Steamed Bun (episode #1467)

You’re listening to A Way with Words, a show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

On our Facebook group, Fred Rosen of Boynton Beach, Florida, raised an interesting question about the language that people use to talk about their age.

His cousin calls himself 50-plus. He says, I was 50 years old for one day, and now I’m 50-plus. Just one day, I was 50. But people are going to think he’s 59.

Really? If he’s under 51, then he’s cheating himself out of some really good years there.

When you’re a kid, those individual numbers mean a whole lot, right?

Oh, yeah. Yeah, and even the numbers in between. You know, I’m four and a half. I’m five and a half. Yeah, my son counts the months partly because the birthday is at the end of it. And he knows that gifts are coming.

But yes.

Oh, does he? Okay. But then, you know, you get to a certain age and you just say your regular age, or at least I have. And then you get a little bit older and you sometimes start to fudge it or you forget.

Do you literally forget your own birth?

I have to stop and think, well, how old am I? And a lot of people chimed in on this discussion. Bruce Lundak said, when I turned 50, my friend welcomed me to the 600-month club.

Oh, that sounds depressing. Julie Todd said, I’m 42, but I say I’m 29 plus shipping and handling.

I like that one a lot. That’s great. And Randy Barber said, a friend of mine is currently celebrating the 40th anniversary of her 30th birthday. So I think that means she’s about 70.

Jack Benny did that, right?

Well, that’s funny that you mentioned that because people were saying, I’m Jack Benny plus whatever. 39 plus, yeah. Jack Benny was 39 for something like 30 years.

Oh, is that right? Okay. And it was a long-running joke, yeah.

Yeah. Do you fudge your age at all?

Never. No, the same reason I don’t have a comb over or put plugs on my head. I’m bald. This is me. You know, I’m the age that I am. It is what it is. It is what it is.

Yes. Well, if you have an interesting way to refer to your age, we’d love to hear about it. Or we’d love to hear your questions and stories about any aspect of language. The number is 877-929-9673 or send us an email. That address is words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Well, hello. This is Diane calling in snowy northeast Iowa.

Diane, what can we do for you today?

Well, I called regarding a word. It’s the word kitchen. Over the last few years, I’ve been thinking about, well, the living room’s the living room. The entry room’s the entry room. The dining room’s the dining room where you dine. The bathroom, you take a bath. The basement’s the base of the house. And so why is the kitchen the kitchen?

Yeah, the word kitchen is different because it’s so much older than all of those other words.

Okay. All the way back to around the year 1000, when people were speaking Old English, the word was cucina. And it goes back to a Latin word that means to cook, coquer. You see it in…

Oh, cucina.

Oh, that’s very interesting.

Yeah, yeah. It’s like Italian cucina and Spanish cocina. It’s a much, much older word. And then sort of linguistically, we added all these other rooms onto the house, so to speak. The word bedroom comes along much later. It was bedchamber.

Well, my mother, who’s almost 89, said, well, Diane, I think it should be called the workroom. It should be called the workroom. Over the years from the farm and then coming up through the new generation with everything modern. But she didn’t have an answer either, so could you not?

Yeah, in Old English it was that, and so that one stuck around, and then we added all these other rooms onto the house, like the laundry room or the mudroom. Because that was the only room of the house, you know, probably.

Definitely an important room of the house. For a long time, though, if you look at the historical records on this, cooking was done outside the house.

Sure. Because you didn’t want fire in the house.

That’s correct, probably, yes. You’re right. Bathroom functions as well.

Yeah. Yeah. Right. And you’re more likely to live in a kind of combo barn house with the animals next door underneath you and the floor below in order that their body heat would provide heat for the whole home.

Wow. That’s very true.

Yeah. That’s so interesting.

Yeah. So it’s actually a really good question. And then you said the word cucina went, that was from the old English, then it went to, you said Italian?

They spring from the same root in Latin, and so that word spread out into all those romance languages and into English.

Okay. Well, that’s very interesting. I really appreciate this. Thanks for talking to us, Diane. Have a great day.

Thanks, Diane. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye. 877-929-9673. Email words@waywordradio.org.

Hello. You have A Way with Words.

Hey. This is Jennifer in Atlanta, Georgia.

Welcome, Jennifer. What’s going on?

Well, I was curious about the welcoming words, a.k.a. hello. We say hello or hi, or in the South here we say hey. It’s taken a little differently if you say hey in Philadelphia or Boston. So I was thinking about that having moved a lot as a kid. But I was also wondering about the changes to that greeting over time. Because my grandmother, who grew up outside of New York City and New Jersey, told me a story when I was young about how her mother or her grandmother would not say hello because it had the word hell in it. And they, in fact, would say hey-o instead. And so I was curious to know, A, is that true? Was it a time sort of thing or a group of people that would do that? And then that morphed into, well, that’s sort of near hey, which is what we say here often in the South, to say hello. And how does that all work together?

I have heard people propose, instead of saying hello because of the hell, to say heaven-o.

I’ve heard them say it.

You have?

Yes. Like, you’ve actually been greeted by people?

