Sweet Dreams (episode #1450)

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 Grant, I have a puzzle for you.

Okay.

Take these two words. You might want to write them down.

Okay.

Take the two words and arrange them into one word by rearranging the letters.

And the two words that I want you to rearrange are new door.

New.

Take the letters in that.

New door.

Okay.

N-E-W-D-O-O-R.

Rearrange the letters into one word.

And what’s my end goal? Just to get something cool happening?

Yes.

Get something cool happening.

Wonder something.

I don’t know.

Take the letters in new door. Rearrange them to form one word.

To form.

Oh, ha ha. One word.

You got it.

I knew you would get it.

I knew you would get it.

Well, you did hit one word a little hard there.

Oh, did I? That last time?

You clued me in. Thank you for that.

That’s right. Who knows how long I would have struggled.

I thought you did really well. Rearranging the letters in new door to form literally one word.

Nice. Very good.

Yeah, my nine-year-old’s going to love this one.

I thought he might.

I thought you would, too.

We love your puzzles. If you want to trick us or fool us or griddle us, give us a call at 877-929-9673 or email us, words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, good morning.

Good morning.

Who is this?

This is Jeanette from San Diego.

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

So I was wondering, I’m from New York originally, and I’m now living in California, and it’s about the pronunciation of the word Carnegie.

So growing up in New York, you know, we have Carnegie Hall. We’re familiar with Carnegie, the steel industrialist who, you know, was a philanthropist and built Carnegie Mellon, Carnegie Hall, etc.

But on your show, I keep hearing about, you know, such and such a show was funded by Carnegie Trust Fund and Carnegie.

So I was wondering about the pronunciation and which is the correct pronunciation, Carnegie or Carnegie?

Yeah, well, if you’re talking about the industrialist and philanthropist who gave the money for all of those things, he was from Scotland originally, Andrew Carnegie.

He was actually a Scot, right?

He was an Americanized Scot.

Right. Irish.

Right.

Or Scotch-American, yeah.

Yes, and if you go to his little hometown in Scotland, that’s what you’ll hear again and again.

Carnegie.

Carnegie.

Carnegie, accent on the second syllable.

With more of an A than an E.

Right.

So the Carnegie Hall that exists in New York should actually be pronounced Carnegie Hall?

Well.

I’m not going to argue with 9 million New Yorkers.

No, he tried that and it didn’t work.

That’s a battle that won’t be won, huh?

It is a local pronunciation.

As far back as the 1940s, you can find people in the Carnegie Journal, which is about Carnegie Museum and the Carnegie da-da-da-da, all this stuff, complaining about the New York pronunciation of the word.

So it’s only in New York that it’s pronounced Carnegie.

Mostly, and people who learn to speak.

I’m from Carnegie.

Yeah.

Yeah, Western Pennsylvania, they get Carnegie, right?

Yeah, they say Nagy or Nagy.

It’s kind of a combination of those two.

But, you know, Jeanette, you raise an interesting larger question, and I’m so glad you’re from San Diego because I have a question for you.

Sure.

About three or four times a week, I go hiking on the highest mountain in this area.

And you probably know it, and it’s spelled C-O-W-L-E-S.

How do you pronounce the name of that mountain?

C-O-W-L-E-S.

Mm—

I would pronounce it Cowles Mountain.

Right.

Right.

I know.

And that’s my problem, because properly, that mountain is pronounced Cowles Mountain.

It was named for a guy whose last name is Coles.

And in fact, if you go to the trailhead, there’s all this information from the Mission Trails Regional Park that includes the pronunciation, the proper pronunciation of the mountain.

But my problem is when I tell people here in San Diego, even, that I hike on Coles Mountain, they correct me and say, oh, no, it’s Cowles, C-O-W-L-E-S.

So my question to both of you is what do you do about that?

If you know the technical name for something, but everybody else calls it something else, or you think…

I mean, it’s like every time I switch to cows, I always find somebody who says, oh, but it’s Kohl’s.

So it just always stops down the conversation.

So I just sort of say the mountain near my home.

As a person who has worked as an English teacher for immigrant individuals with lots of different accents that they bring into our English, I have to say, what I say to that is, viva la differance.

And I applaud the diversity, right?

And I think that living in today’s global society, we have to really applaud diversity and welcome nuances in accents and in phrases.

Your show is all about that, of idiomatic expressions from different regions and different eras of time.

That makes life interesting.

Yeah, we’re all about diversity. And when in Rome do what the Romans do.

Exactly. So when in New York say Carnegie.

Don’t fight with New Yorkers, I wouldn’t fight with…

That’s right. We know it’s Houston. Houston Street.

Yeah, but there’s one little note I want to toss in here about Carnegie versus Carnegie.

And that is that he became a well-known figure before radio.

So you were more likely to read his name rather than to hear his name.

There you go.

And so the local New York pronunciation…

So that opened it up for interpretation with pronunciation.

And people, the regular person, did not have that personal access to the Carnegie family in order to adopt that actual pronunciation.

