-S-H, but it’s not going to be the squish that you know, all right?

Or a chewy.

Or a chewy.

The first clue.

In an effort to reduce the money and time spent schooling, some Arizona schools now have squish years.

Nine months of school are compressed into six.

Squish students can complete high school in two years and enter college at age 16.

Second clue.

To those on the political right, she looks like a squish.

She once voted for the war and now says she’s against it because of all the pressure for more liberal members of her party.

And then the third clue.

If there’s a bully in school, then there’s always a squish, the bully’s long-suffering target.

So is a squish A, a new time scheme for high school?

Is it B, a politician who constantly caves into criticism?

Or is it C, the name for a bully’s victim?

Craig, what do you think?

What’s a squish?

Wow.

So the first one has to do with shortening the amount of time or extending the amount of time that you’re in high school?

Taking nine months of school and doing it in six months.

I actually did a program similar to that in high school, so I’m going to have to go with that.

What did they call it when you were in high school?

We just called it graduating at semester.

Okay.

So, Craig, your answer then is A.

A.

The squish is nine months of school compressed into six.

Unfortunately, the answer is B.

A squish is a politician who’s kind of squishy on the issues.

You squeeze them and one answer pops up between one set of fingers and another answer pops up between another set of fingers.

They never really stick to what they say.

So we go from flip-flop to squish? Nice.

Yep, yep. We do indeed.

Craig, thank you for playing. I just wanted to ask you, what do you do there in Lawrence?

Right now I’m a research assistant for the long-term exercise study through the Energy Balance Laboratory.

Oh, that is fantastic. So no wonder you went straight for that clue.

Sure.

Yeah.

Well, thank you for playing today, Craig.

It was great fun.

Well, thank you so much.

You guys have a wonderful day.

Hey, Craig.

Yeah?

You’re going to have a wonderful day in a couple of weeks because we’re going to send you a whole book of interesting words.

I am looking forward to it.

Yeah?

Craig, we’re going to send you a copy of Aaron McKean’s book called Weird and Wonderful Words.

Excellent.

I look forward to it.

All right.

Thanks for playing.

Thank you, Craig.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

If you would like to play our slang quiz, we’d be happy to hear from you.

The address is words@waywordradio.org or call us, 1-877-929-9673.

Those are the same ways that you can reach us to ask us questions about language.