Well, no, I’ve heard them say it, like, in a church where they just wouldn’t say hello. It was a Pentecostal church that I was visiting, yeah. They said heaven-o. They wouldn’t say the word hell.

Oh, my goodness. And you, Martha, talk about growing up in the church, but that wasn’t an issue in your church.

No, no, no. It wasn’t an issue in the Southern Baptist Church where I grew up. Unfortunately, hello, the hell in hello has nothing to do with the place where the devil resides. It’s just a coincidence of spelling that kind of came about because of the oddness of English etymology.

So it’s nothing to do with hell, hell.

Really?

Yeah, no. Hello comes from some older words. They’re spelled a variety of different ways, including hallo, H-A-L-L-O, or halloa, H-A-L-L-O-A. And there’s a variety of these shouts that are used in naval contexts or in hunting, you know, like fox hunting, that sort of thing, or that are used just to get someone’s attention.

We have a huge number of words in the Germanic languages that are surprisingly similar to each other that all look kind of alike and all sound kind of alike and all are spelled kind of alike. And it’s the same story for hey. Anybody who knows Swedish knows that hey is a fairly standard greeting in Swedish. H-E-J. And it looks a lot like our hey and it sounds like our hey and it’s related perhaps a thousand or more years back.

Unbelievable.

Yeah. So we have a ton of these, and all of these words like ho and oy and yo, and a lot of these, you can see the similarities here. A lot of them, they don’t have hard consonants in them, right? A lot of them are really easy to say, and they’re very easy to shout.

Hi, howdy.

Well, howdy is short for how do you do. And they’re all breath exhalations, too.

Right. They’re literally exclamations, right? We exclaim them with our full force of our lungs, or we can if we wish.

Yeah, I’m thinking of Spanish, too, which the word starts with an H, although it’s hola. You don’t pronounce the H.

Interesting.

Pretty cool, right?

Yeah, well, always.

Well, thank you all very much.

Our pleasure.

Thank you for calling, Jennifer.

Y’all take care.

Okay, you too, Jennifer.

So, yeah, the hey and hi, that kind of utterance exists in very similar forms in dozens of languages across the world.

And they’re not etymologically connected, necessarily.

Some of them may be, but most of them are independently derived because it’s a natural sound for a human to make.

For me, hey is really warm.

I’ve heard people say, you know, it’s not so warm elsewhere, but I find it really warm.

Hey.

Oh, I meant to ask Jennifer about that where somebody thought it was kind of rude.

It’s a thing you say that when somebody offends you, like, hey, you’re stepping on my toes.

Hey, that’s my seat.

Yeah.

No, I think that it’s really warm.

Let us know your thoughts about language, 877-929-9673, or send them in email to words@waywordradio.org.

A couple more comments from our Facebook group discussion about the language that we use to talk about our age.

Fred Rosen said, I had an uncle who retired to Florida in his early 70s.

He played tennis and told people he was 10 years older to get a compliment for how good he looks for a guy in his 80s.

And then Bob Allen wrote, sometimes instead of giving a number, I say, I’m not old.

I’ve just been young for a really long time.

There we go.

That’s a good attitude.

That’s the attitude.

You can coast a couple decades on that attitude.

I know, right?

It’s true.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha.

This is Judd Halenza calling from Del Mar, California.

Welcome.

Hi, Judd.

How are you doing?

What can we do you for?

Help me out with the word must needs.

I take a newsletter from a very articulate gentleman named Dennis Gartman, and he writes a letter that comes to me every day, and it’s market-oriented, covering business, economic, and political views.

He occasionally uses the word must needs in various sentences, such as we must need pay attention to the Brexit vote, for example.

And it just seems very superfluous to me.

This is a really rare phrasing, and it just basically means must by necessity.

It’s kind of like saying it’s not that we must because I think we must.

It’s that situation and the world requires that we do it.

So we must by necessity.

I’m surprised to hear this guy saying it.

I just Googled him while you were talking, and he’s from North Carolina.

And I think of this as a Britishism, something you’re more likely to get from a Cambridge scholar than a guy writing a financial newsletter in the United States.

Yeah, and he lives in Virginia.

So I thought it was something maybe from the East Coast, obviously very American.

Yeah, I don’t think of it as American versus British as so much as just sort of archaic.

And it’s the kind of thing that when I’ve heard it in real life, it’s been with sort of a wink-wink, you know, oh, we must needs do this.

So somebody puts on an air of propriety and formality, to use that word.

Yeah, is that part of the tone of his writing at all in this marketing newsletter?

No, it’s actually quite the opposite.

This is him being very serious, and I think goes back to your definition, where we really do need to pay attention to what he’s saying.

What’s interesting here is that this may surprise you that needs is not a plural noun in this phrase.

It’s actually an adverb.

It’s an archaic adverb, kind of on the same lines as, say, once or twice.

And there were a few of these.

The Oxford English Dictionary has a pretty nice note on these very archaic adverbs.

So the fact that it follows must means that needs is an adverb describing must.

So we must needfully maybe is a way to think of it, as if needful were the word that was used there.

It really jumps out at me.

