The Thought Plickens

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You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

Martha, for one of the projects I’ve been working on lately, we’ve been using a term called bike shedding. Do you know this?

Bike shedding? Is that getting rid of your bike and moving up to a motorcycle or down to a tricycle?

No, no, no. It dates back to 1961 in a book called Parkinson’s Law by a fellow by the name of C. Northcote Parkinson.

And he describes about people’s willingness to argue about the tiny details of a project because those details are knowable and manageable.

And their unwillingness to talk about the large picture, the big bones of the project.

So, for example, as he illustrates, you might easily argue about the color of a bicycle shed.

Should you paint it red? Should you paint it yellow? What color?

But you would be unlikely to argue about how to build an atomic power plant.

Because that’s outside your expertise or your experience, right?

I see.

And he describes this in a pretty funny, humorous context of a way of envisioning how a project or management can go wrong.

Where you get lost in the details.

You spend way too much time arguing about stuff that really doesn’t matter simply because that’s the only thing that you can get a handle on.

And then when I think about, sometimes when I think about language, I actually think about the same thing.

Sometimes we argue about the very useless little tidbits rather than talking in general about the big picture of the world of linguistics.

Right. That’s a really good point. Bike shedding. I like that.

Bike shedding. Yeah.

Well, I have a really old word for you. You’ve given me a new one. Here’s a really old word.

Tohu bohu. Do you know this word, Grant?

Tohu bohu.

I love this word. T-O-H-U-B-O-H-U.

Tohu bohu. It means just a mess, confusion.

I walked into my teenage son’s room, and it was a tohu bohu.

But here’s the really great thing about this word, Grant.

It is so old because it goes back to Hebrew scripture.

In fact, it goes all the way back to the beginning.

In Genesis, when it talks about the earth being without form and void, the Hebrew there is tohu vavohu, without form and void.

And ever since the 1700s, people have been using tohubohu, not very often, but to mean a mess, confusion, disorder.

That’s brand new to me, even though it’s very old to the language, tohubohu.

Isn’t that great? Tohubohu and bike shedding.

If you’d like to talk to us about any aspect of language or share an old or new word of your own, give us a call.

The number is 1-877-929-9673 or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Judy Dunson in Indianapolis, Indiana.

Well, hello, Judy. Welcome to the program.

Thank you.

Well, I have a question on a phrase that we were using not too long ago.

It’s called swan song.

When somebody is getting ready to leave, or in our case, it was somebody who had finished their term on the board, and we were joking around asking him what his swan song was going to be.

And then a little later, I was talking with someone about my pending retirement, and they were saying, what are you going to do for a swan song?

And I said, where did that term come from?

And none of us knew because we’d never heard a swan singing and didn’t know whether a swan does some sort of dying, mournful thing when it dies or whether it came from an opera or what.

So in other words, Judy, you got out of singing a song?

Well, they didn’t ask me to sing, and it was probably a good thing.

Oh, really?

Well, if you were going to sing for them, what would you sing?

Well, I don’t think it would have anything to do with retirement.

Okay.

There’s no business like show business.

Yeah, I wouldn’t do the old great goose ain’t what she used to be or something like that.

There we go.

Very good.

Well, yeah, it goes all the way back to the ancient Greeks at least.

As you suggested, they had this mistaken belief that there was a certain kind of swan that is silent most of its life.

It’s really kind of a beautiful story that it remains silent most of his life.

And then just before the moment of its death, it breaks that silence by singing this final song of unbelievable sweetness.

Sounds like something that should be in an opera.

It probably was.

It was. It definitely was.

You’re right that it’s this classic image that you find in Shakespeare and The Merchant of Venice and Chaucer and Aesop’s fables.

I mean, it’s been around for a long, long, long time.

And we borrowed the expression from a German expression that means the same thing.

Well, that’s interesting because when I was speaking with one of my colleagues about it, he started saying, well, this came from this woman named and gave this German name.

And when she was singing and then she just dropped dead.

I said, you’ve got to be kidding me.

He says, yeah, I just made that up.

But he linked it to German.

Interesting.

Well, we would never do such a thing.

Never.

Ever.

No.

Ever.

It was Schubert who had a collection of songs published after he died under the name Schwanegesang.

Right.

Like the unfinished.

I thought maybe it might have something to do with the opera of, you know, where the swan is dying.

You know, the dancers are swans.

Swan Lake.

Oh, Swan Lake.

Something like that.

Yeah, there’s definitely some correlation there.

Most of the dictionaries that I’ve checked suggest that we borrowed swan song from German, where it is something, well, my German is terrible, but Schwanengesang, which is literally swan song.

And you can find it in German as far back as 1560.

I’m sure it’s much older than that.

And there’s definitely the correspondence between the English language tradition of opera and the German tradition of opera is so great that I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s where we get it from directly.

So, Judy, what are you going to do in retirement now besides call erudite radio shows?

Well, actually, I would love to just continue to call this show.

You’re one of my favorites.

Oh, nice.

But I work for Church World Service, and I plan to continue to volunteer for Church World Service in my retirement.

So I’ve got some things mapped out, especially in emergency response and things like that.

Oh, cool, cool.

Well, that’s very much needed.

