Sticky Wicket (episode #1622)

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. We heard from Kelly Hayes in Carson City, Nevada, who says that she recently stopped drinking alcohol, but she’s irked by the term mocktail.

She says most other words to describe a beverage without liquor are negative, so I’m looking for a positive phrase or word. And Grant, I’m sort of irked by the word mocktail as well. I mean, if you invite people over for an evening of mocktails, I think somehow that suggests there’ll be something missing, when actually these drinks can be quite sophisticated and complex and an end in themselves.

And I was surprised to learn that the word mocktail has been around since at least the 1930s, but I’m wondering if other people would like an alternative to the word mocktail.

Yeah, I don’t feel like they need a separate name. For example, you can have artisanal sodas and they are outstanding. And artisanal sodas come with high quality flavored syrups and high quality carbonated water and you add fruit to them and in a fancy glass and that’s a heck of a drink.

And it’s basically the equivalent of a mocktail, but it doesn’t need to be called a mocktail. It’s just a fantastic soda. But if you’re specific about what you’re going to be serving, I think what she’s looking for is a name for a drink that has its own identity, sort of like vegan or vegetarian. It doesn’t mention what it doesn’t have.

The best alternative I’ve seen is hentail. I like that. Oh, hentails. Yeah, sure. I mean, the alternative, I think, is just to reclaim the word. You know, so many words get reclaimed, words that initially sound negative. But I’m wondering what our listeners think about that.

Absolutely. If you’ve got an alternate name for drinks that ordinarily have alcohol, but in this case don’t, something other than a mocktail, we’d love to know, particularly if it’s something real that you’ve heard out there in a while.

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

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Lauren Daniel. I’m calling from coastal North Carolina near a little town called Swansboro.

What’s on your mind, Lauren?

So I grew up listening to my mother and my grandmother use obscure terms all the time. So the one in particular I wanted to reach out to y’all about was the term sticky wicket. My mother would always say that phrase. My grandmother would say it.

And it was always used to kind of talk about a conundrum that one might be in, like if they were in a tough spot and not sure how to act. They were in a sticky wicket.

Were they cricket fans?

No, not at all.

And that’s why I was so curious about it because it just seems like an obscure term to me. And so I was just wondering where it could have even come from.

But you knew enough about it to know that it was from cricket.

Well, I’ve put that together over the years with my father.

Gotcha.

But even, but I mean, I’ve never watched a game before, but I can imagine that maybe they get sticky. Does wickets get sticky? I don’t know.

Those wickets do get sticky, or at least they used to. It’s all the gummy bears they eat while they’re playing.

I know. Yeah, so this probably isn’t a concrete term.

Well, it’s really interesting. It does come from the game of cricket. And I’m trying to understand the game of cricket because it’s becoming more and more popular in this country.

I just read an article about the fact that it’s becoming really popular in North Texas, for example, because of all the South Asians who have settled there. So I think that in your future may be a cricket match.

But let me tell you about this phrase. It refers to a wicket. Now, in cricket, a wicket is a set of three stumps with two sticks across the top. And there’s one wicket at each end of a strip of grass called the pitch.

And the batter stands in front of the wicket and tries to prevent those sticks from getting knocked off by the other team’s bowler. And the batter also tries to hit the ball out of reach of the defending team.

I’ve picked up this much. And the term wicket has also extended to not just those little wooden structures that you’ll see, but the grassy space in between them.

And if that space is wet, then the ball is going to bounce really erratically. It may skid across the grass or it may take out a chunk of turf. And what happens is that the stretch between the wickets becomes a lot more unpredictable. It becomes harder to navigate.

So it’s called a sticky wicket. And the phrase playing on a sticky wicket or batting on a sticky wicket means metaphorically that you’re in a difficult or awkward or unpredictable situation.

But Grant and I have a wonderful time with cricket terms because there are so many of them that haven’t found their way into the language necessarily, but are just really fun to say.

Dibbly-dobbly.

Yeah, that’s a good one.

Silly mid-off.

Or even have a term, Lauren, for the razzing that they do of each other. Sledging is what they call it when they try to distract their opponents by teasing them or making fun of them or making them laugh.

It’s called sledging. And there are lots of sledging remarks that are collected of some of the famous sledging that’s been done or just because it’s well known. Just great players with great sledging.

Yeah, I like that better than trash talk.

Sledging.

Lauren, so I hope we’ve helped some.

Well, thank you all so much for your time. I always enjoy listening to you. I always learn so much. So many things I didn’t know I didn’t know. So thanks for all of your insight.

Well, Lauren, call us again sometime next time you hear something like that.

Yeah, take care.

You bet.

You bet.

Thank you all. Have a great day.

