The Other Shoe (episode #1658)

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 Burnett.

Grant, do you know what an avahi is?

A-ba-hi?

It sounds like a fancy sparkling water.

It sounds like an all-inclusive resort in a faraway, wonderful place.

Club Avahi.

It sounds like an airline that I can’t afford.

Let me tell you what an avahi is. It’s spelled A-V-A-H-I. And an avahi is a woolly lemur of Madagascar. They’re very cute.

Oh, so big tusks. They roam the plains.

No, no. No, they’re little bitty, but they have real big eyes.

Oh, I see.

They’re just adorable. And I think, you know, we could market a sparkling water with an avahi on it, you know, just as the trademark.

Absolutely. A little cute critter. Everybody loves those.

A boggy.

Yes. I just learned that word this week. Let me give you one other word that I learned this week. Saltigrade.

Saltigrade. Is this like tardigrade? The little critters, the tiny microscopic critters that can survive in space and just about anything?

It is related to that word. Tardigrade means walking slowly, moving slowly. And saltigrade means having the feet or legs adapted to leaping, usually used of spiders.

I hear it. So the salta part is related to all the Romance languages that have salt root for jumping.

That’s exactly right. And the English word somersault as well, saltigrade.

So where did you learn these words?

Well, Grant, I have spent a few weeks now luxuriating in words like these because I recently served as the pronouncer for the 2025 San Diego County Scripps Regional Spelling Bee.

And I got to tell you, it was quite the experience.

A room full of brilliant people.

Yes, yes.

These young people are so bright and they work so very hard to get there.

You know, it’s a cliche to say that every one of them is a winner, but really they are because they learn so much and then they get up there and they perform in these incredibly nerve wracking circumstances.

Oh, I can only imagine.

Well, the students were great and I learned a lot of great words in the process.

But I got to tell you that in the process, I also learned some things about myself, including a couple of hard lessons that I will share later in the show.

Martha, I’m really looking forward to hearing more about it.

And I know that we’d both love to hear from our listeners.

Call us or text us.

Our toll-free number is open to you in the United States and Canada, 877-929-9673.

Or email us, words, at waywordradio.org.

Hey there, you have A Way with Words.

Hey, this is Louie calling from the Black Hills of South Dakota.

Well, hey, I wanted to ask you guys about a turn of phrase that I heard my dad use a few summers ago.

It’s kind of a one-off moment that’s been ringing in my ears for the last few years, so I’ll set the scene for you.

We were hosting a family reunion out here in the hills, and we thought it would be fun to bring our extended family all out to the lake for an evening picnic.

And we rented some paddle boards so the younger contingency could all float out on the water.

So there I was out floating and my girlfriend, whose first time it was meeting all my extended family, was out there with me.

And her sunglasses were perched on the top of her head and they slipped backwards.

And in an effort to grab them, she tipped herself completely backwards and went somersaulting into the water in front of the whole family.

Right. And so in this moment, my dad, who was out on the paddle boards with us, he exclaimed these words.

He said, oh, bit the farm.

And I was like scratching my head.

I mean, I’ve ive never heard him use this expression.

Like, where did that come from?

Also, we’re on a lake.

So is that even appropriate right here?

I thought you guys could help me figure that one out.

Well, first of all, that definitely sounds like a family legend in the making.

That’s a hundred year story right there.

Bit the farm.

That’s a good one.

Yeah, it’s got a ring to it, doesn’t it?

It totally does.

Well, it sounds like a mix of two expressions, though, doesn’t it?

Bite the dust and buy the farm.

Yeah, there you go.

And they both kind of mean either to crash or to die.

If you bite the dust, you kind of fall face first.

And if you buy the farm, you crash headfirst into the ground.

Both these expressions have a long history.

So it sounds like a kind of almost a malapropism, a mixed metaphor.

A dadism.

A dadism, where he’s combined these in the heat of the moment,

And the excitement of the enthusiasm he had for captioning this moment.

And Bite the Dust comes from this idea that if you’re in or on the ground, your mouth could be said to be full of dirt or dust.

If you’re buried, your mouth is full of dirt or dust.

And By the Farm actually has an interesting history.

It goes back to the military.

People who flew jets in the early days were said to, if they crashed,

The idea was that if they left behind family, that family would either get a big insurance payout or would sue the government and either way get enough money to pay off the mortgage to buy their property, theoretically a farm.

Hypothetically.

Oh, there you go.

Yeah.

So they would literally buy the farm.