Well, that makes sense.

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

Well, thank you so much. That was very interesting.

Thank you.

I appreciate your taking my call.

Yay.

Okay, take care.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Call us 877-929-9673 or share those language stories in email.

The address is words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Lasagna Moore from Ulysses, Texas.

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

Thank you.

So I have a friend, an older gentleman that I’m dating. He’s about 15 years older than me.

And sometimes when he tries to, I’ll say, get fresh, quote-unquote fresh with me, and I want to come to his advances, he will apologize to me, and he will say, I’m sorry for losing my faculties with you.

His faculties?

Yes.

Yeah.

F-A-C-U-L-T-I-E-S.

And I’ve just never heard that word used to relate to, you know, trying to do that to someone.

And I’m just trying to get a better understanding of the history of that word and if he’s using it correctly.

So how long have you been dating this guy?

I’ve been dating him for six months now.

Okay.

And what would you expect him to say rather than that?

Yeah, that’s a good question.

Maybe I apologize for trying to get fresh with you. Maybe that was inappropriate.

I apologize for being inappropriate.

You know, I would expect something like that.

Did you ask him?

Not faculties. I’ve never heard that.

Yeah, I’ve never heard that either in that context.

Did you ask him about it?

I did.

And then he says, well, that’s what he tells me.

Well, that’s what it means. It means that I made an advancement towards you and you rejected the advancement.

So I lost my faculties with you. I lost myself with you.

I could see how he could get there.

And here’s why, Lasagna. Faculties can mean your senses.

So he lost his senses. He lost control of his behavior, more or less.

And I guess he let his emotions, feelings get the better of him and stopped being able to govern his actions.

I guess that’s what he’s saying, right?

Yeah.

Because if your faculties are your mental or your physical abilities, and a lot of times it just kind of reduced down into your senses and your sense of awareness, your sense of place, your sense of propriety, those kinds of senses as well, as, you know, touch and taste and seeing and so forth.

Oh, okay.

Yeah, your ability to control your impulses, I guess.

But, you know, I have to say that that sounds really charming and gallant to me.

Oh, does it?

Yeah.

Is he a gallant speaker?

He is.

Yes, he is.

-huh.

I mean, it just sounds so, I don’t know, gentlemanly and chivalrous.

Right.

Instead of saying, like, sorry, whatever, which you could have said, right?

Yeah, what’s wrong with you?

Yeah, I mean, is this the kind of guy who would, I mean, I’m picturing the kind of guy who would, you know, lay down his coat across a puddle for you to step across.

Have I got that right?

Yes.

Open the door.

You know, make sure you’re comfortable.

Make sure the temperature is correct.

Make sure you have everything that you need.

Very formal.

So, yes, it kind of fits his personality.

I see.

Send us a postcard when the wedding happens.

Yeah.

Yeah, I sure will. I sure will. Well, thank you for this. This was great.

Oh, good.

My pleasure. Thanks for calling.

Yeah, it doesn’t sound like you two need much help.

I would say good luck with that, all right?

All right. Thank you.

Thanks. Bye-bye. Tell them hello for us.

Thank you.

All righty. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

We do solve marriages and now love lives.

We do, and we’d love to know what you think. Call us, 877-929-9673.

Grant, do you know this exhibit at LACMA, the L.A. County Museum of Art, called the Rain Room?

It’s really, really popular.

And you go into this room and it looks like it’s raining in there.

But any place a person goes and walks around, they don’t get rained on.

No, I don’t know that room.

They turned on the lights purple after Prince died to honor him.

Well, the reason I asked you and the reason I asked you that way was I was talking with a friend the other day and I said, oh, have you been to the Rain Room?

And she said, oh, yeah, yeah, I’ve been to the Rain Room.

And then she realized, oh, wait, no, I haven’t.

I’ve only seen it online.

And we both realized that we had this sense of having been there without actually going there.

And I was thinking about the conversation as a result of that you and I had years ago about fofiness.

Do you remember this?

Friend of a friend.

Yes, yes. When we see people on Facebook who aren’t necessarily our friends, like maybe the children or the dates or the spouses of the people who are our friends, but we feel like we know them and we feel like we know what’s going on in their lives because we’ve seen our friends’ Facebook feed.

And so I was thinking there ought to be a word for experiential fofiness.

Something like that.

You know, something where you feel like you’ve had the experience, but you haven’t really.

Yeah, I had an embarrassing moment a few years ago where there’s a woman who is a friend of like, I have like 20 or 30 friends in common with her on Facebook. She’s like involved in politics one way or the other.

And then I saw her in the park. There’s an event, a gathering of some kind.

And I greeted her like somebody that I really knew.

And she gave me like laser eyes.

Like the like, how is this man threatening me?

Oh, no.

Isn’t that weird?

Yeah, it was weird, but I felt like, you know, like, sorry about the dog.

Yeah, the new place looks great.

You know, I didn’t say that, but that’s what I was feeling inside, kind of like, all this stuff I know about her.