So my swan song will be very active.

Excellent.

Excellent.

I love it.

It will be more like Happy Feet than swan song.

More like happy feet.

I like that.

Well, hey, thanks a lot for calling.

Okay, and thanks for the answer.

Thanks, Judy.

Take care.

Grant, speaking of retirement, remember when we asked that question about is there a better word than retirement?

You know, sometimes there’s a word that we talk about on the show that just hits a nerve, and this one did.

I mean, the e-mails just won’t stop coming.

We heard from all kinds of people who were suggesting instead of the term retirement, rebooting, reframing, reformatting, refazing, becoming an entrepreneur.

One of my favorites was from Gary in San Diego who said that when he was a full-time employee of a company, he referred to that as captive employment.

And now he refers to his current state as free-range employment.

I like that, free-range.

So that’s what I’m going with for now.

But, boy, now if we could just come up with an alternative to senior citizen, we’d be all set.

Old people.

No!

Okay.

Send your ideas and suggestions to words@waywordradio.org or give us a call at 1-877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello.

This is Michelle Diekelman calling from Oceanside, California.

Well, hello, Michelle. Welcome to the program.

Hi, Michelle.

Thank you.

What can we do for you?

Well, I’m a high school teacher here in Oceanside.

And we were having a debate sort of by email among the faculty about the use of criteria as a plural noun and also as a singular noun.

So my brief question is, is it correct to use criteria as a plural noun, and is it correct to use criteria as a singular noun?

Wow. And you teach what there?

I’m actually the French teacher here.

Okay, you teach French, and somebody is trying to tell you that criteria is a singular word?

Yes.

What do your discussions look like? Is the email system melting down?

No, it really wasn’t that much.

Unfortunately, not everybody engages in these language debates.

But I like language and talk about language, and this was an English teacher.

And we had sent out a note, all the teachers in this high school teach two vocabulary words a week at the same time during the same day.

And the special word, the focus word that week was criteria.

And so when we sent out the information about criteria, then she replied that criteria is incorrectly used as a plural, which I think that’s not right, but that it may also be, it is accepted as a singular.

So she sent that on the email, and then people kind of had discussions about it in their own departments, I think.

Oh, my.

So we have the French against the English once again.

Is that right?

That’s true.

That’s true.

And this person isn’t in a position where she can fire you or anything, right?

No, I think I’m safe on that. I think I’m safe.

No, no, okay, you’re peers.

And so your position is that it’s okay for criteria to be a singular?

Well, here’s my position.

My position is if people use it as a singular because I’m sure people do, then I’m okay with that.

I also want to basically have it both ways.

I want people to be able to use it as a singular, but I also want it to be correctly used as a plural.

So I’m not going to judge people if they’re going to use it as a singular, but I do prefer that we acknowledge there’s a correct use.

So you’re looking for a particular criterion then.

That’s true.

And is that…

It must be the criterion for this.

-huh.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I don’t guess they teach Greek there, right?

No.

Okay, because if they did, then the answer would be flashing in great big neon letters.

Criterion is singular.

Comes from the Greek word that looks almost exactly like that and means a standard of judging, and criteria is the plural.

It’s a neuter plural in Greek, and that’s how those work.

You see the same thing with phenomenon.

A lot of people say phenomena for the singular, and that’s not right.

Phenomenon is singular. Phenomena is plural.

And you’re correct. Traditionally, at least, criterion is singular and criteria is plural.

And you’re also correct that a lot of people do use criterion in the singular.

It’s such large numbers now that it can’t be ignored, and all the major style guides, and many of the minor ones, will deal with this question.

And I think there’s some consensus there, which is kind of, you’ve kind of come right to it, which is do it right.

Do it right when you can.

Make sure that criterion is the singular and criteria is the plural.

But if someone else uses criteria as the singular, it’s not a mortal offense.

You don’t need to condemn them.

You don’t need to put a big red F at the top of the page.

Yeah, but send them a snarky email.

No, I don’t want to be snarky about it.

I do have a very open mind about it.

-huh.

So, and the other word I thought of, too, like that is, well, you said the phenomenon is data.

Does data follow that same rule?

Oh, yeah, that’s another one of those that gets even trickier, I think.

Datum and data.

And agenda.

Agenda is a plural in Latin.

The agenda has completely made the transformation and is now fully anglicized and no longer follows the Greek rule.

Exactly.

Or Latin.

Latin, yeah.

And I think that’s a good point, that agenda has been fully assimilated that way.

But if you look in some dictionaries, usage notes, those kinds of things, they’ll say that a lot of people do make that criteria mistake, but the rule still holds.

I would say that your nuanced position is a really nice one.

And I think that you’ve fully covered your bases, and you’re acknowledging that we’re on the cusp of a transformation here and that there might be some people who learned it differently and do it a different way.

But again, if you know the traditional rule, why not go ahead and use it?

Well, Michelle, thank you so much for calling us today.

It’s been a pleasure. Thank you so much.

It was our pleasure.

Take care. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

I was reading the Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage while we were talking here, and they really just kind of nail it in a sentence.

They say, time will tell whether it will reach the unquestioned acceptability of agenda. I think we’re still waiting for that data to come in.