Although another idea was that what they were buying was their worm farm, their cemetery plot.

I do like bit the farm, though.

Yeah, bit the farm.

I like it too. It kind of reminded me of like, oh, I ate it.

Yeah, exactly.

Or I biffed it.

I biffed it, yeah.

Biffed it, yeah, there you go.

But it’s a mixed metaphor on the same lines as it’s not rocket surgery, which is a mix of it’s not rocket science and it’s not brain surgery.

Yeah, okay, I see what you mean, yeah.

Well, Louie, two questions for you.

Did your girlfriend find her glasses and her sunglasses?

And what kind of impression did she make on the fam?

The glasses are at the bottom of the lake, and we haven’t gone back for them.

And thankfully, someone in the family, since everyone had just arrived,

Someone had their suitcase full of dry clothes for her.

So, yeah, it became a story we told again and again that week.

And, yeah, she’s pretty well embedded in the family at this point.

Is she still the girlfriend or is it something more now?

Oh, we’ll see.

We’ll see here.

Oh, get with it, Louie.

Get with the program.

I’m doing my best out here.

All right.

Tell us she didn’t bit the fam.

No, she really face-planted herself into the family in that moment.

All right.

Well, give her our best.

Sounds like she’s good-natured and putting up with the teasing.

Yeah, no kidding.

She gets a lot of it from me, that’s for sure.

All right.

Well, take care of yourself.

Watch out for backwards tilts on the lake.

Thanks, guys.

Love the show.

Yeah, thank you.

Thanks, Louis.

Take care of yourself.

Bye-bye.

Bye for now.

Well, seize your phone and give us a call, 877-929-9673.

There’s a word that people in Finland use for somebody who is persnickety, finicky, a hair splitter,

And it’s pilkunvilaja.

And it translates wonderfully to comma polisher.

I love it.

Comma polisher.

Yeah.

Pilkun means of a comma.

And the other part of that word means literally somebody who files, you know, like files with a metal file.

Oh, yeah.

I’m just picturing taking a nail file to a comma to polish it up a little bit.

Oh, I love it.

Yeah.

That’s particular.

We’re not particular about the way you reach out to us, which is why we’ve got about a dozen ways you can reach us.

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

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Carmen calling from San Diego.

Hi, Carmen.

We’re neighbors practically.

We’re in San Diego as well.

This is where we do the show.

Awesome.

I had a question about the phrase waiting for the other shoe to drop.

I was talking to a friend a couple weeks ago, and he just entered a new romantic relationship.

And he said it was going really well, but he couldn’t help but wait for the other shoe to drop.

And I was thinking, where does that phrase come from?

What did he mean by that?

What did you take from that?

Was he suspicious?

Yeah, I think that he meant like it was going really well, but he expected something to go wrong.

Oh, he didn’t have a lot of faith that it was going to turn out in his favor.

Well, this phrase, waiting for the other shoe to drop, has been around for at least 100 years in English.

And it seems to go back to a story that was circulating in the United States about a guy who comes home to a boarding house after a very late night out.

Maybe he’s been drinking or something.

And he comes in and he’s getting ready to go to bed.

And he takes off one shoe and he just lets it drop to the floor, you know, with a thud.

And then he realizes, oh, you know, I better be quiet.

And so he quietly tiptoes to the bed and takes off the other shoe and gets in bed and is about to go to sleep.

And then somebody downstairs, as he’s drifting off to sleep, yells up, well, drop the other shoe then.

I can’t sleep waiting for you to drop the other shoe.

It may have come from vaudeville or some kind of joke.

Yeah, there’s some variations on that. Some people think it has something to do with Mark Twain. For some reason, it gets attached to his names or that there’s somebody who intentionally withholds the second shoe to make their neighbor, who’s already nervous and kind of a frightful person, kind of go nuts.

Right. It’s kind of like going dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun.

And then by the 1930s, it became figurative, where we use it to refer to this sense of anticipation.

Grant.

Got to have the Rocky Horror mention in there, right?

Right.

So that’s pretty much what we know about this phrase, and I hope this relationship works out, if it’s supposed to.

Yeah, I hope so, too.

Thank you so much.

Sure thing.

Yeah.

Take care, Carmen.

Call us again sometime.

Thank you.

I will.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Well, hey, you upstairs, we’re waiting for you to give us a call.

877-929-9673.

And don’t forget that you can now text us to that same toll-free number if you are in the United States and Canada.

I have to say one of my favorite new words that I’ve learned from working with spelling bee materials is the word hofdorp.