Like, the new place looks great.

Oh, yeah, you know, sorry about the car trouble.

Whatever, this kind of stuff that you see on Facebook.

That’s hilarious.

So she was a fof, a friend of a friend.

So weird.

Well, if you have a word for experiential fofiness, let us know what it is, 877-929-9673,

Or send it to us in email. The address is words@waywordradio.org.

We talk with more good folks about language when The 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 we’re joined by John Chaneski from New York City.

Hey, quiz guy.

What’s up, bud?

Hey, John.

Hi, word people.

How are you?

I’m doing just fine.

All right.

You know, I imagine that most of our listeners, being word freaks and puzzle people, are like me.

They like lists.

You guys like lists, don’t you?

Mm—

Sure.

For once in a while.

Sure.

It’s just nothing about diving into all this.

So, no, we don’t usually go the trivia route here, but I’m making an exception because this is all about words.

I’m using as my source material the top 100 most common words in English as compiled by Oxford Online, which is associated with the Oxford English Dictionary.

I’m going to start very, very easy.

There are only two words on this list that are one letter long.

What are they?

A and I.

And A.

Yes, A and I.

A is word number six, and I is number 10, exactly number 10.

Very good.

Great start.

Now, there are exactly two cardinal numbers on the list.

What are they?

One.

Oh.

-huh.

Wait, is that right?

We need, yes.

I’m on the right path.

One of you is going down the right path.

Oh, heck.

One is O-N-E.

Yes.

Yeah.

And then 10?

No, not 10.

Two.

Two is right, Martha.

Oh, two?

Okay.

You’re spanking him, yes.

One is at number 35, and two is at number 84.

Doesn’t matter.

Guesses are just as good in this game.

Huh.

Next question.

There is exactly one ordinal number on the list.

What is it?

Oh, first.

First.

That’s first, yes.

But Martha got that in first, as they do on the internet.

First.

Now it’s at the top of the list.

What are the first five words on the list of the top 100 most common words?

Oh, Lord.

The.

Yeah.

Yes, that’s number one.

And.

Is.

That’s number five.

Me.

Are.

No.

No.

Not A-R-E, no.

Really?

No.

Is?

No.

Words two, three, and…

No.

I’ll give you this.

Words two, three, and four are all two-letter words, and word number two is actually a form of the word am.

That is, it’s B.

Oh.

Two.

Oh, I see.

Did we say two already, T-O?

No, you didn’t, and that’s number three.

Okay.

Of.

Of is correct.

Very good.

You got all five.

Nicely done.

Only three letters of the alphabet do not appear in any word on the list.

What are they?

X.

Yeah.

X is right.

Q.

Z.

Q is right, and Z is right.

Yes, very good.

Your Scrabble score has just tripled.

Now, the first three nouns that appear on the list can be placed into the following blanks in order to make an annual issue of a U.S. magazine.

What are they?

Blank, blank.

Sports, bikini.

No, no, no.

Let me tell you.

Yes, bikini is on the top 100 words in English.

Blank, blank of the blank.

Times man of the year.

Oh.

Not man.

Times person of the year.

Yes.

Oh, man.

Time person of the year.

Very good.

55, 61, and 63 in order.

Nice.

That’s very clever.

What an interesting quiz.

We learned a lot.

Thanks, guys.

Thanks, John.

We’ll talk to you next week.

Take care, John.

Bye-bye.

Next week.

Bye.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org or tell us all about your language dilemmas on Twitter @wayword.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Anna.

I’m calling from Indianapolis, Indiana.

Hello, Anna.

Welcome to the show.

Hi, Anna.

What’s up?

Well, I have a question about the word ask.

I am a consultant in the electric power industry, and over the last few years, I’ve been involved with a lot of projects where we have to report to executives, and usually we’re wanting something from them, such as more time or more money or something like that.

And whenever we are creating presentations for these groups of executives, people always say to me, what is the ask?

You know, we need to really narrow down that ask, and we need to frame the ask correctly.

So basically they are changing the word ask from a verb into a noun.

And I have to confess, it drives me absolutely crazy because I feel like we already have words that they could be using, for example, question or request.

It seems to me that, you know, a request for the executive would work just as well.

So my question was really if you had any idea when this started and why it started and why business people love to create new words all the time.

Ask is weird because you grow up not hearing it the way that you’re hearing it now, right?

It sounds just kind of weird.

And linguists call that process nominalization.

Where you take a word that doesn’t usually function as a noun and make it function that way.

Like, I don’t know, do you and your colleagues talk about epic fails?

All the time.

All the time.

Okay, and does that bother you or just strike you weird or does it seem clever or what?

You know what?

That one doesn’t bother me probably because I started hearing that one when I was a teenager.

And I thought it was, you know, new and fun.

Right.

And so you heard ask for most of your life as a verb, right?

And then when you get into the business world and it becomes a noun.

And there are a lot of words that do that.

You know, we talk about the big reveal in a Hollywood movie or or.