Okay. If you’ve got a question about language, a dispute you’ve had with a colleague, let us settle it.

We’ll figure it out. Somebody will be fired at the end of it.

1-877-929-9673

Or send us an anonymous email to words@waywordradio.org.

Stay tuned for a puzzle that’ll stretch your brain like a 300-foot bungee cord.

Next on A Way with Words.

You’re listening to A Way with Words.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

And we’re joined now by the one, the only, the unique, and the always safe for work, John Chaneski.

Safe for work.

I’ve never been described as safe for work before.

But I guess it applies.

Hello, Grant.

Hi, Martha.

And he can be operated well under the influence of alcohol.

That’s true.

That’s true.

What’s going on, John?

Something happened to me recently I thought you guys might be interested in.

I went to Max’s school, my son Max.

I went to his kindergarten class for all the kids had written these little books with pictures.

And Max had written a story about going to the store with me and I bought him this toy that he likes.

And he wrote in a little word bubble because we read a lot of comics.

He wrote in a little word bubble, we go to the store.

And he wrote we, W-I-I.

Nice.

Yeah.

It totally got by my wife until I said, you know why you’re out there, don’t you?

And do you have a game?

Speaking of games, do you have one for us?

I do have a game.

And speaking of I-I and double letters, it has something to do with double letters.

I call it Make It a Double.

It’s a simple puzzle.

I’ll give you the definitions for two words.

Both words are spelled the same with the exception that a single letter in one of the words is doubled in the other.

For example, skeletal, pleasing to the eye, suggests what two words?

Skeletal pleasing to the eye?

Right.

Wait, skeletal means…

Skinny, pretty…

How about this?

How about skeletal pleasing to the…

Oh, bony and bonny.

Right, right.

Bony and bonny.

I was going to say skeletal pleasing to the Irish eye.

How’s that?

Bony and bonny.

B-O-N-Y?

Okay, gotcha.

B-O-N-N-Y.

Good.

This is pretty easy.

So to spice it up, I’ve made the clues read sort of like a sentence.

There may be a superfluous preposition or two.

It won’t trip you up.

Also, the definition to the single-letter word could come first or second.

It’s changed up.

All right?

Okay.

Play it by ear.

Here we go.

Here’s the first.

Zeus or Hera, for example, is not bad.

God and good.

God and good.

Yeah, should have started with that one.

That was good.

That was God.

I mean, that was good.

Here’s the next.

Took unlawfully, yet wearing a king’s clothes.

Took unlawfully.

I was going to say stolen, but that doesn’t work.

Robbed and robed.

Robbed and robed.

Very good.

Good, good.

Here’s the next.

Wagered on a root vegetable.

Rutabaga and no.

Bet on a beet.

Bet on a beet.

Bet and beet.

Very good.

Rutabaga.

Here’s another.

Moving an aircraft not easily born.

Born as in B-O-R-N or B-O-R-N-E?

Breachcraft and beachcraft?

No.

Usually you fly an aircraft, but when you drive an aircraft.

Taxi and what was the other one?

Let’s do the gerund.

Oh, taxing and taxi-ing?

That’s it.

Taxing and taxi-ing.

Oh, the double I.

Goodness.

What a stranger a double I is in an English word.

I know.

It’s really weird.

You’ve got to get up to some hijinks to find something like that.

Well, that’s a triple dotted, but not double I.

Anyway, here’s the next one.

More narrow like a green Ghostbusters phantom.

He was slimmer and slimer.

Slimmer and slimer.

Good, Grant.

A little earworm for you.

Thank you.

Who are you going to call?

Wordbusters.

That’s us, baby.

Here’s the next one.

Float up and down like some kind of jerk.

Float up and down like some kind of jerk.

I was going to say Bob and Boob, but that’s it.

That’s it.

That’s perfect.

Oh, that’s nice.

Yes.

Float up and down as Bob, and some kind of jerk as a boob.

So, boob and Bob.

Or Bob and boob.

Either way.

Oh, man.

Okay.

Here’s the next.

Without rhythm, like the Helter Skelter guys.

Beatles and Beatless.

That’s it.

Beatles and Beatless.

Oh, good.

I was thinking Charles Manson.

The Beatles were hardly Beatless.

We take a little puzzle license there.

Gotcha.

Okay.

Here’s the last one.

The shredded remnants of spuds.

Taters?

Mm—

Taters and tatters.

Taters and tatters.

Well done.

Man, why hasn’t somebody marketed that?

Mom, can we have taters and tatters tonight?

Tater tatters.

French fries are sort of tater tatters if you shred them really well.

Julianne potatoes are tater tatters.

All right, so that was a hard one.

I think that was pretty difficult.

A couple of those were easy, but some of those, ooh-wee, I could have sat here for an hour without Martha.

That was tough.

You guys did fantastic.

I prefer challenging to hard, and you guys, you were challenged and you rose to the challenge.

You met it.

Thanks, John.

That was indeed a lot of fun.

Thank you.

We’ll see you again next time.

All right.

Sounds good.

And if you’d like to talk about grammar or slang or punctuation or letters or words and how we use them, give us a call, 1-877-929-9673.

That’s 1-877-WAYWORD, W-A-Y-W-O-R-D.