Hofdorp.

So this sounds German in origin.

Yes, yes.

It’s a geographical name.

I should have mentioned that.

H-A-U-F-T-D-O-R-P?

No, it’s even better than that.

It’s H-O-O-F-D-D-O-R-P.

Oh, is it Dutch then?

Yes.

Yes. Hoftdorp is a commune on reclaimed land in the western part of the Netherlands.

It translates as main village.

And I just love that that was something that I didn’t know, and now I know it.

And it’s such a fun word to say and spell, hoftdorp.

Hit us up on our website. There’s a contact form on every page, waywordradio.org.

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

I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett, and coming in from the outside now that the pterodactyls are gone, it’s our quiz guide, John Chaneski. Hi, John.

You know, I have to worry about pterodactyls more than you guys do because I’m so tall, because those things, they fly pretty low.

I’m just, everything’s okay in here? We’re good now?

Yep.

We’re great.

Completely clear. Now, pterodactyls are gone, but I didn’t say anything about the velociraptors.

Well, the velociraptors, I’ll try to outrun them if I can.

They’re smaller than people think they are, by the way. They’re only about the size of turkeys.

Anyway, trivia.

So let’s do the quiz.

And we’re going to do takeoffs again.

We’ve done takeoffs before.

That’s where we take off the first letter of a word to get another word.

And this time we’re going to make two words by taking the S from the start of a word.

The letter S from the start of a word.

Only S now.

Okay.

For example, if I said, the Opportunity Rover on Mars is telling lies about me, the answers would be slander and lander.

Oh, wow.

Nice.

Got a good one.

Yeah, slander and lander.

Now, for some reason, I don’t know exactly why,

These are all relatively long.

They’re all about six or seven letters long, all right?

Okay.

Let me see.

Yeah, all about two syllables, too.

Maybe one or two one-syllable.

Here we go.

They’ve already started dinner,

But there’s enough chairs for two more.

Seat and eat.

Good, yes.

I was going for seating and eating.

Oh, seating and eating.

But seat and eat are perfectly fine.

They’re very good.

Seat and eat.

Now, my family is taking the catamaran out, but I’m home because I don’t feel good.

Okay, that’s easy, right?

Good.

Sailing and ailing.

Sailing and ailing, yes.

I love when you think it’s easy.

Other people are like, well.

Yeah, I’m sitting here going, doy.

Let me tell you a few tales about my conservative friends over in London.

Oh, a story about the Tory.

Yes, stories about the Tories.

I don’t have room to escape these ropes.

I need them to be looser.

I don’t.

I lack the slack to escape these ropes.

Oh, nice.

You lack the slack.

When the stepsisters left, poor Cinderella cleaned up the ashes and cried.

Oh.

Swept and wept.

Swept and wept.

Yes, nicely done, Wata.

The ball game is tied, but now it’s time to get up and stretch.

Seventh inning stretch.

Yes, the stretch occurs in inning number even.

Yes, that’s it.

Seven and even.

Hey, Captain, let’s enjoy some nice salted herring.

Hey, Skipper, let’s have some kipper.

Hey, yeah, Skipper, let’s have a kipper.

Well done.

So you guys were fantastic.

You did really, really well on those S takeoffs.

But congratulations.

Good work.

Bye, John.

As we’ve just demonstrated, we do some goofing around on the show,

But we also have serious conversations about all kinds of things that have to do with language,

And we would love to talk with you.

You can give us a call at 877-929-9673, and you can find lots of ways to reach us no matter where you are in the world.

Just go to waywordradio.org/contact.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha.

This is Santosh Karshal, and I am calling from D.C. Metro.

You know, in many languages, mother, madre, ma, mata, they all start with M.

I was not sure if there is a scientific significance that the child picks up or what is that?

Because it’s been going on for millions of years before even Internet and global connections were.

Why is it so common?

I mean, there are other languages.

There are some other words used for mother, but in so many of them, it starts with M.

Yeah, that’s a fantastic question.

You mentioned English and Spanish.

What other languages did you mention?

Yeah, in Hindi, I am from, originally was born and raised in India.

And in Hindi, so like in India, we have so many different dialects, almost in different states.

And there are several words for mother, you know, ma, mataji, mai, and even the goddess, you know, we have, you know, we believe in a whole bunch of goddesses.

And we always address them as a mata, which is an am, you know.

It’s not a coincidence, actually.

There’s a couple of really strong reasons for this.

And they’re actually not really conflicting reasons, but they’re intersecting reasons.