Instead of revelation.

Yeah. Yeah. The big reveal.

And I’m thinking of the opposite of ask, tell, you know, when we talk about poker, a tell is is a gesture or an expression that that tells something about what you’re feeling.

In the case of ask, in the business world, I think it does have a more specific shade of meaning, a kind of specificity to it.

So you’re saying that a question or request wouldn’t quite work.

That’s what I’m thinking.

I mean, I know in the fundraising world, an ask is something very specific.

You’re not just making a general ask.

You’re asking for $10,000 or something like that.

The other weird thing about ask as a noun is that it goes back a thousand years or so.

Isn’t that weird?

Really?

Yeah.

Wow.

I had no idea.

Even before, modern English was modern English.

Yeah.

Like back into English that doesn’t look like English.

Yeah.

Old English in 900 or so.

And that’s in part because we didn’t have the word request at that point.

And I’m assuming we didn’t have question.

I’m not sure about that one.

But I know that we didn’t have request, which came to us from French in the 14th century.

So in the business world, I used to be bothered by the notion of ask.

But more and more, it seems like business jargon that’s kind of useful.

Yeah. I mean, now that you’ve explained it, I can see where it, you know, is a little bit more functional than I thought.

And you guys use it a lot then or your colleagues?

Yeah, we use it all the time, and it most often does involve money.

The ask is usually, you know, for a million dollars or something like that.

Yeah, or for somebody to do a specific thing, right?

Right, yeah.

It’s usually when they’re trying to zero in on the specific thing that they want the executives to do.

Yeah, so it almost always involves asking upper management or, you know, leadership or something.

Right, right.

Well, my suspicion, and I think Grant will agree with me, is that it’s going to become more and more common because of its utility.

Yeah, if you search in the news index like Factiva or LexisNexis, you will see a gradual increase over time proportionally of the use of a variety of constructions that use ask as a noun, like make an ask or making an ask.

And it’s really interesting. This falls squarely into what Martha was saying about this kind of business jargon that repels people but is so useful.

And it partly repels people because they are newcomers to it.

And so we have this kind of like, oh, there’s a symbol, the sign of the foreigner, the outsider, the person who doesn’t belong.

Let’s reject it. And we have to slowly accommodate ourselves to the fact that we are now insiders in the group that uses the language that we despise.

Exactly. Yeah, it usually takes me a few years to warm up to any new business word.

Thank you so much for your call.

Oh, well, thank you. This helped me out a lot. Thank you very much.

Sure. Take care now.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Call us with your language question, 877-929-9673.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Asher in Burlington, Vermont.

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

My dad, I was about three years old, and him and my mom were hanging out, and he jokingly called me a little Gomer.

Gomer spelled G-O-M-E-R.

And I had no idea what that was and ran into the other room crying, to which they both cracked up.

And to this day, still don’t really know what Gomer is.

I was recently visiting my dad in Indiana, and he gave me a little more insight how there was a character named Gomer Pyle on the show, The Andy Griffith Show.

But he still didn’t really have an explanation of where the term or the word came from.

So I’m hoping maybe you can provide a little more insight.

Gomer Pyle. Boy, that really takes me back.

Yeah, right?

I watched that program every single day after school.

Do his catchphrase.

Which one?

Well, golly.

And he would say Shazam, too.

He was just the biggest goofball.

I mean, he had his own show.

Yeah, he went on to do several shows with the same character, right?

This kind of rustic, rude, local yokel guy.

Yeah, Jim Neighbors.

Yeah, that’s what we know about Gomer.

It really pops up immediately as soon as that show hit the airwaves in 1963.

And it became common slang for a stupid person, a loser, a hick, a hillbilly, somebody who didn’t know, you know, one end of a stick from the other, that sort of person.

But he was good-hearted.

He always prevailed in the end.

But Gomer kind of lost that connotation and just kind of just became a kind of a gentle derogatory term.

So my dad was calling me a bit of an idiot, but a good-hearted idiot.

Yeah, maybe.

A good-hearted idiot.

You hope so.

Three-year-old.

It’s a very sweet term, I think, little Gomer.

It’s not very common anymore, though.

No.

No, he was a big fan of the show, and that’s where he said he got it from.

Oh, he did.

Okay.

All right.

Yeah, you should go.

You know, I actually, Asher, have the complete box set of Gomer Pile.

You do?

I do.

I loved it.

Do you?

Okay.

Yeah, you’ve got to check it out, Asher.

This would be a good bonding experience for you.

I guess we’ve got to go watch some Gomer Pile together.

But that’s it. Yeah, Gomer. And there’s a medical use of it that is far more common now, medical slang Gomer, where everyone believes it stands for get out of my emergency room, but it doesn’t. It also comes from this fellow on the show.

And if you look in, there’s an article written in the Journal of American Speech in 1989. The linguist who put that together has a really important part where he talks about Everett Greenbaum, who wrote the show, named it after a writer he knew named Gomer Kuhl.