Or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Or try us on Twitter at the username Wayword.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, good morning.

My name is Gabriel.

I’m calling from Marietta, California.

Okay.

I just have a question for you guys.

And first of all, you know, English is really not my first language.

I’m from the Philippines, and I’ve always been curious about the word okay because it’s very universally used.

I use it back home.

I use it here.

And I just want to know, where did it come from, and is it an acronym or an abbreviation of something?

But I know it’s just an affirmation of like if somebody’s talking to you and you’re agreeing, you say okay.

Well, cool, Gabriel. So you grew up speaking Tagalog?

Yes, I did. Yeah. I speak Tagalog fluently and I’ve only been here in the States for about nine years.

And Gabriel, have you heard theories about where this term might have come from?

I remember I asked a friend, and he told me it was something from a letter that was sent to a, I think a president or a senator.

And there was a script there, and they saw a word like an O and a K.

And I’m not really sure if that’s correct.

Yeah, that sort of sounds like different elements of the real story that got stuck in a blender and all mixed up.

And there’s a lot to say about that, but let me try to boil it down for you.

First of all, there are lots and lots and lots and lots of theories besides that one about where it came from.

Or I shouldn’t say theories, but stories.

And so let’s just dismiss those right from the beginning.

Okay.

There’s not evidence that it comes…

You spit again.

What’s that?

I said it again.

You said okay.

Okay, let’s see.

Oh, see, I did it too.

I was going to say, okay, let’s see how many times we can…

Right there.

Right then. Correct. I mean, people are probably getting ready to send us emails about, oh, it comes from ancient Greek or it comes from Choctaw Indian language or it comes from Irish or Burmese or Finnish.

Scots or Wolof or Martian.

Right. West African. Yeah. Maybe it comes from Martian. I don’t know.

But anyway, we don’t have evidence for those stories, even though they’re floating around.

Now, here’s the one that’s the most plausible.

Gabriel, back in the 1830s and 1840s in this country, there was a period of great linguistic playfulness, kind of like today.

People were just, they loved making up words.

This is the period of time when you start hearing words like hornswoggle or gosh bustify, which means very, very happy.

And people also played with letters and abbreviations, particularly in newspapers in the Boston area.

Columnists would, they would misspell words occasionally.

On purpose, mind you.

Yeah, on purpose.

And they would use funny abbreviations.

And one of those abbreviations was OK for all correct.

They spelled those words incorrectly, O-L-L-K-O-R-R-E-C-T, which is not correct.

And Grant, there were a lot of other different initials that were used in those days, right?

Yeah, a ton of them.

None of them seem to have lasted the same way that OK has, however.

Exactly. And apparently one of the reasons is that although all of these fell away, OK stuck around in part because of President Martin Van Buren, President Number Eight.

He was born in Kinderhook, New York, which is in upstate New York.

And people used to call him Old Kinderhook.

And if you think about it, old Kinderhook is abbreviated O.K.

And so people formed a democratic O.K. Club in his name.

And somehow we think that that had a role in the all-correct O.K. Abbreviation taking off and becoming popular.

There was a kind of reinforcement there.

And now there are citations for this in newspapers going back to the 1830s.

We can find a pretty good pattern, which is why this theory, out of all of the theories about okay, has the most support behind it from linguists and lexicographers.

There are other theories that have a little bit of evidence, but this is the strongest one.

There’s an unbroken record back to the 1830s on this.

Yeah, so it’s kind of a long story, but it goes back to all correct.

All correct. I’ll remember that. All correct.

Hey, Gabriel, I have a question for you.

Sure.

Is there a Tagalog word for mountain that maybe starts with a B?

Yes, there is.

What is that word?

It’s called bundok.

Bundok.

Aha.

Okay.

Mountain.

I had to ask because, you know, we gave you guys okay, but you guys gave us the word boondocks.

Really?

Oh, yeah, that’s right.

I didn’t even thought of that.

Yeah, yeah, because it means mountain, right?

Yeah, it means mountain.

We brought that back from the Philippines and a few other things besides.

We could have contributed something.

Yeah.

Okay, one of the theories behind why it spread so easily, besides the rise of American power throughout the 1800s and into the 1900s, was the fact that O and K are two sounds that are almost universal in languages spoken around the world.

They are incredibly easy to say, incredibly easy to understand, and difficult to corrupt.

Exactly, exactly.

Okay.

Wow, you guys are great. Amazing. I love your show again, and that’s really, really helpful.

Gabriel, thank you so much for calling us today. Best of luck to you.

Thank you.

Okay.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Okay.

Bye-bye.

Okay.

Okay.

Bye.

Thank you.

Bye.

Boy, it’s hard not to say that, isn’t it?

Yeah.

Well, help us make the linguistic connections.

Find out the history of language here on A Way with Words, 1-877-929-9673, or send us an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hi.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi.

This is Krista from Dallas, Texas.

Hello, Krista.

Hi, Krista.

Welcome.

Thank you.

What’s happening?

I have a pet peeve, and I’d like to hear your opinion on its appropriate usage.

All right.

We love to opine.

Oh, good.

I’ve noticed lately that people are substituting the word female for the word woman.