It sounds like maybe he’s saying it for emphasis.

I don’t know.

He really means it, right?

It appears to me when I’ve seen it that it is definitely for emphasis.

Well, that’s the most that we know on that, Judd.

Hope that helps.

Well, thank you very much.

Appreciate it.

I enjoy your show and keep up the good work.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

877-929-9673.

This is a show about language examined 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 Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

And joining us right now from all the way in New York City is John Chaneski, our quiz guy.

Yo, John.

Hey, yo, Martha.

Hi, Grant.

What is up?

Well, I am preparing, believe it or not, a little soon for this, but I’m still doing it.

I’m preparing for the National Puzzlers League convention this summer.

This year it’s in Boston.

And I’m boning up on the NPL puzzles, what we call flats.

And I thought I’d do a little puzzle about some of the puzzle types we use.

Oh, boy.

Now, I know, whenever I get the NPL in here, it’s always a little tricky.

Now, I may have mentioned that among the puzzle types the NPL uses, there’s one called a false derivative.

That puzzle usually applies the relationship between two words to two other words that use a different relationship.

Like, for example, if the plural of mouse is mice, then the false plural of spouse is spice.

Right.

So that’s what we call a false plural.

Now, there are many, many different kinds of falsities.

Let’s try a few, okay?

All right.

All right.

I’ll give you an example and then a clue to the falsity.

For example, if I was going to use what we just used, there’s just one mouse but many mice.

I have a blank, but a bigamist has blank.

Okay.

Got it?

Gotcha.

Okay.

So, if you sit and think, you will eventually have thought.

Should your leaky dingy blank, you can say it has…

Sought.

Sought.

Yeah, sink and sought.

Sink and sought.

Yes, that’s a false past tense.

Well done.

You may be smart, but I am smarter.

Brooklyn may be blank from here, but Montauk is even blank.

Oh, I see.

East and Easter.

Yes, Brooklyn is east of here, but Montauk is even Easter.

False comparative.

Gotcha.

Very good.

My right shoe is tied.

My left shoe is now retied.

When I commute to work, I take the blank there, and then I blank back home.

Rebus?

Yes.

Bus and rebus, that’s nice.

Bus and rebus, a false reiterative.

I’ll use this lever to get some leverage.

Oops, I’m naked.

Better put on some blank so that I’m wearing some blank.

Some clothes, so you’re wearing clothage?

No, think of another word.

Pants, pants.

The first one’s a four-letter word.

Genes and genage?

Garb and garbage.

There we go.

Yes, very good.

Garb and garbage.

That acrobat is very, well, acrobatic.

And check out my blank farm.

Tiny and busy.

These insects are certainly very blank.

Ant and antic.

Yes.

Ant and antibiotic.

In case you’re sick, yes, use those ants.

False adjective.

There’s no color in this photo, so I’ll colorize it.

I want my electric keyboard to sound like a church blank,

So I’ll touch the button that will blank it.

Organize it.

Organ and organize.

Organ and organize, right.

A false verb, right.

Why that little imp is so impish.

Your wordplay is somewhat like a blank.

It’s very blank.

Your wordplay is somewhat…

Pun and punish?

Yes.

Your pun is somewhat like, your wordplay is somewhat like a pun.

It’s very pun-ish.

Oh, pun-ish.

Right.

So true.

So true.

You guys, I really should think about joining the National Puzzlers League.

You have fun like this all the time.

I would love seeing my name at the bottom of the list.

When the scores are posted, I’d be like, there he is.

I always know where to find myself.

There you go.

So that was a flat?

These are kinds of flats.

Yeah.

Usually a flat is a little verse.

Mine didn’t rhyme, at least not all the time, but flats usually rhyme.

And at the beginning of the flat, you’d get what kind of wordplay is involved in the flat.

These are all what we call false derivatives.

Got it.

Thank you, John.

That was a great quiz.

Really appreciate it.

Thank you, guys.

See you soon.

Bye, John.

And if you’d like to talk with us about language, any aspect whatsoever, give us a call, 877-929-9673,

Or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Yeah.

Hi.

Hi, who’s this?

My name is Suhail Rahim.

Welcome to the show, Suhail.

I’m calling from the Dallas-Fort Worth area, and actually I have a mystery that I’ve been trying to solve for the last 45 years.

Oh, wow.

I used to be at a boarding school in England in the early 70s, and we had a German exchange student who came over from Germany.

And one night, all of us were sitting around telling jokes and riddles and so on.

And after a while, this German guy says, I want to ask you something.

So we said, fire away.

And he said, what’s the difference between a frog?

And we said, OK, what’s the difference between a frog and what?

He said, no, what’s the difference between a frog?

And he repeated that a couple of times.

So obviously, none of us knew what he was talking about.

So he said, I’ll give you the answer.

And he said, the greener it is, the faster it swims.

So, again, that didn’t make any sense to us.

And we asked him a couple of times to try and explain it, but obviously something was getting lost in the translation.

So that’s where it basically ended.

But I’m sure there was something in German, some expression in German that made sense.

But in English, obviously, we couldn’t understand what he was talking about.