Okay.

You too.

Bye-bye.

I happen to be looking at a newspaper archive and specifically the Minneapolis Journal from Sunday, July 15th, 1906. And I came across a wonderful headline.

Noisy hungry frogs saddened farmers life. They scare his cattle and they also eat his flannel shirt.

They ate his flannel shirt, huh? What?

Yeah, I almost didn’t want to read the story, but it was a wire story about a farm in Lehigh County, Pennsylvania. It was just four short paragraphs.

And it was about a farmer named Alvin Shoemaker who was complaining that these large frogs had become pests on his farm. And the story said their croaking scares his cattle when he drives them to water.

And last year they devoured his strawberry crop. And then two years ago, they got into his summer house and ate a half dozen of his best flannel shirts, which lay there in the laundry basket.

There’s just so much that was unsaid in that story.

Yes, I’m confused. I didn’t know that frogs would eat flannel, but okay.

I guess, Mr. Shoemaker, I’ll take your word for it at this distance.

Yeah, I wonder about that, too.

But noisy, hungry frogs saddened farmer’s life. That sounds like a riddle or a palindrome, but it’s none of these things.

Yeah, right.

Send your linguistic mysteries and your weird headlines, 877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Good afternoon. This is Nell Weber from Virginia Beach, Virginia.

Hello, Nell. Welcome to the show.

Hey, Nell. What’s up?

Thank you. In my family, my grandmother, and this started with my great-grandfather who was a farmer, and he used the term as clean as seven waters.

Now, he had a dog which he named Seven Waters, and somehow or another we always assumed that’s where the expression came from.

He had a dog named Seven Waters?

Yes, because that dog could clean a plate so clean that it looked like it had been washed.

I’m just imagining him standing on the porch yelling for seven waters.

Oh, absolutely. He was a farmer who was a little bit land poor, but he had 13 children, so he had no lack of help.

Child rich.

Yes, absolutely.

And one dog?

He had a pack of hunting dogs, but this dog would get there first and lick the plate. Absolutely nobody had anything left on the plate to even sniff at.

Oh, my gosh.

I don’t know if I’ve met a dog that can’t do that.

Yeah, I’m not sure that’s a special talent.

So seven waters, clean as seven waters.

Martha, I got a feeling here that there’s more to it than the dog.

Well, yeah, for sure.

Well, let’s talk about the word waters here.

I mean, usually water functions as a mass noun.

You know, that term applies to nouns that designate something that’s usually impossible to count.

Examples of mass nouns would be sand or cutlery or literature.

You know, usually those are not plural.

And in this case, the word water functions as a count noun.

It designates the use of water, that is, a rinse.

So seven waters, clean as seven waters, refers to each of seven consecutive uses of water.

Seven washes, seven rinses.

It’s an interesting notion because there’s a reference to this kind of thing in the Bible.

In 2 Kings, Naaman is told to wash seven times in the muddy Jordan River.

And at first he refuses, and then he goes along with it, and he’s healed of leprosy.

And so seven traditionally symbolizes perfection.

And if you’re washing seven times, then powerful things can happen.

And Grant is not just in that culture, right?

No, it isn’t.

As a matter of fact, in Islam, there’s a tradition of seven waters as well.

And it shows up in a variety of languages spoken in countries where Islam is a dominant religion.

For example, in Farsi, to wash with seven waters is a way of saying, as one reference book puts it, to perform one’s ablutions with great nicety and circumspection.

And in Farsi, it sounds something like, behefta abshastan.

So the seven waters are either a literal or figurative perfection, like Martha said, or completeness.

It ensures that something, maybe a person, a situation, a reputation is completely a perfectly clean.

And also in Kurdish, there is a saying or a proverb that’s something like, he is beyond seven waters, meaning he is beyond redemption, either literally beyond redemption of God or beyond redemption in a personal sense, like, oh, he’s a hopeless case. He’ll never change his ways.

Is this a common saying in English? I’ve never heard it anywhere else.

No, but Martha, it’s interesting, isn’t it, that it goes back that there might be that common shared, like Islam and Judaism and Christianity all have that shared religious root.

And I wouldn’t be surprised to find that the seven waters is connected there, you know, that all of these cultures share these common religious influences.

Right. And if you look at old newspapers from the early part of the 20th century, sometimes you’ll see laundry services that advertise seven waters.

That is, they’re supposedly rinsing your laundry seven times to get it super duper clean.

Oh, that’s something I really didn’t know. Thank you very much.

Thank you so much for calling.

Call us again sometime and you take care of yourself, all right?

All right. Thank you so much. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Good clean fun with us.

877-929-9673.

More about language and how we use it as A Way with Words continues.