And I guess the easiest one to talk about first is biological.

There is something that happens with children where some of the first sounds that they produce is what’s called a bilabial sound with an open vowel.

And that is where the lips come together and they make kind of an sound.

And it can either sound like a B or an M, whether or not they’re using their vocal cords.

Which is why you also get words for mother and father that sound like baba or papa.

In Indian languages, aren’t there words for father that are baba?

Yeah, in India, yes.

And another sound you’ll also hear is in, but this comes about from the nursing stage.

The noises that children make when they’re nursing tend to be nasalized.

Again, these sounds come about.

And then we have this second thing that happens where the parents often interpret these noises and have assigned meaning to them.

So the caregivers interpret these sounds, sometimes taking them historically.

We’re talking many, many, you know, tens of thousands of years ago or even thousands of years ago.

Take them to refer to themselves and decide that the children means the parent.

The children is referring to the parents.

And this has happened across all human cultures.

And it is possible that the child actually was referring to the parent because these are the first sounds that the child makes.

The m and the b and the n and the a so so what we have here is if the child does decide to refer to the parent in any way those sounds are going to be the first ones that they make but there’s another thing that has happened beyond that biological factor we have things like language descendants.

So in the indo-european languages which i think all the languages that you referred to so far are indo-european languages, we have this shared historical linguistic fact that we come from common linguistic roots. So this is where you’ll get like madre and mare, the Spanish and French words are linguistically related. They are descended and almost all of the Indian languages spoken on the subcontinent, almost all of them, not all of them, are descended from the same linguistic roots.

And those fundamental words for kinship terms tend to come from the same sources.

So in other words, that initial M sound isn’t universal, but there are a lot of cases.

Yeah, not universal, but common.

But if you add in the ma sound and the ba sound and the pa sound and the n sound and the da sound, you get most of the names for mother and father.

Thank you.

And I honestly love your show.

I really enjoy.

I’ve been listening for 20 years.

Oh, amazing.

Well, you are delightful.

You need to call us again sometime and tell us some more.

All right?

Okay.

All right.

Be well and take care of yourself.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Well, no matter what language you grew up speaking or what language you acquired.

We know you have a lot to say about it, and we’d love to hear from you.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha.

This is Brian from Canada.

How are you and Grant today?

Doing well.

Where are you in Canada, by the way?

Just outside of Ottawa, about an hour outside of Ottawa.

Great.

Well, we’re glad to have you, Brian.

What’s up?

Being in Canada, we love our winter vacations.

And always head south.

So a few years ago, we were in the Caribbean, my family and I, and we were on the beach one day, and there was like a hut, you know, that sold refreshments and snacks and things like that.

And my daughter would have been about maybe 10 at the time, and we would go up to the shack and order some things.

And the third time, I guess it was, we went up. When we walked up, the gentleman in the hut said, what can I get my Canadian friend today?

And I sort of looked at him and he took me back a little bit and I ordered what it was. And then I’m looking at myself and all I have on is a bathing suit. And I’m thinking, so I look at my daughter and I’m looking to see if she has like Canada on her t-shirt or a picture of a beaver or something like that. I’m thinking, how did he know I was a Canadian?

So anyway, I leaned over and I said to her, how would he know that we’re Canadian? And she sort of rolls her eyes back and said, eh? I said, that’s how he knew, eh? And then she rolls her eyes even a little more than that.

So my question is, is that a made in Canada thing?

Oh, yeah.

It’s kind of become this stereotypical Canadian thing, right? It’s the thing that I think Americans would mention that in a boot, like by Americans. I mean, U.S. Citizens, U.S. Residents would mention when they think of Canadian English.

But it didn’t used to be that way. It’s kind of only become stereotyped in the last three or so decades. And it’s really interesting to see linguists trace this over the decades since the 80s, more or less. And just watch it kind of become kind of prominent in the mind of the everyday person.

There is a fantastic article by Elaine Gould of the University of Toronto about A, E, H, in the book Canadian English, a Linguistic Reader. And she explores Canadian English and she focuses particularly on the discourse tag A. And that’s what we call that E, H, because a discourse tag is something that you kind of tack on to other things to change the value of everything else that came before.

Everything that it’s attached to, as you noted, a widely recognized marker of Canadian identity. And just simply inserting that anywhere in a speech will mark you as a Canadian. And then like I joked about it, it’s as good as a red maple leaf, seriously.