So, for example, female suicide bomber, so when it’s used as an adjective or as a noun, like a lot of females in the room, or I’m a female.

And to me, that smacks of, like, Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom.

Like we’re talking about tigers or something.

And I’m not quite sure why people…

I understand there’s sort of a general discomfort with the word woman, and that’s a different call for a different program.

But I’m just wondering, it’s probably technically correct to use female, but when is it more appropriate?

And Jim will now attempt to tranquilize the female of the species.

The female of the species waits for the male to approach.

Sorry, you just sent us off in a different direction.

Oh, we are.

We’re back.

It was that certain cadence that you only found on those shows, right?

That’s right.

But there is something kind of clinical about it, right?

As if you’re somehow removed from what you’re observing or talking about.

Yes.

This point of view that you have, that there’s something not quite right about using female as a noun, goes back hundreds of years.

And it even goes back nearly to the beginning of female as a word in English when it was borrowed from the French.

And much has been written about this.

A lot of people today think it sounds like a cop talking, somebody who is trying to sound more important than they actually are.

A female suspect approached and pulled out a gun.

You know, whatever, it’s this kind of stilted language where you say something in kind of an awkward way.

Nobody really ever talks like that.

One of the quotes that I really like here is a fellow by the name of Alford in 1866 says, why should a woman be degraded from her position as a rational being and be expressed by a word which might belong to any animal tribe?

And commentator after commentator over the years has condemned the use of female as a noun.

And yet, and yet it still persists, which is really interesting.

It says a little bit about our need for these two nouns that mean roughly the same thing.

There is some connotation, right?

There’s something else happening.

There’s some extra information contained in female that’s not in the word woman and vice versa so that we feel the need to use one or the other in certain circumstances.

What do you think that extra information is?

Well, it’s a good question.

I think Krista hinted at it when she suggested that there’s a discomfort with using the word woman.

What do you think that discomfort is, Krista?

Because I think that’s definitely a part of this conversation.

Oh, I was a women’s studies minor, so how much time do you have?

Well, if you can condense your dissertation down into a couple sentences.

Okay.

So you weren’t in female studies.

They would prefer lady, and then when you’re using it in sort of a less subjective context, lady doesn’t quite fit, and for some reason woman doesn’t feel right.

I don’t know if that’s the old use of, you know, woman of the night, or it feels insulting to call someone a woman without conferring on them the lady status.

I’m not quite sure what that is.

And you’re just talking about this straight-up noun.

You’re not talking about using female and woman as adjectives or attributive nouns, right?

You’re not where you say a woman doctor or a woman president or a female senator.

Or a woman driver.

Well, that’s what I mean.

That’s a subject for a different show.

Okay, I see.

There you go.

What show would that be?

I’m not sure that that show exists.

But no, in that case as well, even though I find that irritating to say a woman doctor or a woman engineer, that for some reason woman requires some different special classification.

But even then you hear female doctor, female engineer.

Yeah.

It just makes it worse.

And what do you say naturally if you say you prefer to go to a gynecologist of your same gender?

How would you say that?

I’d say a gynecologist that’s a woman.

Oh, really?

Or not a male gynecologist.

You say the fully articulated phrase then.

I tend to fully articulate.

Yeah.

Well, to summarize this, and you’re right, it’s a huge topic.

I can refer to you to a couple of places where it’s discussed at length.

But to summarize this, there are a lot of people who feel the way that you do.

But I don’t think we’re ever going to come down with, this is the waffle answer, get up your flip-flops.

I don’t think we’re ever going to come up with an answer here that’s going to satisfy all parties.

There is clearly, when you look at the large samples of text, of spoken English and written English, you clearly find there’s something happening where female is doing a job that woman can’t quite accomplish and woman is doing a job that female can’t quite accomplish.

Some of it is a little clinical. Some of it is a little personal.

Some of it actually is appropriately impersonal.

I do feel that sometimes when people, at least if I’m judging the data correctly, that when people use the noun woman instead of the noun female, they actually mean it in a non-judgmental and purely description way, whereas when they use the noun female, there’s something about the being the female that’s important to the sentence.

And maybe that’s what kind of is kind of tripping your buttons here.

Let me just encourage you to take a look at Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage.

There’s something like two and a half or three pages about this very subject with examples drawn from history over hundreds of years and a really good summary at the end that just kind of points out that, look, this has been a dispute for a long time.

It doesn’t look like it’s going to be resolved anytime soon.

We might just have to deal with it in our own writing as best we can and kind of forgive others when they have trespasses that don’t align with our understanding.

I will try to do that.

Cool.

All right.

Well, thank you so much, Christopher.

Give us a call.

Thanks very much.

Thanks.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

What do you think?

Give us a call, 1-877-929-9673.

Or send your disputes and disputationists to words@waywordradio.org.

You know, Grant, earlier in the show we were talking to Gabriel, the native speaker of Tagalog.

And I forgot to mention that there’s a wonderful saying in that language which translated goes, one who does not love his own language is worse than an animal and a putrid fish.

Oh, nice.

Isn’t that nice?

That’s from Jose Rizal, a national hero there in the Philippines.

Send us your proverbs, your idioms, your catchphrases, what have you, to words at waybirdradio.org.