So I’m trying to look for an answer for that.

So the joke is, what’s the difference between a frog?

And then the answer is, the greener it is, the faster it swims.

Right.

Right. And it doesn’t make sense.

Absolutely. So that’s all I know, and I’m trying to find the answer.

You know what’s funny about this is that it’s part of a whole genre of German jokes.

One of these is called an antivitz, which means anti-joke.

And they’re just these ridiculous jokes.

There are lots of them about frogs.

There are lots of them that go like, what’s yellow and is a banana?

Or what’s the difference between a stork?

A stork has two equally long hind legs and especially the left one.

I mean, they make no sense at all.

Okay.

Yeah.

I have a German-speaking friend who said, oh, yeah, we grew up on those.

They’re just hilarious, aren’t they?

And at first I was thinking, no, but the more of them she told me, it’s sort of like they sort of get you and they start to be funny.

There are a whole lot of them that involve two skyscrapers in the basement.

Oh, really?

Yeah, which they’re just completely obscure.

Or two cows sitting on a park bench knitting.

They’re just really, really, really silly.

And I don’t know what it says about the German national character, but these kinds of jokes are really popular among German speakers.

So it wasn’t a joke that his schoolmate made up.

It was something that came from the whole German culture.

Yeah, that’s a classic, the one about the frog.

Oh, that’s amazing.

I mean, obviously, I’ve been trying to understand it for the last 45 years, and I’ve told so many people about it.

And we all ended up laughing because it’s just so ridiculous.

And I didn’t know the background to this, but now it makes perfect sense.

Exactly.

Well, that’s exactly it, that they’re just so ridiculous.

Like, here’s another one.

Two men walk across a bridge.

One falls into the water.

The other is called Helmut.

Because they take the form of a joke and you think, oh, yeah, OK, I’ve got a good premise here.

This is good. You’re setting this up. And then there’s nothing.

There’s nothing.

OK. OK. All right.

So did we solve this 45 year mystery for you?

Oh, I did. Absolutely. Thank you. I’ll probably be on the lookout for more of these now.

Well, Google the word that Martha came up with.

Antivitz, A-N-T-I-W-I-T-Z. And you’ll find a bunch more of these.

And I will tell you, too, that it’s not just the Germans.

The Chinese do this, too, and they go by a name that translates as cold jokes.

This is amazing.

Thank you so much.

Sure.

We’re glad to help.

All right.

Thank you.

Take care now.

Bye-bye.

Thanks.

Bye-bye.

Do you want to hear a Chinese cold joke?

Yes.

So this is like the equivalent of the German antivitz.

Yeah.

It goes, a steamed bun was walking down the street one day, and this steamed bun got hungry.

So he took a bite of himself, and then he was a steamed stuffed bun.

It’s so stupid.

It is dumb.

It’s so stupid.

But interestingly enough, in China, if somebody tells you a joke like that, a cold joke like that, you’re supposed to act as if it’s cold.

You’re supposed to shiver or say, whoa, there’s a cold wind blowing.

Oh, interesting.

Isn’t that cool?

Yeah, that is cool.

Yeah.

Tell us your cold jokes, your anti-vitz jokes, your weird non-sequitur jokes.

877-929-9673 or send them an email to words@waywordradio.org and we’ll try to share some of them on future shows.

Here’s a proverb in Hindi that I like.

It translates as, one who knows no dance claims that the stage is tilted.

Oh, is this a little bit of sour grapes?

Yeah, yeah.

You decide the thing you can’t have must be bad anyway.

Or you’re outsourcing the blame.

It’s not that you don’t really know how to dance.

It’s that the floor is tilted.

Or you’ve had it too many.

Right, right.

This dance was rigged.

877-929-9673 or talk to us on Twitter @wayword.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hey, how you guys doing?

Doing well.

Who’s this?

This is Otura Moon.

I’m calling from Northern California, Humboldt State.

Welcome to the show. What can we do for you?

Well, I had a question about a word that I want to say I heard it on maybe like a news program recently dealing with the elections.

They were talking about, I guess, maybe why we didn’t get a straight shot from the media or why the media dropped the ball, etc.

And I heard somebody say a creative class. I just didn’t know who they were talking about.

So, yeah, I think they use it in the terms of trying to describe people inside of the media or something to deal with a group of people that were somehow this creative class.

I didn’t know if it worked in the way that the working class works.

Is it upper class, lower class?

Who is the creative class?

I’ve never heard that term.

That’s a really good one.

There’s a book called The Rise of the Creative Class, published in 2002 by Richard Florida, where he popularized this term and kind of came up with this description, which includes people who are creative and innovative in their work by necessity, let’s say engineers and people working in tech and even artists, of course, people who obviously think of as creative.

And also the group of people who work in knowledge-based industries, so people who maybe work in data mining or data analysis or even journalists, obviously, who would be included in knowledge-based industries.

And together, his premise is that where you see these clusters of people in the creative class, you tend to see thriving economies and you tend to see what the future is going to look like.

And he’s published a couple other books since and drastically revised his first book to accommodate new information and criticisms and other things.

But in general, his theory has found to hold some water.