So he named the character Gomer Pyle after Gomer Cool.

And so we actually have a really nice connection there where we’ve got a solid evidence that the word came from the show.

And we know where the name in the show came from, too, which is really rare for slang, incredibly rare.

So anytime doctors and medical folks bring up the Gomer that they think stands for the acronym, we’re able to confidently say, no, it does not come from that acronym, despite what you believe.

And that’s somebody with a lot of complaints or physical complaints.

Yeah, just somebody who comes in and they want everything from you, all of your time, all of your resources, all of your staff.

Get out of my emergency room.

Very, very interesting.

Thanks for calling.

Hey, thank you both so much.

Thank you.

Okay, take care, Asher.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

You too. Bye.

You can find us at 877-929-9673, email words@waywordradio.org, or talk to us on Twitter @wayword.

We heard from Glenn Reinhart in San Antonio, Texas.

And he writes,

Last week my daughter, 8-year-old Cameron, and I were listening to a past episode of A Way with Words.

During the puzzle with John Chaneski, Martha commented on how the words peppered and leopard rhyme and should be part of a limerick.

So Cameron and I took up Martha’s challenge.

Oh, boy. Let’s see it.

Okay. This limerick is called the fastidious feline.

A hungry yet finicky leopard, one day she encountered a shepherd,

But she chose to get thinner instead of making him dinner,

For the man was not salted and peppered.

Oh, nice.

I think that’s a pretty great collaboration between a guy and his eight-year-old daughter.

Congratulations, Cameron.

Good stuff, good stuff.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Philippe.

Philippe, where are you calling us from?

Hi, I’m calling from Eureka, California. My local radio station is KHSU Arcana, Humboldt State University.

Welcome to the show, Philippe. How can we help?

Well, I hear a lot of people using the word precipice in sports, in politics, and trying to mean that we are on the precipice, which means that we’re getting ready to have a big event.

Precipice is a French word, and precipice is actually a hole in the ground, a chasm.

And if you’re on the precipice, you are crashing, you’re falling, and it’s not good news.

My question to you is, did the meaning change when it went from the French word to the Americanized version, or is it bad use of that word?

I mean, in French, you’re always on the edge of the precipice, but you’re not on the precipice.

Interesting. That’s a really great question.

We did get this from the French.

The English speakers got this from the French speakers about 400 years ago, but it wasn’t much before that that it entered French itself from Latin, at least according to Le Petit Robert Dictionary, which is the one that I use.

What’s even more interesting to me is if you look this word up in a big dictionary, when it has all the different meanings of precipice in English, you will find that it does admit or does allow you to use it to mean the whole itself, not just the edge of the whole or the cliff, like the cliff that surrounds an abyss or the cliff that surrounds a valley or that sort of thing.

But you’re right. You’re totally right.

In English, we’re more likely to think of it as the lip itself, as that very, you know, highest point where you step one foot forward and you’re going down to your death, right?

That’s how we think of it.

So if you’re on the precipice, are you actually falling or are you right at the edge?

If you looked it up in French, I suspect that you will find, I think both exist in French as well.

It either means that you are about to fail, like it’s inevitable that you will fail, or that there’s a chance that you could fail if certain conditions happen.

Yeah, actually, I did look at it before the show here, and it is a hole.

So if you’re on the precipice, you’re failing, you’re falling.

You’re done already.

Yeah, you’re in real trouble.

There’s a pretty funny quote by a politician way back then.

He was saying that France was on the edge of the precipice, and if he was elected, we would take a step forward, which was a terrible way to say.

That’s not good. That’s terrible.

It’s the worst thing to say, but it didn’t hurt him.

Got elected, but still, it’s one of those things. So, yeah, it’s a funny meaning for me.

You know, when I hear it here and we are on the precipice, it’s usually pretty bad news.

Yeah.

I mean, you really nailed something here. I mean, we’re talking about 400 years of divergent history.

I think it’s amazing that the words are as alike as they are because we’ve had centuries for this word to change in both languages even more dramatically than they have.

That’s so interesting.

All the mountain hiking I do, I think of precipices being something way up high rather than…

Right, but way up high with, like, chance of death just beyond.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, don’t back up too far to take that cell phone.

Grand Canyon, you know, chasm, you know, vertical drops.

Yeah, it’s usually a very, very dire situation if you’re falling in the precipice.

You’re in serious trouble.

Well, cool.

Thank you so much, Philippe.

We really appreciate your call.

Well, thank you very much.

Take care now.

Okay.

Bye-bye.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

If a word or phrase is puzzling you, we’d love to talk with you about it.

Call us at 877-929-9673.

Or if you have a story about language, send it to us in email.

That address is words@waywordradio.org.

Our conversation about terms of endearment in different languages prompted Christine Ruffner to write us from Myanmar.

She lives in Lasho there.

And she noted that the term atele in that country means my little liver.

Atele.

And that’s a term of affection.

Yes.

Isn’t that sweet?

You know, sort of like we might say my heart.