So it’s been noted since the 1950s, although it probably existed before that. There’s a chance that it is influenced or maybe even comes from the French-Canadian H-E-I-N. Because the French have a very similar discourse marker. But it’s not for certain.

It’s got a couple different things that it does. So it does have a role besides indicating that you’re Canadian. One is that it basically asks if you agree. It’s kind of like… kind of a confirmation, I guess.

Yeah.

It’s kind of like saying right or you know.

Yeah.

And the other thing that it can do is it can soften what it’s attached to. So I can say, get in the car, eh? And it’s a little less forceful than just saying, get in the car.

Yes.

Yeah, I never thought of it that way, yes.

And if I have an opinion like we should have tacos, and if I say we should have tacos, eh, it’s a little less forceful of an opinion.

That’s true, yes.

Never thought of it that way.

Yeah.

So there’s a bunch of other things, but in general, it’s a softener. It’s not consistent across all of Canada. For example, where you come from in Ottawa, there’s more usage than, say, in Vancouver.

Yeah, and when you say about the French origin, it’s interesting because I’m about less than 10 miles from the Quebec border.

Yeah.

And very prevalent around here and also on the other side of Quebec in the Maritimes. You would hear A, a lot more often there and in Ontario than you would in, say, Saskatchewan or out west.

So the French influence, who’s right in between the Ontario and the Maritimes, that makes a lot of sense then.

Yeah, and French used to be a first language for a lot more Canadians the further back you go. But as each decade passes, fewer and fewer people speak French as a first language in Canada.

Oh, that’s very interesting.

And obviously we say it a lot of times and don’t even realize we’re saying A at the end.

That’s how it is around the whole world. People speak and they don’t realize that their dialect is unique, that it’s got these features that nobody else has.

Exactly.

Ryan, take care of yourself.

Thank you very much.

Enjoy the rest of your day.

All right.

Take care.

Bye.

You too.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

We’re toll-free in the U.S. And Canada.

Give us a call, 877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hey there.

Hi, who’s this?

This is Kathy.

I’m in Mount Gilead, North Carolina.

Mount Gilead, North Carolina.

Well, welcome to the show, Kathy.

How can we help?

I’ve always been a little puzzled. I grew up in the country in a very rural area, and my dad was a farmer, so I was exposed to a lot of different little sayings and stuff.

And sometimes when he would get aggravated, he would use the expression, what in the Sam Hill are you doing? Or something to that effect. And, you know, I didn’t think anything about it because I knew what he meant was, what in the world are you up to?

So when I was teaching, I taught for 30 years. And, yeah, and I’m still sane relatively. Still sane. Congratulations. Relatively. But it was a joy. It was a real joy to be able to do that.

But, like, one time I almost got myself in trouble, and I did not know why. I naturally asked one of my kids. He had been cutting up or not turning in an assignment or something. And I said, what in the Sam Hill are you doing? And he looked at me. And the next day or so, I was called to the principal’s office.

Oh.

You were called to the principal’s office.

Yes.

Yes, I was called.

And I was told that a parent had communicated to the principal that their child’s teacher had used some inappropriate language in the classroom.

I don’t know if he had ever heard that expression, but I think he thought it was a derivative of hell.

Well, Kathy, what we know about what in the Sam Hill is that it is probably a euphemism for saying what in the hell.

But you were using a euphemism, so I don’t know why you got in trouble.

What we can tell you about this expression is that it first shows up in North American slang in the early 1800s.

And there’s kind of a funny instance of this back in 1830. There was a letter to the editor of a newspaper in Providence, Rhode Island. This letter that’s written in a very cartoonish kind of over the top, hyper French style that makes everybody think that this was probably written by a humorous, not a real person.

The letter indicates that this Frenchman is marveling at the fact that all these people, all these Americans on this ship that he’s traveling on keep referring to Sam Hill.

You know, the ship steers like Sam Hill or the wind blows like Sam Hill.

And he’s asking the editor or the readers to tell him, you know, who is this Sam Hill or what is this Sam Hill?

But it’s all very silly, but it suggests that this slang term Sam Hill was already sort of circulating in North America, but was probably so new that the writer was still able to have some fun with it.

The other thing that makes us think that it’s just a euphemism is that when you see this term in the 19th century, it’s not always capitalized.

And sometimes it’s all one word, Sam Hill.

All of this suggests to me, anyway, that Sam Hill was never a real person.

Your dad didn’t know anybody named Sam Hill.

It really is a euphemism for hell.

Well, that’s very curious.

I’m glad you were able to shed a little bit of light on that.