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 here he is at the door with the smell of the sea and the spray and the seaweed in a sailor’s hat and a sailor’s coat.

It’s our quiz guy, John Chaneski.

Hi, John.

There is nothing like a dame.

Nothing in the world.

Yeah.

We’re talking about the ocean today.

It’s funny you should mention that because the quiz I have.

Hi, everybody, by the way.

Hello.

Hello.

Today’s quiz is called Cruisin’.

Now, I figure, you know, sometimes I avoid rhyming games because they’re a little easy.

But why not take it easy once in a while?

And one way to take it easy is to go on a cruise.

Now, it was within my lifetime that the cruise industry seemed to have discovered theme cruises, like foodie cruises and oldies music cruises, comic book characters, macrame, whatever, professor or wrestlers, anything, anything you want, you can go on a cruise for it.

But the original had to be the classic booze cruise, of course, because it rhymes.

And, you know, just a few days of relaxing and drinking with friends.

Now, I don’t drink, but I do appreciate a good rhyme.

When I hear booze cruise, I wonder what other rhyming cruises can be arranged.

For example, a subset of the booze cruise.

This trip is for people who make and sell their own beer and ale and want to compare notes and try each other’s stuff.

It’s called the…

Ale sale?

No, the brews cruise.

Oh, okay.

Cruise.

We’re going to just stick with cruise.

Oh, it’s also going to rhyme with cruise.

Okay.

Yeah, sure.

Like I said, I’m taking it easy on myself today.

Let’s cruise.

Now, some of these are very likely to exist.

Now, if you’re into murder mysteries, intrigue, Sherlock Holmes and such, you can find items to help you solve all over the ship on a…

Clues cruise.

Clues cruise.

You’ve got to know there’s got to be a clues cruise out there.

Must be.

Clue cruise or something.

They probably just call them murder mystery cruises.

Murder mystery cruises, yeah.

Yeah.

Now, if you’ve cruised before, you know that nearly every cruise features a few people who are fashionistas and seem to be there just to show off their Manolo Blahniks and their Christian Laboutons and other luxury footwear.

Let’s give them their own cruise and call it…

Shoes Cruise.

The Shoes Cruise, yes.

Now, sometimes you need to get away to take care of your mental health.

Let’s arrange a cruise for poor souls with abulomania, those affected with chronic indecisiveness.

We can have seminars on how to overcome it on the…

Choose Cruise.

The Choose Cruise.

Yes.

Now, every person who works with their hands deserves some time just to hang around others of their kind.

If you’re a woodworker or other kind of builder who wants to compare notes with other handy people, bring your favorite Phillips head to the…

Tools Cruise.

Screws.

Go, screws.

Screws, screws.

A little better, though.

I say Tools Cruise is not bad.

Not bad.

No, the Scruise Cruise.

John, thank you for taking us on this Amuse Cruise.

I really appreciate it.

That’s great.

Ring us on the telephone, 877-929-9673.

That’s toll free in the United States and Canada.

And if you’re anywhere else in the world, you can text us.

That phone number is on our website at waywordradio.org.

Hello, welcome to A Way with Words.

Well, hello.

This is Cher Lindbergh.

I’m from Minneapolis, Minnesota, but I have a cabin in Amory, Wisconsin.

So I live in two worlds.

What’s on your mind?

Well, I live in Minneapolis, and I’m born and raised in the Midwest.

And a hot dish to us Scandinavians is what the rest of the country calls a casserole.

It’s any kind of a mixture of, it could be anything from rice and hamburger to noodles, but it’s a hot casserole, and we call it a hot dish.

So I came across another definition from the new pastor of my church in Minneapolis, Unity Minneapolis.

He was from Alabama, born and raised in Alabama.

And the reason I noticed there was a difference is I, in front of the church, to welcome this brand new pastor from Alabama who had, he was, I think, in his 50s or 60s when he started in Minneapolis.

I told a joke in front of the entire congregation to welcome him.

And the joke went like this.

There were three people that were friends, and they were in the car, and they died in a car crash.

So all three of them went up to the pearly gates at the same time.

And the first one saw St. Peter at the pearly gates, and St. Peter looked at the woman and said, so what makes you think you deserve to get into heaven?

And the woman said, well, I’m a Catholic, and I have these rosary beads, and I use them so often to count my Hail Marys.

My rosary beads are so worn, they’re practically falling apart.

And St. Peter looks at her and says, all right, you’re in.

So the next one that arrived at the pearly gates was a man.

And St. Peter says, well, what makes you think you should get into heaven?

And this guy says, well, I’m a Baptist and I have a Bible.

And when I read my Bible, I read it so much that the words are worn and the pages are falling out.