My sweetheart.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And apparently the liver is something celebrated in other languages in a way that we don’t.

Persian as well.

In the Middle East, throughout the Middle East and much of the Arabic-speaking world.

Yeah.

So it’s nice to get beyond our borders.

Yeah, and it seems weird to us because we don’t use it.

Yeah, yeah.

So thanks to Christine for writing us from Myanmar.

Give us a call, 877-929-9673, or send us something on Twitter @wayword.

More conversation about what we say and why we say it when A Way with Words continues.

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.

My father grew up in poverty in the mountains of North Carolina.

And at age 13, he moved to a nearby town and begged for a job in a textile mill.

And this was before child labor laws.

And so at age 13, he was working 10-hour days, five and a half days a week.

And what he would do was stand with these giant blades to cut towels as they came through the machinery.

And over the next five years, standing there in that same spot, doing that same repetitive motion over and over and over again, he wore a hole into the solid oak floor.

And he used to tell me a lot of stories about that experience.

He talked about how they were all called lint heads, the people in his town, because there was all this lint in the air that stuck to their hair and clothing.

And the other thing that he always told me was about how deafening it was inside that textile mill.

He would have nightmares on into his 80s and 90s about being in this deafening textile mill and not being able to get out.

And I’ve been thinking a lot about that lately and wishing that I could talk with him about that because I’ve been reading up on the language, the sign language, that people in loud industrial situations have to work out in order to communicate with each other.

You and I both read this article recently about sawmill.

It was on Atlas Obscura, I believe.

Yeah, which is a wonderful site.

And linguists have studied this to some degree, and in some places they’ve found as many as 175 different signs that people are using in that kind of situation.

And for me, it’s really fascinating because you sort of see a language being born.

The idea that they’re not only telling each other with hand motions how many things to produce or how long an item should be before they cut it.

But they’re coming up with terms for like the word weak.

It’s going to take a week or in a week.

They might use like a hand over the muscle as a pun to mean weak.

Oh, they’re joking that the guy’s muscle is weak.

Yeah. And a lot of that language, which I’m sure you appreciate, is crafted in order to keep the bosses from knowing what they’re talking about.

Oh, interesting.

I was reading about mills in the UK where people used a tapping of the head, the top of the head, to mean that the big managers are coming in because these were the people who would be wearing top hats.

Oh, very good.

Yeah. So it’s just kind of a fascinating little language that’s not heard, literally not heard about very much.

Yeah. I read that article with a lot of fascination and we will link to that in the show notes for this episode.

We’re really interested too in knowing more about what you do.

What is something that’s not quite language but feels like language?

Do you have signs that signal something in your family perhaps?

In my family, we have this really dumb little thing we do, what we call kitten paws.

You put your little hands up next to your chest and you tuck your fingers down like a little kitten paws folded over.

And in our sign, it’s kind of the universal sign of, oh, isn’t that cute?

You look like a baby T-Rex.

Anyway, share it with us if you’ve got something, just this little kind of quasi-language, a sign, a signal, a special word.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Kat calling from Dallas, Texas.

Hi, Kat. Welcome to the show.

Thank you.

What’s up?

I have a phrase that I’ve said since I was a kid, and it’s something I learned from my mother, and it’s no great shakes.

For instance, if you said, oh, John’s wonderful. He volunteers at the church all the time. He’s a loving husband. You might say, oh, he’s no great shakes. And it’s because you happen to know something about him, such as, well, he’s no great shakes. He steals from the collection plate.

Oh, my.

You’re wondering about the origin of that?

Yeah, I mean, I had a friend, and she refused to believe that that was an actual saying. She would say, no, you’re just weird. You get that from your mother. She says all kinds of weird things.

Oh.

But then she read a book by a Japanese author, and the phrase was in there. And she came to me, and she said, oh, my God, that’s not just something you and your goofy family say. It’s an actual thing.

Oh, yeah. I say it all the time. No great shakes. Meaning not a big deal.

Yeah. Nothing to make a big party about. And I have to say, when I was growing up, I thought it had to do with milkshakes. You know, like a chocolate milkshake that just, you know, is a little bit melted. When your kid knows they’re way up there in the list of desirable things.

I know, right?

But that’s probably not the origin.

Definitely not the origin. Definitely not the origin.

Yeah.

Yeah, it’s a fairly common expression, actually. There are a couple of theories about it. There’s one that it has to do with throwing dice. And if you’re shaking your hand with the dice in it and then you throw a bad toss, that it was no great shake. But I don’t really buy that one.

The other one that makes more sense to me is that shake boast is an old expression that means to swagger or be boastful. And if you have no great shake, then you’re not really anything to boast about.

But I don’t, you know. They’re both kind of am iffy. The evidence we have on these isn’t very convincing, I don’t think.

Yeah, the term just kind of pops up free of any kind of suggestive context, right?

Yeah.

But on the other hand, we do have gambling does kind of insinuate itself into the casual language in the United States.

Definitely. It’s pretty much everywhere.