Well, we’re glad to have you, Kathy, and thank you for shedding a lot of light over 30 years with, you know, putting old heads on young shoulders, as they say.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, Kathy, you take care of yourself and call us again sometime, all right?

Okay, I will.

All right, be well now.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Oh, we love you, teachers.

We really do.

Give us a call with your stories of teaching no matter how long it was, 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.

And I mentioned at the top of the show that I served recently as the pronouncer for a regional spelling bee here in San Diego.

And, you know, when they first invited me, I thought, great, that’ll be a fun morning.

Grant, I had no idea what I was getting into.

But you have great pronunciation.

You’re constantly helping me out when I go astray.

You just sound fantastic.

You do professional reading.

Well, thank you, Grant. The thing is that there were hundreds and hundreds of words that I had to pronounce exactly correctly for the competitors.

And, you know, yeah, I went into it thinking, you know, this is going to be a breeze. I can read Latin. I can read Greek.

Grant and I have been doing A Way with Words for years and years now. Words are what you and I do all the time.

Right.

Right?

How did it go?

I have a much better appreciation, for one thing, for how the students spend hours and hours working with all these words to understand their meaning and where they come from and how to spell and how to pronounce them.

It’s a massive amount of work.

And what this process made me realize is that English is this big, wide, wonderful language, and it’s absolutely voracious.

It gobbles up words from everywhere about food, about weather, about philosophical concepts and forms of transportation and lots of plants and animals.

And Grant, there were so many words in this huge study guide that I did not know.

Oh, that’s not a surprise. English is ridiculous. English should not be allowed, frankly.

Well, and on the one hand, it was intimidating.

But on the other hand, it is very exciting to think about all these concepts and ideas and things that I didn’t know about.

But also, so many times I would look at a word I’d never seen before and I would feel pretty confident that I could work out what the pronunciation was.

But no, so many times what I guess the pronunciation was, was flat out wrong.

And one other thing I want to say, Grant, is that in this study guide of hundreds and hundreds of words, there were words that I did know, of course, and that I thought I knew very well.

But then I learned from studying these words that I had been mispronouncing at least three of them for years.

Now you know how I feel when you tell me that.

Over our time together, you have gently said, Grant, I think it’s pronounced blah, blah, blah.

And I’m like, oh, she’s done it again.

But, you know, I remember you corrected me on the word piquant, which I’ve always said as piquant.

And it’s sort of like when you’re in a spelling bee and you go out on a word that you spell incorrectly, you never forget it.

You remember it because you have great pronunciation.

For me, it happens all the time.

I can’t possibly remember all the times my pronunciation is corrected.

Well, you know, what I was reminded of, Grant, was the fact that you and I have talked many times about how there’s really no shame in mispronouncing a word that you’ve learned only through reading.

Right.

You know, it just it means that you’re a well-read person.

Yeah.

Your reading is ahead of your ears.

Your eyes are ahead of your ears.

And that’s a great place to be.

The brain is working hard.

Yeah.

Right.

Well, bravo to the participants.

I know that they work their beehines off on that.

Beehines.

And what was the spelling bee again?

This was the San Diego County Scripps Regional Spelling Bee.

And the winner goes on to the National Spelling Bee.

Oh, fantastic.

Well, bravo and brava to all the participants.

We’re happy that you’ve made this choice in your life to be word nerds.

And we love to hear from our fellow word nerds.

No matter where you are in the world, you can email us or find other ways to reach us on our website at waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Oh, hi, Martha.

This is Beth.

I’m calling from Crete, which is the southernmost island of Greece.

Wow.

Wow, Crete.

Yasu.

That’s fantastic.

The kind of thing.

Okay, my question is, because I’m kind of a stickler, having been an English teacher most of my adult life,

And I keep hearing on supposedly sites that should know better,

Using the word amount for something that I’ve always taught my kids should be a number of.

So you can’t say, I didn’t think an amount of people.

I should say a number of people, a number of apples, a number of dogs.

But I hear it all the time on the BBC, on, you know, American news outlets.

So I’m just wondering, is that something that has changed?

Is that acceptable now?

So you might be watching BBC and they might say there’s a large amount of people protesting on the plaka or something like that.

Exactly, exactly.

And I did actually see, not to name names, but on NPR about 10 days ago, which is why I wrote to you, they were talking about something like, well, for $10, what’s the amount of eggs you can buy?

Which wasn’t in speech.

It was written down.

Okay, in speech, sometimes you’re going to make those, you know, you’re live on air or whatever.