So St. Peter says, all right, you’re in.

And the third one was a woman.

St. Peter said, what makes you think you can get into heaven?

And she said, well, I’m Lutheran.

And I know that it’s only by the love and the grace of God that you can get into heaven.

Just in case, I brought a hot dish.

Meaning a casserole, right?

Okay, so the whole congregation laughed.

And this poor Alabama minister is befuddled going, because in the South, a hot dish is a scantily clad female, attractive female.

They call him a hot dish.

Right.

So he couldn’t figure out, how is this scantily clad female going to help this woman get into heaven?

And he’s just amazed.

So later on, he tells us, could you explain that joke?

He wanted me to explain the joke.

And when I did, and he told us what he was expecting, we just howled even more.

So my question is, is it just the Midwest?

It’s the enunciation to it.

We call it a hot dish, meaning a casserole, not a hot dish.

Like what word?

And in the South, they call it a hot dish.

And that’s my question.

I didn’t hear that growing up when I was in Kentucky.

I’m wondering what you use in a hot dish.

What do you put in those?

It’s often cream of mushroom soup, hamburger, green beans, tater tots on top.

It’s often a starch, like noodles or rice or potatoes, mixed with some kind of meat in a cream sauce.

It’s usually a moist dish, like a casserole.

I guess that’s what I would say.

Yeah.

Those are all known to me from Missouri, but we didn’t call them hot dishes.

They were just casseroles.

Okay.

Yeah.

And you’ll find some arm wrestling online about whether one should call that a hot dish or a casserole.

People have really strong opinions about that.

They do.

This is mostly Minnesota and maybe a few of the surrounding states, Martha, but mostly Minnesota.

Right. Yeah.

I mean, to me, a hot dish is just a hot dish with a hot food in it.

But there’s a way to say it.

And I think I hear Cher saying it.

It’s not a hot dish.

It’s hot dish.

Hot dish.

Hot dish.

Yeah, almost like it’s one word, right?

It is one word.

It is one word.

It is one word.

Yeah, in the cookbooks, it’s one word, hot dish.

There was a survey conducted in 1986, supposedly, that recorded 3,732 different hot dish recipes in Minnesota.

There you go.

Yeah, lots of hot dish.

Most of them have cream of mushroom.

Cream of mushroom soup is one of the main ingredients.

It doesn’t happen.

Yeah, the Campbell’s people are happy.

Oh, they are thrilled.

Well, thank you so much, Cher, for your call.

We really appreciate it.

And that joke is funny.

I’m sure your pastor, he’s like, okay, I know I found a good bunch here.

This was a pleasure.

Okay.

Bon appetit.

Okay.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

And you can call us on WhatsApp.

Send us a voice note, in fact.

You can find that WhatsApp number on our website, waywordradio.org.

We had a voicemail from Annabelle who says that when her son was about four years old, he asked to see if they had something in the havenet.

And she said, what? The what?

And then she realized he was talking about their cabinet.

And to this day, the family calls the cabinet the havenet, which makes sense, right?

Right, because the cabinet has things.

Yeah, look in the cabinet.

Cabinet.

Sweet, little cute kid things.

Those are always the best.

I’m glad they were having it.

I’m having it too.

words@waywordradio.org.

Hi there, you have A Way with Words.

Hi there, this is Norman.

Hi Norman, where are you calling from?

I’m calling from Oakland, California.

Hi Norman, welcome to the show.

What can we do for you?

Well, I have a question. I recently made something called jok, J-O-O-K, which is also called konfit, kanji.

And I was wondering if the word kanjil originated from kanji or vice versa.

So is the word kanji originating from Asia or vice versa?

All right. You’re going to have to describe this dish so that people get a better clue why you think they might be related.

Besides the sound.

Kanji is rice boiled for at least three hours, and it creates a porridge.

But the porridge, if left to cool, it congeals.

And you can technically make paste out of it, to tell you the truth.

Right, put up wallpaper.

You definitely could.

So, yeah. So, Kanji was originally, for a long time, the name for this dish. It’s C-O-N-G-E-E. You used both the old pronunciation and the new one, which makes me think that you’re familiar with the more modern spelling as well, which is K-A-N-J-I, which has nothing whatsoever to do with the Japanese writing system.

And you also called it juk, which is either spelled J-O-O-K or J-U-K.

So three different names for this same dish.

So to answer your first question, no.

The word congealed is completely unrelated to the word kanji or kanji.

Completely unrelated.

It’s just a coincidence.

And I could see why you might think that because it congealed kind of looks like kanji.

And the way you might be confused is congealed is related to the French word congele, which is the past participle of congele, which means to freeze.

But there’s an L in there, and it shares a Latin root with words like gel and gelatin and jelly and gelato.