Yeah.

Is it old-fashioned?

Yeah.

Yeah, it’s got a good long history going back to the early 1800s at least, maybe even earlier. Because a lot of times when I use that phrase, people look at me and they’ll say, I love the way you talk. You say the weirdest stuff. And it’s like they’ve never heard it before.

But you told me it’s fairly common.

Yeah, it’s common enough.

Yeah, I don’t think it. I think probably if you surveyed a group of adults across a wide variety of ages, half the people would know it immediately. I mean, I’m just guessing here, but I think it’s common enough for that.

The fact that the translator of it, was it obviously written in English, the Japanese book? Who was the author?

I heard from Murakami.

So, yeah, Murakami doesn’t write in English. That the translator felt it appropriate to translate from Japanese into English suggests that the translator thought it was current enough to use, that the average literate reader would get it.

I’m going to have to get that book again and read it again so I can see. Because I did read it myself, and I saw that, and I was like, yeah, it’s the same.

Yeah.

But I’ll have to see how it would be used.

Yeah, it’s the same. And I would say that I love the fact that when people point out odd things in your language, I would take that as a badge of pride at just your literacy coming through, right?

Kat, you’re not as weird as you thought.

Oh, I never thought I was weird. I thought they were just misinformed.

Yeah, there we go. That’s the attitude. You’re right. And that’s the solution to everything. Call weird people to confirm that you’re not weird.

I am normal. The three of us are not weird.

All right. Nice look that we got.

Thank you so much.

All right. Thank you. Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Do you say no great shakes, Grant?

Yeah. I mean, it wouldn’t be something I would say all the time. I’d probably more like to say no big deal.

Speaking of other gambling terms in English.

There we go.

Well, maybe it is a gambling term. I just don’t see evidence for it, really.

No, there’s no evidence for either one of those. They’re both really insubstantial. It pops up like 18, 19 or so. And I read through all the early citations in the Oxford English Dictionary, did some digging on my own. I’m like, I got nothing here.

That’s typically how it works. You can spend a week on a term and be no better off than you were when you started.

And we do. So take advantage of that by calling us 877-929-9673 or send your stories about language in email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Alex, phoning from Montreal.

Hi, Alex. Welcome.

Well, the question I had, I serve as a master corporal in the Canadian Armed Forces, specifically in the Infantry Corps. And my question was related to the pronunciation of lieutenant.

Now, where I come from, it’s very, I guess by tradition, it’s a very Anglo unit. So a few members, including myself, refer to lieutenants as lieutenants. And that’s also very common in the British Army and the British Armed Forces in general.

So I was always wondering why it’s pronounced that way, especially in the more Commonwealth nations, compared to, let’s say, in the States where the rank is referred to as lieutenants.

Yeah, that’s a really great question. So you’re in Canada, and you follow, at least for this particular word, the more traditional British pronunciation, lieutenant.

Yes. My unit specifically is a household unit. It’s a guards unit.

Okay. So by tradition, we’re quite English.

Yeah. And Canada overall is squeezed between two major influences, both the UK influence and the United States influence, right? And so it’s going to get pushed from both sides, and you can see this happening with things like whether or not the last letter is Z or Z.

Just to make one thing clear to everybody who’s listening, the word, regardless of its pronunciation, is still spelled the same, right? It’s L-I-E-U-T-E-N-A-N-T, right? Still spelled the same way.

Yeah, and that’s what’s especially confusing for folks. First, you’ve got to understand that both pronunciations come from French. Both of these pronunciations existed in French before the word was fully borrowed into English.

So, it’s not something that the Americans came up with or invented on their own. There’s a little asterisk that I’ll explain in a minute. And so, this happened in French. There were a number of different words that had use in them, where the U wasn’t altogether clearly separated from the V. And the V and the F sounds can be very similar on the lips, right? Whether or not they’re voiced or unvoiced and a couple other factors.

And so, we have this kind of small group, this cluster of words that can be pronounced either with a f or v sound or without it. And this was one of those words. And nobody really knows why the French started doing that, except there was a regional dialect where this apparently became more common. Let it be known that it wasn’t some, you know, United States aberration that came up with lieutenant. Although Noah Webster, who had a tremendous influence on the pronunciation of many words in American English and United States English, did prefer the LIEU pronunciation, L-I-E-U to be pronounced, because he felt it hewed more closely to the etymological origins of the word. And he put that in his dictionaries as a preferred pronunciation.

Now, as a Canadian, I don’t know if you know, but there was a time in the United States where if you had books in your house, they went in this order of frequency, the Bible, Noah Webster’s Dictionary, and some Shakespeare. And so we’re just talking like the number two book for the longest time, like the second most common book that you were likely to read in American households was this dictionary.

So it did have some influence on how Americans spell and how they speak.

Okay. I’m actually quite surprised that in French, lieutenant was even a thing. I always assumed that it was lieutenant.

Yeah, and it’s interesting. The French, over the centuries or even longer, have done a variety of things that have squashed out or drastically reduced the influence of their regional dialects.