You do tend to find that group of people, as he described them, in these places in the United States that look like what we’re all going to become.

Okay.

And so that means people, not people who work in the manufacturing, unfortunately, and not people who tend to work in these agrarian jobs, which are rapidly disappearing or becoming corporations and not family-run businesses.

Yeah, which do require creativity.

But not the level he’s talking about where you create something not just for yourself, but you create concepts, ideas, systems that will spread like a meme to the rest of the world and become the new way of working.

Right. And I remember when Florida’s book came out and all of these city officials all over the country were reading it and trying to figure out how to attract the creative class to their cities with progressive legislation. How can we pass laws that will draw these people to our urban centers?

And some places have done it. I was studying urban planning at the time, and the book was handed around like crazy, and people were talking about his ideas. And again, there are obviously some criticism, but there’s no idea that goes unassailed, right? But in general, it’s only been

15 years or so, but it’s kind of been very predictive of what has turned out to be true again and again and again. The other thing that he said in the book, which is an important part of it, is that creative types, and again, remember, it’s more than just artists and musicians. They tend to cluster together. They want to be near each other. So that’s part of what’s happening.

We can see that in migration patterns. Okay. Well, cool. Thank you so much for your call. Really appreciate it. Hey, thank you guys so much. You guys are doing the Lord’s work. I really appreciate the show. It’s a lot of fun. Take care. Thanks a lot. Bye-bye.

I remember reading this story in The New Yorker years ago about the creative class in Detroit back when Motown was a huge thing. And it was just this amazing critical mass of people in the same neighborhood, you know, Aretha Franklin, Billy Davis, all those people right there in one small place. And just what a yeasty creative environment that can be. Just all kinds of things bubbling up.

You are the catalyst for the person next to you and they are your catalyst as well. Exactly. Right. We both would love to live in an environment like that. Let’s go find one. Well, I think this studio works.

One thing to say about creative class is Richard Florida may have popularized the term with his 2002 book, but he didn’t coin it. It’s at least 100 years old, though its meaning has been changed over the years. Yeah, it’s been around for a while.

Call us to talk about the terms that interest you, 877-929-9673, or send an email to words@waywordradio.org. I have a couple of other German anti-jokes. These are these jokes in German that just don’t make sense. These are the translations I’m sharing with you.

Two thick feet are crossing the street. One thick foot says to the other thick foot, hello. They’re so stupid. One more. Two skyscrapers are sitting in the basement knitting mopeds. What’s wrong with this picture? Mopeds are crocheted. They just, I don’t know.

The non-joke jokes from the Germans. The non-joke jokes from the Germans. Do they do that in a language you speak? Let us know, 877-929-9673, or send them an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hi, this is Sam from Dallas. Hi, Sam. Welcome to the show. Hey, Sam. Well, thank you. When I was growing up, my daddy always had a phrase he used in the description of people whom he trusted, who were of good character, sort of like the Boy Scout, trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, and so forth.

He would always say that person, either she or he, is a person is all wool and a yard wide. And I’ve always wondered where that came from. I don’t know what it means. Is there an origin for that? There is an origin to that. So for you, it means what the person is trustworthy? That’s correct.

So reliable and trustworthy. All right. So I know this predates us all, but back in the era of big textile mills in this country where wool was processed to make clothing, certainly as late as the late 1880s, there was a company out of New York that advertised that its fabric for its clothes was all wool and a yard wide. And this slogan was picked up by many other companies as well.

And what they meant was, is that the fabric wasn’t like they didn’t cheat it a little bit, make it a little less wide than a yard, but also that it wasn’t shoddy. And now by shoddy, S-H-O-D-D-Y, I don’t mean our current use of shoddy. I mean the former use of shoddy, where shoddy was the name for cloth that was made from scrap cloth, where you would gather up all the clothing and shred it and have this really fine fiber base and then make an almost felted or not quite wool material out of it.

And so it tended to come apart easy, but you could use it for cheap clothing or filling and cushions and that sort of thing. And so this shoddy material, this manufacturer, I want to let people know I haven’t simply bought up bales of used cloth and shredded it and made new clothes out of it. This is the original wool stuff. It’s exactly a yard wide, and you can trust me on that.

So it’s like an advertising slogan? Yeah, an advertising slogan, yeah. You can actually look in old newspapers and still find it, like zillions of them in the 1800s that used all wool in a yard wide, and by the late 1800s, they started to be used colloquially and figuratively to refer to somebody who was true to their word.

Well, that’s really interesting, because I used to go to the fabric store with my mother and see the big bolts of fabric and those huge tables. And then my daddy would use this phrase, and I thought there was probably some connection, but I didn’t know what. Well, there we go. Yeah. There you go. Wow. Well, that’s perfect. I really appreciate your taking my question. Thank you.

It’s our pleasure. And, you know, Sam, at one point, it got altered a little bit, and it was just shortened to all wool. And you’ll still occasionally sometimes see somebody say, yeah, he’s all wool. But that’s, again, just the shortened version of the whole expression, he’s all wool in a yard wide. Very good. Very good.