Or give us a call on the telephone, 1-877-929-9673.

When we come back, New York Times tech columnist David Pogue.

When it comes to slang, how is his bandwidth?

Stay tuned to A Way with Words.

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

And I’m Martha Barnette.

It’s time for our slang quiz.

And if you’re a fan of high-tech gadgets, you’re probably also a fan of today’s contestant.

David Pogue is the technology columnist for The New York Times.

He’s assured us he won’t be Googling the answers while we play, although I suppose he just might be tweeting as we speak.

David, welcome to A Way with Words.

Thank you.

What’s the latest gadget you’re playing with?

Oh, well, I’m looking at a new cell phone from Palm that doubles as a pocket Wi-Fi hotspot.

So wherever you go, you’re in the middle of a wireless hotspot.

Oh, nice.

Well, David, we always ask our contestants for their favorite slang term, and we’d love to know yours.

Something from the tech industry, maybe?

Yeah.

Well, my latest favorite is nonversation, and that’s when two people are in the same meeting together, but they are conversing via text message or instant message surreptitiously.

No one else in the room is aware that they’re communicating, so they call that a nonversation.

Oh, sure.

Yeah, the back-channel conversations.

Sure.

Definitely know all about those.

Let’s move on to the slang quiz.

David, you know a great deal about the gadgets of the modern age, but today we’re going to find out what you know about the gadgets of another age.

I have three archaic devices.

I’ll give you a short description and some possible answers.

Your job is to figure out which is the true description of the device.

If you need help, Martha will be standing by.

Here’s number one.

A letter is delivered to the Times 100 years late.

It looks like information about a gadget, so the Times mailroom sends it on to you.

Unfortunately, there’s been a lot of seawater damage, and the only word you can read is planktonocrit.

That’s P-L-A-N-K-T-O-N-O-K-R-I-T, planktonocrit.

What was it?

Was it A, a children’s microorganism farm, the sea monkeys of the 1890s?

Was it B, a centrifuge that separates plankton from water?

Or was it C, a new formula for cement made from live plankton cultures and newsprint?

I wish I could say it’s a sea creature that says one thing but does another.

Like a hypocrite.

Oh, very nice. Very nice.

Well, I have no idea, but I’ll say C, the cement.

No, it’s the centrifuge that separates plankton from water.

Yeah, I thought that might be a little too difficult,

But I was hoping there’s a root there.

The K-R-I-T root is the same one that’s in criterion and critic.

It comes from Greek, and it means more or less judge or even umpire.

In other words, the device is judging or sorting the plankton.

It just spins it around.

And then you can analyze the diet of oysters or whatever.

That’s what they used it for back in the day.

Why would you do that?

Science knows no bounds.

I don’t know, actually.

I’ll keep that in mind next time I’m playing Scrabble.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, that’s like a 100-point word, I think.

All right, let’s try another one.

We’ve got three total of these.

Here’s number two.

In 2008, the website for the magazine Make, M-A-K-E,

Featured instructions for building a pre-cinema device called a phenakistoscope,

Or phenakistoscope, depending.

If you build a phenakistoscope, or a phenakistoscope, what would you see?

And that’s P-H-E-N-A-K-I-S-T-O-S-C-O-P-E,

Phenakistoscope.

Is it A, a movie camera lens array

That is filled with pure liquid nicotine?

Is it B, a room-sized backlit lava lamp?

Or is it C, a spinning disc

That animates a series of pictures

So they look like they’re moving?

Oh my gosh.

My son got one of those last things,

But that was called a Praxinoscope, I believe.

So I’m going to go with B.

B? A room-size backlit lava lamp? Really?

That’s something Make would make.

Make is a magazine for do-it-yourself nerds who like to build things.

Fantastic stuff.

Do you think it’s the room-size backlit lava lamp?

I’m just going to throw that out, yeah.

Well, no, it was C.

It was C.

It was the one that was close to the device that your son got it.

You’ve seen them, the running horse, the person on the velocipede, the scampering dog.

It’s a paper disc with a bunch of slightly different pictures around the sides,

Separated by vertical slits.

And then you spin it, and you look through it at a certain way,

And the magic is made.

It animates.

Okay, well, I’m going to have to challenge the judges here.

I’ve got the box in my hand.

It came from a scientific catalog for kids.

Called Animation Praxinoscope, P-R-A-X-I-N-O-C-E.

And that is exactly what it is.

It comes with the horse, and then it comes with some blank ones

Where you can draw your own panels.

Very good. Yes, that is exactly.

That’s another name for the device.

It has more than one name.

Oh!

How could something so obscure have more than one name?

There are two other devices that are almost exactly the same,

The Thaumatrope and the Zoetrope, and those are more names still.

You know, this is a science, again, knows no bounds in the coining and the neologizing.

Your evil knows no bounds.

It’s true, Mr. Pogue.

All right.

Here’s number three.

You’re visiting Lower Slobovia, which, as we all know, is a backwards country.

They’re particularly behind on health care.

A doctor there wants to use a sphygmograph on you.

That’s S-P-H-Y-G-M-O-G-R-A-P-H.

Sphigmographon.

What is he trying to measure?