And even today, some of this takes place.

But there was a time when the diversity of the types of language spoken in what is today France were pretty much like they were when Italy became a nation, just like incredibly diverse, really interesting.

A lot of Germanic influences or Dutch influences or just words hanging on from centuries before.

Just really interesting stuff.

And a lot of that has been extinguished or almost is now considered archaic or even just something to hang on to in order to have some pride.

But it’s not actually a living language anymore, unfortunately.

An attempt to bring everyone together under one sort of identity.

Yeah. All right. Well, thank you so much for your call.

Thanks for taking me.

Keep up the great work, guys.

Take care now.

Good luck.

Thanks, Alex.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

You know, you mentioned the etymological origin, but we didn’t really talk about it.

Yeah, placeholder, right?

Loom meaning place and tenant meaning holding or holder.

Exactly, yes.

So you’re standing in for somebody.

It’s equivalent to the Latin locum tenens, which people who are in medicine may know about the locum.

He’s the guy that fills in with your, does your rounds for you or handles your patients while you are on vacation or you’re sick yourself.

Yeah, literally in place of you.

Yeah, lieutenant in lieu of you.

We’d love to hear your question about language, so call us 877-929-9673 or share those language stories in email.

The address is words@waywordradio.org.

We heard from Tom Mulcahy in Indianapolis who wants to know, why does an usher ush?

Or is that one of those verb-sounding words that isn’t one?

Why does an usher ush?

Does it come from shushing people?

No, that was my guess too.

They usher you down the aisle.

Right.

They’re leading you from place to place.

Right.

Actually, it goes ultimately back to the Latin word os, which means mouth,

Because an usher was somebody who stood at the mouth of a building, at the door.

Oh, interesting.

Isn’t that cool?

I love when we get questions like that.

Usher.

Oh, mouth.

That’s very cool.

Nice, right?

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Leanne calling from San Diego.

Hi, Leanne.

Welcome to the show.

Hello, Leanne.

Thank you.

What can we do for you?

Well, here is my question.

My mom used to put me to sleep at night and tuck me in in the 1950s and would say this expression,

Have sweet dreams and rest in the arms of Morpheus.

And I’m interested in how that came to be a phrase,

Why someone would be using that and every day sign off for their children,

And anything else you could tell me about the use of it.

So did it make you feel secure then?

Oh, it was just lovely.

Who wouldn’t want to sleep in the arms of someone?

And I understood who Morpheus was, but I had no idea where she might have heard that or if anybody else used it.

It’s just a question that’s been with me.

Sleep in the arms of Morpheus.

And you say you already know that Morpheus was the ancient god of dreams.

Ultimately, he became the god of sleep.

But in ancient Greece, he was the god of dreams and sort of a shape-shifting character who could get into your dreams and impersonate people.

Oh, all the better.

Yeah, right, right.

It comes from the Greek word morphe, which means form, and we get the words metamorphosis from that.

And ultimately, we get the word morphine, which induces sleep from the name of morphine.

Yes, but how would it be that somebody would come, that that would be an expression that people would use?

Yeah, it’s a gorgeous expression and one that’s used less and less.

I don’t know about…

It would go back to when we were more classically literate.

Right.

Yeah, when it was the kind of thing that everyone who went to school would read the myths.

Right.

And he also had the same name in both mythologies, right?

In the Roman and the Greek mythologies?

In Ovid’s Metamorphosis.

Yeah.

But how did this come to be something that people ever used in modern times, in the 50s, for example?

Right.

I understand your question.

And I’m not sure of any song or any passage in literature that would have suggested that exact phrase.

But what you would have is, if you think about the influence that television shows have today,

Where they’re a common cultural touchstone, and we might call back to a story that we all know

Because we’ve all seen the show and say, oh, yeah, that’s just like George Costanza in the fat wallet, right?

Or, you know, that’s like waiting in line at the Chinese restaurant with nothing happening, right?

At a time when everyone knew these mythologies, if you were educated at all, you knew them,

It’d be easy to say, yeah, I was so tired last night.

It was like I went to sleep in the arms of Morpheus.

And everyone’s like, oh, yeah, Morpheus, sleeping, dreaming, being tired.

Yeah, it makes a lot of sense to me.

And so even today, these mythological figures have given us a whole bunch of other words.

All of them have, more or less, most of them anyway.

And even today, you can say thundering like Zeus, and people will still get, oh, yeah,

Zeus is the god of thunder.

He throws lightning bolts, right?

Yes.

And so pretty much it’s just the cultural touch point.

We all have it in common there.

We can refer back to it to make sure that we’re understood.

I love it.

Well, it’s quite possible that other listeners have gone to bed and heard exactly those same words.

If you’ve heard that phrase, let us know.

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

Leanne, thank you so much for your call.

Thank you.

All right.

Thank you so much.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Want more A Way with Words?

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

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

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

This program would not be possible without you.

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

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

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

In New York, we thank quiz 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.