Well, thank you so much. I appreciate it. Thank you, Sam. Thank you. We love the show. Oh, thank you very much. Really appreciate it. Bye-bye. Bye.

877-929-9673. Here’s a sweet little term from Appalachia, handful of minutes. Can you guess what a handful of minutes is? A short while, maybe? Well, it has to do with smallness. It means that something’s small. She ain’t no bigger than a handful of minutes, but she can whoop us. I’ve known a few women like that in my time. I know, right? No bigger than a handful of minutes.

877-929-9673. 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 ancient Greek historian Herodotus once wrote about a tyrant who lived in the late 6th century BC. And this tyrant named Histiaeus wanted to get a message to a fellow tyrant in the region to conspire to revolt against the Persians.

But if you’re going to send a message like that by a messenger, you don’t want to get caught, right? So he devised this clever way. How do you get a message like that to somebody else in writing? And he figured out a way to do it, which was that he summoned his most faithful servant, shaved the guy’s head, tattooed the message on the guy’s head, and then let his hair grow back, and then sent the servant off to this other tyrant, his fellow tyrant, to deliver the message by saying to the tyrant, hey, shave my head. There’s a message there. Pretty smart, right? Right, right.

Must not have been urgent. I guess not. But I thought that was a really cool story, and it turns out that there’s a term for this kind of covered writing. Oh, interesting. And that is steganography. Oh, I know that word. I figured you would. I was going to point out that it comes from the Greek word steganos, which means covered and is related to the name of the dinosaur that’s covered. Stegosaurus. Exactly. And scale, or plaques almost, right? Yeah, those bony plates. Plates. Stegosaurus and steganography.

But I figured you would be familiar with modern day steganography. Yeah, so this is a method of encoding a message into something that looks innocuous. Typically, you include it in an image where you just say, oh, that’s a really beautiful landscape that you’ve sent me here. Why did you send me a picture of a mountain lake? I have no idea. But when you decode it with the right software, it will deliver the message that was hidden inside the bits and bytes all along. Exactly.

Or you can just make it really, really small. Right. Person enlarges the image. Or you and I have talked before about how if you’re building a website, you can hide text on the website if the background is white. And the text is white. Yeah. You use a font and color it white, then it’s invisible till you mouse over it. And some puzzle sites do this as well. They can have the question on the page and then you highlight on the screen to see the

Answer. Oh, that’s also steganography. Very easy way to do without any extra code. Interesting.

Yeah, the image steganography, you can actually practice it yourself. Just Google around. You’ll find some software out there, and you can have fun sending secret messages to your friends.

Oh, how cool. Also, the bad guys use it for what that’s worth, but you don’t have to be a bad guy to do it.

Oh, that’s very interesting. I knew you would know the word steganography. Sure. This is a show about words and language and how we talk to each other and apparently how we send ciphers back and forth.

Give us a call, 877-929-9673. Talk to us on Twitter @wayword. Or send us an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, Martha. How are you?

Hi, I’m doing well. Who’s this?

My name is Jim. I’m calling from Pitsilanti, Michigan.

Well, welcome to the show. How can we help you?

So I am a big fan of Jeeps, and I’ve read about them. I’ve studied them. I drive them. One thing that’s always bothered me, though, is I don’t know the origin of the word Jeep.

So there’s a big controversy over how the vehicle itself came to be called Jeep. But apparently the word was in use prior to that, especially in military circles, to mean anything untested. But I don’t know the origin of the word, so I was just wondering if you and Grant might be able to help.

Boy, howdy, can we? Yes.

So there’s a controversy about Jeep? I mean, how serious can this controversy be?

So some people say it comes from a slurring of the initial GP, which would stand for government, and P meaning an 80-inch wheelbase vehicle. Other people say it comes from Eugene the Jeep, which was a cartoon character from Popeye. Other people say it was just a slang term that a test driver for Willis Overland came up with.

So there’s some controversy over that, but it was apparently in use, like I said, to mean, especially in the military, anything untested. So let’s break this all down as quickly as we can, because it can get complicated.

The GP origin is not believed by any lexicographer, etymologist who works in historical language or in military language. So GP, as an acronym, is not, as far as I’m concerned, the origin of JEEP, J-E-E-P. I know people will swear up and down. And the wheelbase thing, that is as far off as any etymology I’ve ever heard. That’s ridiculous. And you can tell them that I said that.

So the truth is we have a long historical printed record showing that Jeep pops into the language at exactly the same time that Eugene the Jeep, which is a weird fourth dimensional character, shows up in the Popeye cartoons. We see it show up there and he makes this. He goes, Jeep, Jeep. That’s all he ever says.

And pretty soon after that, it also shows up in military language to refer to newbies or recruits or, you know, the green guides who are just showing up and don’t know how to do anything for anyone ever. And then not long after that, it shows up meaning just a foolish person or just someone who’s offensive. And then not long after that, it shows up to be applied to these vehicles.

And the thing is, like, there’s so much overlap during all these uses. It perfectly characterizes how new words enter language. There was always at the beginning this kind of scattered period where people are kind of using it a little differently from each other or using it in ways that they’re not sure about, but they’re trying their best to get it right. And I see this in the printed record exactly here.