But let’s explore a little bit this dish because the reason it has so many names is because it is known throughout Asia and much of the world.

It’s called cayu in Japanese, kenda or kanda in Sri Lanka.

That juke name originally was Cantonese, which has been borrowed into other Chinese dialects and into Thai and also into Hawaii, where you’re more likely to hear juke or druk than your kanji or anything else.

And the word kanji comes from Tamil.

It was originally a word from India.

And variations on that word exist in most Indian languages.

And then English speakers got a hold of the food and the word in the 1600s, borrowed it into English, and never looked back.

What’s really interesting to me is that the word kanji is still used in English, but the only thing it has in common with dishes of that same name in Asia is rice.

A lot of times they’re very different dishes, just incredibly different dishes.

Well, that’s good to know.

And that’s also good to know that there was an association between the Indians and the Chinese, because I know their two cultures combined greatly.

Yeah, yeah. Even now, as two powers who are sometimes in political conflict and culture, they have a lot of back and forth.

And I think historically the ping pong of food and religion and literature and all that kind of stuff has been a real nice addition to the world.

I think the way the two pass things, good ideas back and forth between each other.

So, Norman, how did it turn out?

It was actually perfect.

But, you know, you have to trust because we generally don’t cook rice for five hours or three hours.

Three hours is what it was.

And you can get, out of one cup of rice, you can get quite a big pot of congee, which is, I mean, a full pot.

You can get a couple of quarts.

So it’s Chinese chicken soup, by the way.

And you can add cilantro, or some people add pork, or chicken, or a little bit of fish.

But it is their chicken soup.

That is what they have when they don’t feel good or if it’s a cold day.

It’s amazing.

Thanks for your perceptive question.

We really appreciate it.

Well, I appreciate your show.

You guys are great.

Keep up the good work.

Oh, it’s our pleasure.

Thanks so much, Norman.

Bye-bye.

Okay, bye now.

Bye.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Dave Cipollone from Pittsburgh, PA calling.

Hi, Dave.

Welcome to the show.

Hi, Dave.

I was watching a TV show and someone said, whenever you say, you know, whenever the reverend says, hold my, hold your peace.

He said it was P-I-E-C-E.

So I looked it up and I couldn’t really tell you that like what it was.

So I was reading a book by Geraldine Brooks.

His book was called March.

And it was about, you know, like the guy from Little Women.

And on page 254, she was talking to a surgeon and she said, I didn’t know.

I didn’t know what to say.

So I held my peace.

P-E-A-C-E.

Now, five pages later, her husband, who was very sick, was talking about going back into war, into the Civil War.

And she said, basically, if he did that, I would hold my peace again.

P-I-E-C-E.

So I’m thinking, well, which is it?

It looked like in the book March by Geraldine Brooks, it was the same context.

She was saying the same thing, but it was P-I-E-C-E versus P-E-A-C-E.

So I was like, which is it?

Oh, wow, that’s really interesting.

Just to clarify, in terms of the thing that they say at weddings, you know, if anybody knows why these two should not be joined together, speak now or forever hold your peace, that is P-E-A-C-E.

Yeah, it’s peace with the sense of an absence of noise or stillness or quiet.

For hundreds of years, the expression hold your peace or keep your peace or have your peace has meant to remain silent or just to maintain that stillness.

And people get confused about that because there’s also the entirely separate idiom of say your peace, you know, state your peace of a discussion.

And the idea there is sort of like if the discussion is a pie, you get to say your piece of it.

It’s one part of the conversation.

And then, you know, once you’re finished saying it, then you say, I’ve said my piece.

So two different pieces there.

Okay.

Thanks.

Thank you very much.

And now you will have peace of mind, right?

Yeah.

I’ll have peace of mind.

Yeah.

Very nice.

Okay.

Thank you for this good.

Thank you for this kind word.

Bye-bye.

Take care, Dave.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Thank you.

Well, if you’re struggling with a language question, we can probably provide you peace of mind.

Call us 877-929-9673 or send the question and email to words@waywordradio.org.

I happened to be stopped in traffic the other day and I got behind a Range Rover Velar. Velar. And I was thinking, who in the world names cars after linguistic terms like Velar?

I was so puzzled. I came back home and I looked it up. And actually, those Range Rovers, I’m sure everybody knows this but me, those Range Rovers are called Valars, V-E-L-A-R. And it’s derived from the Italian word velare, which means to veil or cover, because when they created the prototype for this particular type of Range Rover, it was very, very, very secret.