But this was written down, and I kind of went, whoa, amount of eggs, really?

So is that accepted usage now so I can stop, you know, getting bugged by it or yeah, you know, it’s funny because in these you live in a multilingual universe there, you know, being an England native English speaker but living in a Greek-speaking environment you probably are part of a multilingual world anyway since Greek is part of Europe and it’s a very cosmopolitan country.

Anyway, right, we heavily visited by people from around the world who want to come and enjoy its.

Food and its culture, you know, and the deep history that’s there. But it’s all about circumstances. So we have, on one side, we have these formal situations, the texts that you would write, say, for your classes, your professors and your teachers, or for the workplace where you’re writing reports and proposals and maybe something for your business partners. Those places are where you would probably want to adhere to these very strict rules.

And then the strict rule in this case is the distinction that amount applies to substances that are considered as mass and number applies to something that can be counted as individuals within a group.

But in everyday speech, we don’t need to make that distinction. And so that’s what we’re hearing. Now, the problem is that news often straddles those two universes. It straddles formal speech and informal speech because the speakers of news often are talking off the cuff. They’re not working from scripts necessarily. They’re paid to be the kind of people who can assess a situation without having to do a huge amount of prep. And so sometimes they’re just working from their own brains, and that means that they’re calling on those informal patterns.

Right. You know? That’s why I was asking, like, are we going to be, you know, more of a stickler for writing it down? In speech, I understand that, but I never hear a number of people being said anymore. It’s an amount of people. What I hear here, you know.

Yeah, you’ll see an important one thing to remember, Beth, is that spoken language is the original language and a written language is this highly structured kind of organized, stylized language that we have invented on top of spoken language. So the written language is this artificial construct. So, Beth, I hope that makes you feel a little better.

Yeah. Well, I mean, I could just say I could just relax about this. Oh, that’s the correct thing. Yes. Yeah. Yes, just relax and enjoy the sunshine and the beaches and the blue, blue waters. Well, yes. Great conversation, though.

Yeah, fantastic. You’re a delight and a treat. Okay, thanks a lot. Have a great day. Bye. Bye.

We heard from Angie Scholler, who lives in Oklahoma City, and she writes that when her parents were first married in the early 1960s, her mother made a tuna casserole one night. And she writes, my ever diplomatic father didn’t particularly enjoy it. From then on, whenever daddy asked mom what would be for dinner that night and the answer was tuna casserole, he’d say, why don’t we go out for dinner? And tuna casserole became a family term for them for eating out. And she says, I remember hearing, shall we get tuna casserole at the local burger joint? Or shall we get tuna casserole at the local Mexican restaurant?

That’s sweet, right? Yeah. You take something that could be an ugly memory and you turn it into a family, you know, family lexicon. Yeah. That’s good nature. That’s how you handle family kind of disagreement, right? You just kind of shift it into the light and the funny.

Yeah, tuna casserole has more than one meaning. Who knew? We’d love a peek into the dialect of your family. What’s in the lexicon in your house? What’s the decades-old story that became this word that everybody uses? Let us know. Toll-free text or call 877-929-9673. Hi there. You have A Way with Words.

Hey, guys. My name is Ray. I’m calling from Dallas by way of El Paso. Wonderful. What’s up, Ray? So growing up on the border, I thought my Spanish was pretty good. I moved to Dallas. I became a bilingual elementary school teacher. And my students and my colleagues quickly informed me that I was speaking jibber jabber. It wasn’t proper Spanish. And I would politely correct them and say, no, I think what you meant to say is, obvious Tex-Mex really well, Mr. B.

But growing up, my family had this term. So if we had like a big gathering and then everybody leaves, or it could just be my friends and like we have a big party, everybody leaves your tight-knit group, we would say sac-a-gata. And it’s basically like debrief. Any good gossip or anything noteworthy happening, we would kind of share it. Nobody else seems to have heard this before, except for my tight-knit group of friends and family, apparently.

When I research it, I see it like a claw or a talon, but it means more like to show your strength or bring out the claws or show what you’re worth. I always just thought like with a claw or a talon, like you cut to the meat or cut to the heart of it. Is this one of my jibber jabber that my family invented on the border or does anybody else use this or are there any other terms?

Yeah, I love what you’re saying here. There’s a couple of different layers to this. Let’s address the jibber jabber and your Tex-Mex Spanish. You just speak a dialect. I mean, I don’t know if you grew up speaking Spanish, but there are distinct regional dialects on both sides of the border. So it’s entirely possible that you just speak a variety of first or second generation Spanish that other people haven’t encountered.