So in my opinion, and it’s backed up by the work of lexicographers like John Leiter, who worked on the Historical Dictionary of American Slang and did all the fieldwork for this. It does come from Eugene, the Jeep, and it was just floating out there in the ether used for a wide variety of things and ultimately came to be applied to this really useful four-wheeled vehicle.

So there’s no historical record of it being used prior to that, like in the World War I era?

No, no. We find it as early as 1936, but not as far back as World War I. If there are uses of jeep referring to a vehicle in World War I, I will be astonished. And I would love to see those because it will overturn a lot of information that we have in our standard slang lexical works.

Thank you so much. I appreciate that. That will give me the hands up and a lot of arguments I’ve been having. So thank you.

Well, that’s what we’re here for. By the way, if you want the background on all this, just go to your library and look for the Historical Dictionary of American Slang and you will find a lot of information, printed records, recording the citations of this word being used in all these different ways.

Great. Thank you so much, Grant. I appreciate it. Thank you, Martha.

All right. Thanks for calling.

All right. Have a good day.

Thanks, Jim. Appreciate it.

Take care. Bye-bye.

Eugene the Jeep.

Now, see, the GP thing was something I grew up hearing again and again.

Yeah, but the thing is those false etymologies do that. They fly around, and they’re easy to remember.

Exactly. That’s what I was going to say.

But it’s funny how often they’re wrong, like the easy thing that somebody told you. You’re like, you’re saying to yourself, well, how could this fourth dimensional little character that says Jeep Jeep apply to this vehicle?

They were known to be really unruly, like riding a Bronco that they bounced all around, right? Riding in one of those original Jeeps was not a smooth ride. They were difficult to control. They were open on the sides and the top sometimes. They got you from A to B, but not much else.

Okay.

And the cartoon character was like that?

No, he was fourth dimensional. He would pop up here and there and do all this stuff. He’s very hard to explain. To find those almost like outer space character popping up in a time in American history where you’re like, wait, we actually thought about fourth dimensional characters in Popeye of all places? That’s weird.

Yeah, he was there. I have my Saturday night all planned out and I’m going to read up on that.

877-929-9673 is the number to call to talk about language or send us an email. The address is words@waywordradio.org.

We were talking earlier about euphemisms for age, not saying exactly how old you are. Jan Tavares wrote on our Facebook page, it’s not quite the same, but my mother-in-law says her grown children are from her husband’s first marriage to her. I think that’s pretty clever.

So that misleads people into thinking that she’s younger than she is.

Oh, so you’re the trophy wife. You must be very young.

Exactly. That’s nice.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Yes, hi. My name is Jennifer Strauss, and I’m calling today from Traverse City, Michigan.

Hi, Jennifer. How are you doing?

I’m doing really well. How are you guys doing?

We’re doing well. What’s going on in Traverse City?

So I have a question that kind of came out of a recent situation that I’m in. I’m an extremely active and energetic person who has recently had foot surgery. And my recovery required that I not walk and be very still for three weeks. Friends who know me really well have been calling and asking me how I’m doing. And I find myself telling them that I’m going a bit stir-crazy.

So last weekend I was listening to the show, and I thought about myself telling them that I’m going a bit stir-crazy, and I thought I would give you guys a call and just find out the origins of that saying and what does it really mean.

Oh, gosh.

Well, our sympathies, first of all.

So now you’re bionic, right?

Oh, yeah, now I’m bionic.

Yeah, it was surgery due to triathlon, extreme triathlon for many years. It sort of did a number on one of my feet. So I’m very grateful to have this done so I can get back out there again.

Oh, wow.

So, Martha, she’s super athletic, and she’s stuck at home for three weeks, and she’s stir-crazy.

Oh, gosh. That’s just awful. I really feel for you, especially if you’ve been so active before.

Well, I’m wondering, when you’re sitting around there thinking about the term,

Do you have any theories that come to mind about why it might be stir-crazy?

You know, until lately, I’d never really thought about it.

Oh, where did that come from?

Some origins have to be in reference to people who have been trapped inside or not able to move a lot.

But the stir part, I didn’t understand, you know, and certainly don’t want to use the crazy part to offend anyone.

You know what I mean?

In terms of mental health or whatever.

Right.

So I just wondered about, you know, the origins.

So trapped inside and not able to move a lot.

Indeed.

Well, that would make a lot of sense.

I know for years I thought it just meant you were wanting to stir.

But you couldn’t stir, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. But it doesn’t have anything to do with the verb, actually.

Right.

Stir is an old word that means prison.

Oh, my goodness. There it is.

If you’re in the stir, you’re in prison.

Yeah.

There it is. I did not know that.

Doing a dime in the stir.

Very interesting.

So being locked up in prison and feeling that, oh, my goodness, there it is.

Very interesting.

Yeah, it’s a term that may go back to the language of the Ramani, the people who originated in northern India and kind of spread out all over the world.

But yeah, stir is an old slang term for prison.

Very interesting. Well, I certainly don’t feel like I’m in prison, but at times it has felt similar.