Is it A, your hairline, B, your pulse rate, or C, your ability to carry a tune?

Okay, I’ve been saying B, B, B, but this one has got to be B.

This has got to be your pulse rate.

So the choices are ability to carry a tune, pulse rate, and what was the first one?

Your hairline. Measure your hairline.

Yeah, no, it was blood pressure.

Yes, indeed.

Well, it’s your pulse rate.

And it’s this crazy-looking device that clamps to your wrist,

And it looks like the kind of thing that goes with a shot of truth serum.

You know, like in a Bond movie, this is the thing that they put on Sean Connery

So he’ll tell them where the gold is hidden.

And sphygmos is Greek for pulse, and it works on that same principle as a phonograph,

Which is every time your veins or your skin pulses as the blood passes through it,

It moves a little needle on a piece of paper.

Well, a sphygmomanometer is a blood pressure cuff.

There we go.

I was going to say that.

I’m married to a doctor, so for once, that information.

I know the blood pressure cuff is a sphygmomanometer, so that one, nice.

Very good.

David, thank you so much for playing along with us today.

This was good fun.

Thanks, David, and good luck at Scrabble.

Thanks.

I appreciate it.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Well, if you’re puzzling over a linguistic mystery, give us a call, 1-877-929-9673,

Or email us.

That address is words@waywordradio.org.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Monica calling from KHSU in Arcata, California.

Well, hello, Monica. How are you doing up there?

How are things in northern, northern, northern California?

Things are very well up here in very northern California.

Okay, growing up on the West Coast, born and raised on the West Coast,

I’ve always thought it was funny when people have mentioned a California accent.

You know, it’s like, what accent?

We don’t have an accent.

We just pronounce words the way that they’re supposed to be pronounced.

Like, you know, actually saying all of the syllables and things like that.

And then somebody laughed at me.

I was talking to a friend about drawing, which I’m not very good at,

And using crayons.

And they were like, wait, using what?

Like crayons.

And they’re like, crayons?

I’m like, really?

Who pronounces it crayons?

I mean, I know that’s how it’s spelled, but that seems so weird.

And I talked to a coworker of mine who grew up in the Midwest, and he’s like, yeah, we pronounce it crayons.

And I was like, wow, I actually pronounce something apparently like the Midwest pronunciation.

And I just, you know, I was curious about the pronunciation of crayons, which just sounds more awkward that way.

C-R-A-Y-O-N, crayon.

Yeah.

What do you say, Martha?

I say crayon.

I say crayon as well.

Say it again.

Let’s hear it again, Monica.

One more time.

How do you say it?

Okay, crayon.

I mean, I think maybe I just kind of rush through it.

Well, there’s something happening here that’s not just you.

It’s not laziness or rushing or anything like that.

It’s something happening.

No, no.

Yeah, there are other people who say it this way.

And, in fact, it’s one of those words that they’ll use sometimes on a dialect survey to see what your dialect is or see where the variations are.

And in fact, Monica, we can post a link on our website to a dialect survey that was done a few years ago that actually has it mapped out where people in this survey responded with the pronunciation crayon.

Now, it’s only 14.13% of the respondents.

Most people said crayon or crayon.

There were four pronunciations of the word.

Crown, apparently, is a pronunciation of the word.

Yeah, have you ever heard anybody say crown?

I have not.

So, crayon, crayon, crayon, and crown.

Yeah.

So, with these four and a dialect survey and a few other questions,

We can narrow you down by your region and probably figure out where you are.

And I’m not surprised.

You’re from up there, Northern California, your whole life, right?

Well, I spent a portion of my life in Northern Nevada.

But, I mean, primarily, you know, I’ve been here for a large portion, almost half of my life.

-huh, -huh.

I’m primarily a California girl.

Monica, you’re not that weird.

A little bit.

Thank goodness.

I’m going to quote you guys on that somewhere.

You see the blurb now.

Martha and Grant said I’m not that weird.

That’s right.

Well, thank you for, I appreciate knowing that I’m not the only one that says it like that.

At least 14% of the population pronounces it like I do.

Monica, let me ask you two more dialect questions just while we have you, all right?

Let’s see if we can find a little bit more about how you speak.

Are you ready to play this?

I am ready.

All right.

If you go to McDonald’s and you buy the burger and the fries that are for the kids

That come in this special colorful box with the characters on the outside, what is that called?

The Happy Meal.

Okay.

And if you eat a lot of food and somebody asks you if you want seconds, you say, no, thanks, I’ve had my… my fill.

Okay.

And when you go to the store and there’s something on sale and you spend very little money and you’re really pleased and you say, well, I got a real… deal.

Deal, okay.

Or a bargain, but usually deal.

And cattle are rounded up and put inside a… a corral.

Say it again, please.

A corral.

A corral, okay.

Two syllables there.

Yeah, you’re pretty much okay.

What I was looking for is some people who also say cran also say fill instead of feel, mill instead of meal.

A happy mill.

Yeah, a happy mill.

And crawl instead of corral.

So I’m weirder than you thought, but still not quite as weird as I thought I could be.

Exactly.

You got it.

By Jove.

Monica, thank you so much for giving us a call today.

All right.