They call me Pocho. Oh, okay. Yeah. If they call you Pocho, then it’s probably second or third generation Spanish. Right. Yeah. But that’s okay. I always say that no matter how much of a language you speak, second, third, fifth, hundredth language, as long as it’s more than zero, great. You know, just as long as you’re learning it and trying to speak more than zero, that’s good for you. So just keep it up and you’ll get there, right?

I would tell my students, you can correct my Spanish, but we learn together, you know? Yeah, absolutely. Every word you learn is something you didn’t know yesterday. Every phrase, every idiom. So that’s all on the plus side. So together, the three of us are going to learn this new expression that you’re teaching me and Martha. Sacagara is amazing because I find it in some Spanish glossaries collected in Texas, which is where you are.

And so it is a Texas regionalism, a Spanish expression spoken in the northern part of Mexico and in Texas. And it means a variety of things, but it can mean to chat or to gossip. And it does mean to take out one’s claws. An English slang translation might be to be catty, to be like a cat. Now, in mainstream Spanish, I do find in a couple of my reference works, it could mean to hurt someone physically or mentally.

But what’s really interesting is that in Mexican Spanish, now let’s break down this word for the English speakers who don’t have any Spanish. Sacar is a form of sacar, which means to take out. And gara, G-A-R-R-A, is claw. So in Mexican Spanish, there’s a little bit of a pun. Because the Spanish word gara, G-A-R-R-A, is both claw, C-L-A-W, and old clothes.

So the best translation for those on the U.S.-Mexican border might be to air dirty laundry. But you’re airing somebody else’s dirty laundry. You’re talking, right? You’re talking about their sad state of affairs. So when everybody leaves the party, you’re talking about, oh, did you hear what she did? Right?

Yeah. Exactly. So a synonym is estirar cara, which means to extend the claw. And also there’s hacer garas, which means to tear to pieces. But so probably more common throughout the rest of Mexico is sacar garas, which means to pull out your claws. But it means to get advantages, to like to take advantage of a situation. So it’s not common throughout Mexican Spanish and certainly not in the rest of the dialects of Spanish. But I do find it in glossaries specific to Texas and the north of Mexico.

Yeah, I’m wondering if this is a term that has gone through some amelioration because it seems like such a nasty, you know, almost violent term. But I’m just wondering about the kind of gossip that followed a gathering. Was it malicious or was it like just, you know, the scoop on what’s happening?

Anything noteworthy. Yeah, I know sometimes it was, but just anything noteworthy like, oh, did you see how your nephews grew? Or they got accepted to that college? Did you hear that? Okay. But yeah, no, no, of course, yes. Those were the best ones, the salacious ones. Did you see what they were wearing?

Well, Martha, that’s a great question. And Ray, perhaps you could talk about this. In some of my glossaries, they make a very strong distinction that people who are considered might define it as to gossip.

But people who speak Spanglish might define it as to platicar, to chat.

So it’s a little different because chatting is kind of neutral, but the gossip is a little negative.

No, I’ll be honest.

Yeah, I like the gossip.

It’s more gossip.

Anyway, so here we are.

We’ve all learned a term together, got a little bit of background.

You brought it to us.

Thank you, Ray. This is wonderful.

No, that was great. I appreciate it. Keep up the great work.

Now he’s going to go gossip about this conversation, I think.

Martha and Grant, they said this. They’re the worst.

Thanks a lot.

But we can too.

Our pleasure. Come back here sometime. We’d love to learn what you learned from your kids sometime, okay?

Absolutely.

We know a lot of teachers listen to us, and we’d love to hear what you’re learning from your students.

Give us a call or send us an email. The number is 877-929-9673. The email address is words@waywordradio.org.

A Way with Words senior producer is Stefanie Levine. Tim Felten is our engineer and editor, and John Chaneski is our quiz master. Go to waywordradio.org for all of our past episodes, podcast links, and ways to reach us.

If you have a language, thought, or question, the toll-free line is always open in the U.S. and Canada, 1-877-929-9673.

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It’s supported by listeners and organizations who are changing the way the world talks about language.

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And special thanks to our nonprofit’s volunteer board, Michael Breslauer, Josh Eckels, Clare Grotting, Merrill Perlman, Bruce Rogow, Rick Seidenwurm, and Betty Willis.

Thanks for listening. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. Until next time, goodbye.

So long.

Bye.