Aren’t all new cars secret, though? They camouflage them in weird ways as they drive them on public streets. Right. Don’t they call those ghost cars or something like that? Something like that, yeah. But I don’t know why this one was more secret than others. I don’t either. And, you know, I had this nice drive home where I was thinking of what other linguistic terms could we used to name cars.

The Ford uvular.

A nasal.

Instead of a nasal.

A nasal.

Talk to us. We’ve got a dozen ways to reach us on our website at waywordradio.org.

This show’s about language seen through the lens of family, history, and culture.

Stick around for more.

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

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

Is listening to an audiobook for your book club somehow cheating?

You know, there was a time when I would have said yes, that a printed book forces you to engage and focus as you’re translating those letters on the page into words in your mind.

And I would have argued that reading a printed book makes it easier to stop and absorb what you just read.

And it allows you to immerse yourself in the kind of deep reading that results in what one writer calls the slow and meditative possession of a book.

Or consider the words of Irish novelist Colm Tobin, who said,

The difference between reading a book and listening to a book is like the difference between running a marathon and watching a marathon on TV.

But you know, in the last year or so, I’ve done a complete 180 on this.

Audiobooks have completely changed my reading habits, and I would argue that they’ve changed for the better.

Because for one thing, I’m reading many, many more books, like when I’m cleaning the house or walking the dog or exercising.

You can’t do that while you’re holding a book.

And often after a long day of staring at the computer screen, the last thing I want to do is make my bleary eyes do more work on another electronic screen.

And now there are so many books that are voiced by talented actors like Meryl Streep and Claire Danes.

I’ve talked before about Charlie Thurston’s narration of Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead.

It’s so gorgeous that I sometimes play it in the car all over again like a soundtrack when I’m driving around.

But I do wonder if the experience is different depending on whether you’re listening to fiction or nonfiction.

There was this one small study years ago where students were assigned to read either a long article on a scientific topic or listen to a podcast about it.

And they were tested a couple of days later, and the people who actually read the article did a lot better than the ones who just listened to it.

And I think that’s probably true for me as well.

I find when I listen to a nonfiction audiobook, I almost always end up buying the print version and going back to it just to see what I might have missed or to picture the structure of the book better.

But I don’t know.

For better or worse, I think they’re just different.

And I’m curious to know what you and other people think about that.

Yeah, I feel like we’ve touched on this topic before, and I’m interested here.

It sounds like that your thoughts have moderated and modified somewhat over the years.

I have moved back and forth.

You and I come from an audio environment.

We do a radio show.

We are in love with audio, and yet we’re both in love with books and the printed word as well.

So it’s a complicated topic for us.

For you, it’s the idea, it sounds like.

The ideas that are being transmitted by these brilliant people.

It’s important that you get them into you no matter how they come in.

Yeah, exactly.

And I think you’re zeroing in on what I’m coming to believe, which is that it really isn’t an either or.

I think, you know, when this technology first came along, I was thinking, well, either audio or print.

But I think there’s this, I don’t know, alchemy that happens when somebody reads to you.

I mean, who doesn’t like to be read to?

And there are so many talented people out there reading these books.

And it’s just a different experience.

I mean, it’s like those readers are collaborating with the author the way that actors collaborate with a playwright and maybe interpret it a little bit differently.

Well, we would love to hear your thoughts on audiobooks versus print books or audiobooks and print books, how they both fit into your life.

And we, of course, always recommend that you check out your local library and the huge resources that they offer for both audiobooks and print books.

There’s nothing more wonderful than a library.

Let us know about your thoughts, 877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

And find a dozen other ways to reach us, no matter where you are in the world.

Go to our website, waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha. Hi, Grant.

Hi, who’s this?

My name is Silas Grant.

I’m a high schooler in Madison, Wisconsin.

A high schooler? What year?

Going into sophomore.

Going into sophomore. All right. Good years. Good years of your life.

But what’s on your mind today?

So I was wondering, how did the French R sound, like the trill all the way back in your throat, how did that develop?

Because most languages descended from Latin use like a trill towards the front of your mouth.

Like in Spanish, carro, right?

Yeah. Okay. So you’ve got to tell me, why is a sophomore in high school wondering about this?

So I was reading Tolkien a while back, and I kept turning to the parts of where he embedded his own languages and stuff.

I was writing that stuff down because I thought it was cool.

And then I started making my own languages.

And so I’m making a language right now, and I’m trying to incorporate this sound.

But I’d be interested to know the history and how it gets into a language.

Oh, Silas, how cool. You are a kindred spirit.

Yeah, absolutely.

And Tolkien has so many people who’ve inspired them to invent their own languages.

He’s got those wonderful appendices in the back where he talks about the languages that he’s invented for his people, the elves and the orcs and so forth.

And so you want to include this French R sound in the language you’re making.

Yeah.