Thanks for our time, Grant.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Give us a call, 1-877-929-9673.

Let us figure out where you’re from or send us an email to words@waywordradio.org.

We’ll tell you if you’re weird or not.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Jada Samudra.

I’m calling from Green Bay, Wisconsin.

Hi, Jada.

Welcome to the program.

Thank you.

What can we help you with, Jada?

Well, I think it was last month or the month before, I remember you had some things about how people mispronounce words, and it got me thinking about my mother’s funny playfulness with words, and I started remembering a whole bunch of different things she used to do that I don’t know if she originated or they have an older history.

I know one thing that I’m pretty sure she coined was the thought plickens.

The thought plickens?

The thought plickens, right.

When we’d be watching a program or a movie or reading a mystery or sometimes if we would come home with some elaborate explanation for why we were late coming home from school or something, she’d say, aha, the thought plickens.

I like that.

I’ve never heard that spoonerism.

That’s funny.

I used to say the thick plattens.

Did you?

Yes.

How about that?

She had a number of interjections when we would start a sentence, we kids, would start a sentence with sort of one of those little words that, you know, people start sentences with before they actually start saying what they’re talking about.

And she would have these interjections.

So, for example, if you started a sentence with well, she would add, well, well, three holes in the ground.

Or if you started a sentence with so, she would interject, buttons on your underwear.

And or if you started a sentence with C, she would interject, said the blind man as he picked up a hammer and saw.

So I’ve been wondering all along if my mother made up these or if there was a time in, I don’t know, kind of the cultural history where it became a mode to kind of make up these interjections.

Kind of like see you later alligator kind of thing.

I don’t know.

Maybe.

Let me ask you a question.

Did your mother say these things as a way of kind of nudging you not to use things like starting a sentence with well or so?

Is that what she was doing?

I don’t remember it that way.

It’s quite possible.

But she was also just very playful with language.

So I don’t remember it as kind of like a pedagogical tool or something.

Right.

It wasn’t that she was a pedant or anything or that she was kind of like, she wasn’t necessarily irritated.

It was just you said something, it triggered this automatic response and she just spit out the thing that she always says, right?

Yeah.

And of course, then we would get irritated.

Well, that was my next question.

That was my question too.

Yeah.

Did you find that annoying after a while that she kept saying the same thing year after year?

Well, I don’t even know how often she did it.

She did it often enough that I’m trying to think back because this is quite a while ago because I’m in my 50s.

So I’ve been trying to think how often she did this, but somehow it got into my language.

And actually I’ve taught it to my husband who’s Indonesian, so it’s really great.

So he’ll say that.

Oh my goodness.

So does either of you get in a word edgewise?

I mean, I would think that you would have these sort of start and stop conversations.

Well, I think it’s a good thing that there’s nothing that she interjected for like, right?

Oh, yeah.

Now all the kids say like, but I don’t think we grew up saying like.

Oh, yeah.

Let’s not think of one of those.

I’ve heard a variation of the blind man as he picked up his hammer.

I’ve heard a variation of that.

But there was another one that you didn’t say, which I’ve heard, which is when someone says hay, you say hay is for horses.

Oh, yes.

I know that one.

Straw is cheaper, grass is free, marry a farmer, and you have all three?

That one, no.

And I asked if she cared about, if she was saying this is a way to remind you not to begin your sentences that way.

Because for a lot of people, that’s what these are.

They’re kind of devices to remind somebody else that they’re speaking in a way that is hyper-casual or overly slangy or just somehow not correct.

Jade, I should just say, answer one of your other questions.

These aren’t, as far as I can tell, unique to your mother.

I’m looking at a variety of reference works while we’re talking here.

And I’m finding the thought plickens goes back to at least 1912.

Oh, you’re kidding.

No, a lot older than that.

Oh, you’re kidding.

Most of these have a long history.

And that doesn’t take anything away from your mother’s using them.

And that’s how we learn language.

We get all of our language from somebody else.

And so there’s no reason that these couldn’t be borrowed perfectly from anyone else, as is wholesale.

Jada, I want to thank you for giving us so much of your time today.

This was really interesting.

And I’m sure we’ll get a lot of email and calls about it.

Okay.

Thank you very much.

All right.

Take care.

Give us a call.

Let us know about the expressions in your life that somebody uses over and over, whether you find them amusing or annoying.

Or if you’ve got some that you made yourself, send them along to words@waywordradio.org or give us a call, 1-877-929-9673.

Things have come to a pretty pass.

Our romance is growing flat.

That’s our show for this week.

If you didn’t get on the air today, you can leave us a message anytime.

The number’s 1-877-929-9673.

Or email us.

The address is words@waywordradio.org.

And you can stay in touch with us all week by following us on Twitter.

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Stefanie Levine is our senior producer.

Our technical director and editor is Tim Felten.

We’ve had production help this week from Josette Hurdell and Jennifer Powell.

From Studio West in San Diego, I’m Martha Barnette.

And from San Francisco, I’m Grant Barrett.

Thanks to Howard Gelman for engineering our show from the studios of KQED Radio.

Do svidaniya.

Bye-bye.

And I say neither, either, either, neither, neither.

Let’s call the whole thing off.

You like potatoes…

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