Yeah, your movement is limited for sure.

So the Ramani word is something like stirabin or sterapin or something like that.

Something like that, yeah.

And we find it back as far as 1835.

Stir been a jail.

Wow.

Yeah.

And then stir crazy itself is only a little over 100 years old, right?

Correct.

Yeah.

So that was coined in the early part of the 1900s.

Interesting.

So we hope we helped you pass the time for three minutes anyway.

I thank you very much.

Very interesting.

So thanks a lot for answering my question.

Our pleasure.

Sure thing.

Good luck with your recovery.

Oh, it’s going well.

Thank you very much.

Oh, good.

Good.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Stir crazy.

You can find a bunch of songs on Google Books that it shows up in.

There’s some of them in the Romani language.

Oh, really?

The people we used to know is gypsies, right?

-huh.

My mush is leld to stir-a-bin, to stir-a-bin, to stir-a-bin.

My mush is leld to stir-a-bin, to the tan where Mandy gins.

I don’t know what it means.

But stir-a-bin is that word where we got the stir part and turned into, stir-a-bin means prison.

And the stir entered into English.

Oh, that’s fascinating.

Is that a song about being in prison?

I believe so.

I could not find the origin of it.

It just shows up in one of my slang dictionaries, and they don’t explain it.

That’s so interesting.

It actually sounds like just sort of pacing around in a cell.

Yeah, right?

Like a tiger in a cage.

Going wall to wall all day long.

Stirbing.

Going stir crazy.

Well, we’ll help you with whatever comes to mind, whether you’re trapped at home or somewhere else.

877-929-9673.

We have the master key for every door.

Send us an email to words@waywordradio.org.

We were talking earlier about different ways to fudge your age, to euphemize whatever your age is.

And on our Facebook group, Suzanne McCarthy said, my mother used to say she was plenty nine.

I’m plenty nine.

And Tiffany Sorensen said, I have a friend who states that she weighs a hundred and plenty pounds.

I like that.

I weigh a hundred and plenty.

That’s great.

That’s all you need to say, right?

877-929-9673.

Hi, who’s calling?

This is Mark, a wrap of staff that’s calling from La Mesa, California.

Well, welcome, Mark. What’s up?

Well, I had a question about a word that my uncle, who was a colonel in the Air Force, used to use when I was younger.

He would say, it’s time to get KIP, K-I-P.

And I just assumed from his mannerisms and the way he was saying it, it was time to get a nap, sleep.

But I had never heard that word before or since.

So I was wondering where the origin is and if that’s what it means.

To get KIPP.

Yeah, and what armed service was he in?

He was a colonel in the Air Force.

Was he American?

Yes.

Interesting. Was he stationed overseas, perhaps in the UK?

He did serve during the Korean War.

Interesting.

I ask because KIPP is really kind of almost exclusively a British term.

Most Americans only know it from their reading and don’t actually tend to use it at all.

But it has meant to sleep or to take a nap there for quite some time.

But originally, a kip was a brothel.

And it comes from a Dutch word meaning a house or hut, a small house or kind of a shack.

By the mid-1800s, it settles out and a kip is either a boarding house or a place where you can just kind of rent a bed for a while.

Or it means a nap or a short sleep.

It usually doesn’t necessarily mean, you know, a full night’s sleep, although, again, like a lot of kind of less standard words, it varies depending on the source and place.

Interesting. Very good. Thank you for all the knowledge.

Yeah, our pleasure. So do you use the word Kip?

I do not. I’ve heard it one other time used, actually, in an episode. I was watching television. It was an episode of Mask, the television show from the 70s and 80s.

Sure.

And the commanding officer had used it.

It was the only other time, and it kind of, my ears perked up,

Because I’ve heard that word before, but never since.

Huh. So it can be both a noun and a verb, right?

Let’s get some kip or let’s kip.

That’s right. Yep.

I was kipping.

Right. You can kip. I kipped really well last night.

Got some kip. Right.

Well, maybe we’ll start interjecting it back into our vocabulary here in Southern California.

I think that’s a good idea, Mark.

Thank you so much for calling.

Thank you.

Appreciate it.

Thank you.

Have a good day.

You too.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Yeah, so originally a brothel.

But brothel also had different connotations.

It just wasn’t a place where you found the pleasure of a lady.

It was also sometimes a place where you had a room for the night, right?

Yeah.

And the pleasure of the lady was a secondary benefit.

Caught up on sleep that you don’t get.

Yeah, in the barracks.

Yeah, exactly.

Call us with your language question.

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

And you can also find us on our Facebook group.

I just can’t help myself, Grant.

I’ve got to share some more of these German anti-jokes.

This one goes, there are two muffins sitting in the oven,

And one of them says to the other,

Man, it’s hot in here.

And the other muffin says,

Oh my God, a talking muffin.

So these are the German non-joke jokes.

Oh, that one’s actually a pretty good joke.

I know.

They’re just so silly.

877-929-9673.

Want more A Way with Words?

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So leave us a message at 877-929-9673 and we’ll take a listen.

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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 guide 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.