It’s interesting that you should pick this sound out, this uvular R.

And the uvula is that little dangly thing in the back of the throat.

Because there’s a really well-known book, Trask’s Historical Linguistics, it notes that this particular sound has spread, continues to spread throughout the European languages.

It says that three centuries ago, the Western European languages has what’s known as some kind of coronal R.

That’s more like the R that happens on the very front of the mouth, where the R happens on the alveolar ridge, that hard bony ridge behind your teeth.

But today, that uvular R that happens in the back of the mouth, with that little dangly bit, happens in eight languages, in Basque, in French, in Italian, German, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish.

And so this is a really interesting language phenomenon, isn’t it?

Yeah.

It’s a phonemic shift is what they call it.

And so it’s not just French that has had this happen.

Part of what happens here is that we have this concept known as prestige languages.

And French typically has been a prestige language where something happens in French and other people who admire the French and their culture, particularly for their fashion and their food and their literature, might imitate the high class and the well-known and the important people in France and borrow their French words or learn to speak French and high-class French.

And perhaps they’ve borrowed some of the sounds from the language as well.

And that’s exactly how this particular R came to be in French itself.

In the 9th and the 14th centuries in Old French, they didn’t have this R sound.

It sounded more like the modern R that we have in Italian and Spanish today, which was like the Latin R back in the day.

But around the 17th or 18th century in Paris, we got this R sound that is like, I’m exaggerating it here, so it’s a little easier to hear on the radio and in the podcast.

And this new uvular R was a characteristic of posh speech.

And the other thing they had was this, to make that R, they didn’t open their mouth very much.

They tried to avoid opening their mouth wide, and that really forms that R whole.

Anyway, suffice to say, by the end of the 18th century, that R sound, that new R sound, the one that we know today, was firmly established in Parisian French, and then spread to lots of other parts of the French-speaking world.

But it by no means is standard now.

That R isn’t standard even in France.

And other parts of the French-speaking world don’t necessarily have that R.

And even in places in Paris and France where they use that R, there are other R’s still in use.

It just depends on the word and where it appears in the sentence and what’s being said and by whom and to whom.

That’s very interesting.

Yeah.

It’s very interesting.

Canadian French, of course, their R’s are different.

They’re a little more like they used to be than the modern French are.

Silas, do you have a name for your conlang?

You know, not yet.

I don’t know.

I kind of settle on the name later on.

Can you say hello to us in your new language?

Sure.

Alakwa.

Alakwa.

Alakwa.

I like that.

Nice.

And what about goodbye?

Goodbye.

Ami.

Ami.

And yes and no?

Ma and Naya.

And Ma and Naya.

Okay.

Very good.

Alakwa.

Ma and Naya.

Those are all very good.

I like the sound of that language.

I think you’re going places with this, Guy.

Send us a little email with an update to your language, all right?

Yeah.

All right.

Thank you so much.

Take care.

Good luck in school.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye, Silas.

Share your language stories with us, 877-929-9673.

One of our conversations prompted this remembrance from Kirsten Everspah, who lives in Evanston, Illinois.

She and her husband lived in a co-op in college at the University of Michigan.

And it was common in co-ops across campus to have food and other things that were just there for common use.

Anybody could take them.

And the acronym that they used on campus was GUF, which stood for general use free food, but it also stood for detergent and just anything else that you had that anybody could take.

And she said that they were recently together with a group of friends from college, and they still use that term because it’s so nice to have a term for anything that’s fair game for everyone.

Guff.

General use free food.

Guff.

Oh, yeah.

I don’t imagine there’d be a lot of collision with the other meaning of guff.

That’s pretty handy.

Yeah, I like it.

Well, you can call us and you can give us either kind of guff on the phone, 877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Sheila.

Hi, Sheila. Where are you calling us from?

From Charlotte, North Carolina.

Oh, wonderful. Well, welcome to the show, Sheila. What can we do for you?

I called regarding my father. He’s deceased. Were he alive? He’d be 103 today.

And as a kid growing up, he used to always ask us, did we need any Gitas, which was the term he used for money.

And then he went on with his nieces and nephews, his grands, my nieces and nephews, and he would always ask them as they were leaving, do you need any Gitas?

And we don’t know the origin of that word or how that became money for him.

Well, that’s pretty generous of him. Did you need Gitas?

Oh, from time to time. And even if you said no, he would still give it to you.

Oh, there we go.

What a sweetheart.

That’s a good fellow, yeah.

G-E-E-T-U-S, something like that?

I guess.

I don’t know.

He was from Alabama, so it was said with a pretty thick southern accent.

But I’m listening to your accent.

You’re not originally from North Carolina, are you?

I grew up in Chicago.

Yeah, I can hear that in your vowels.

Yeah.

Yeah, Gita, you’re not the only one who can’t really decide how to spell it.

I’ve got four or five different spellings here.

G-E-E-D-U-S is one of the spellings.

G-E-E-T-U-S, G-E-E-T-I-S, G-E-E-T-A-S, sometimes G-H-E-E-T-U-S, and then sometimes people just say geets.

Give me some geets, meaning give me some money.

The origin of it is lost to mystery, like a lot of slang, but I have a little theory that I want to share with you, and you can see what you think.

You can judge it for me and see if you think it’s worthy.

When digging up the origin of this term, I discovered two interesting facts.

One is a lot of the early uses of it come from California, which is very strange.

Many, many of them in the 1920s just show up in California newspapers.

One of my favorite quotations actually showed up in a Eureka, California newspaper from 1923.

And there’s this columnist who went by the pen name of Hector, H-E-C-K hyphen T-O-R.

It’s this slangy, anonymous columnist, and he wrote mostly about gambling and gamblers.

So as you can imagine, his writing was wild.

He wrote, in one of his columns he wrote, one of the town pool room sharks maintains that he is sanitary the year-round because somebody sends him to the cleaners every Saturday night.

But that makes no never mind with us.

We know that as long as he is out of Gitas, he is also out of soap.

And I just think that’s funny.

They send him to the cleaners, meaning that they take him for all his money.

And all of his columns are like that.

And he used it in a few newspapers.

So that’s interesting to me that it might have been a Western term.

But a little earlier than that, it shows up twice in a newspaper in Atchison, Kansas in 1920, where somebody is said to have the Giedis.

And they call it a malady.

I was going to say.

Yeah, but they don’t really say what it is.

They say W.P. Wagner has the Giedis.

The Giedis is the malady which made Judge Jackson’s rooster famous.

I’ve never heard of Judge Jackson’s rooster, so I don’t know why it was famous.

And I couldn’t figure out who Judge Jackson was or anything about the rooster.

And then a day later in the same paper, in the same column, W.P. Wagner, colon, the Giedis is not serious but very inconvenient.

I don’t know.

I don’t know what the Giedis is.

But I’m thinking, you know, Martha, you probably are thinking what I’m thinking.

There’s all these terms talking about your knot of bills.

You know, we talk about the knot or the bankroll, the roll of money, your cabbage roll.

And I’m just wondering if Wagner’s Giedis was like a goiter or something.

Or a boil, maybe on his bum or derriere.

And maybe Giedis might refer to your bankroll or your roll of money.

And so both of these refer to a knot or bump or roll or something.

It’s about a knot of something.

I don’t know.

Just a theory.

It’s very loosey-goosey based only upon those few appearances of the word.

Yeah, I think I was thinking just get us, you know, something that you get.

Yeah, that’s what Jonathan Green, the slang mexicographer’s theory is, but that’s just simply based on just the phonetic similarity.

There’s absolutely no citation evidence for that, though.

Well, that’s interesting.

We always kind of wonder, he was in the Navy in World War II, and we wondered if the origin came from his travels that way.

He may have picked it up there.

It’s certainly slangy.

Yeah, and people in the Navy pick up all kinds of new language from, you know, you encounter so many new people from around the country.

Or in the Navy.

So you’ve got a lot of new language that way.

Right, and you’d spend your Gitas on the Gidunk.

That’s right.

On the ice cream, right?

Yeah.

Well, Sheila, in other words, we don’t know.

Yeah, I’ll hold out for more information.

It’s one of those terms you kind of put on your list of,

Boy, I’d like to know more,

And occasionally a new database will go online

Or a whole big batch of newspapers will be digitized,

And I’ll look it up again and see what I can find.

Thank you so much.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

If you know what made Judge Jackson’s rooster famous, do let us know.

And if you have a question about anything related to language or slang, no matter where you picked it up, let us know.

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You can find them on our website at waywordradio.org.

Grant, I really am serious about learning how to watch and appreciate cricket.

And I’m collecting all the terms so that I’ll be ready when I see my first cricket match.

And one of the terms that I really like and can’t wait to use is, how’s that?

H-O-W-Z-A-T.

Is that just a form of how is that?

Yes, yes, and that’s what you use when you’re appealing for an umpire to reconsider a call.

How’s that?

How’s that? Oh, I see, yes.

Like, give me that again.

Yeah, it’s pretty polite.

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Special thanks to Michael Breslauer, Josh Eckels, Clare Grotting, Bruce Rogow,

Rick Seidenwurm, and Betty Willis.

Thanks for listening. I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett. Until next time, goodbye.

Bye.

Bye.