The Train is Servicing the Station (minicast)

Welcome to the summer podcast edition of A Way with Words from KPBS in San Diego. I’m Grant Barrett.

While the show is on summer hiatus and my lovely co-host Martha Barnette tries to explain to Yankees

Where the S and half the vowels in Louisville have gone, I’m going to take this time to read some mail from our white-hot inbox.

Jeff Harris writes from Kamloops, British Columbia to ask about the word agio, A-G-I-O.

It’s a great Scrabble word, but not in his dictionary.

Well, Jeff, if I were to make the short hop over the border from Seattle to Kamloops

And exchanged my American dollars for Canadian loonies,

I’d pay an agio, which is a currency exchange fee.

By the way, if you’re curious like I am about the city named Kamloops, K-A-M-L-O-O-P-S,

The Canadian Bureau for Indian Affairs says that it’s from a Shushwap Indian word meaning

The meeting of waters.

The city sits at the junction of the North and South Thompson Rivers.

Kamloops does not mean the meeting of frogs, no matter what Wikipedia says.

A bunch of you wrote and called about the expression bleeding edge,

Mostly pointing out that it’s just a variation on bleeding edge.

Thanks to Dan Jacobs, Lawrence Rogers, Chris Atkins, David Blythe, and Dave McCarthy.

You’re right, gentlemen, we didn’t make that clear.

We were using the scissors with the rounded ends when we edited that show and got a little carried away.

Several of you emailed us about the plural of email.

Martha and I agreed in an episode of our show that emails, plural, is an owing on the ear,

Though, strictly speaking, it’s okay to say.

Mona Baumgarten in Encinitas says that for her, mail and email are the delivery systems.

She prefers the terms pieces of mail and email messages.

Graham Charles and Sausalito suggest that the reason we do not say mails,

But might say emails, is that mail delivered to one’s home is a mixture of shapes and sizes.

The emails that arrive on your computer, in contrast, are all identical in form, making them more subject to counting.

Mike Reynolds in Madison, Wisconsin, rightly adds to our conversation that mail is not the plural of letter.

Fair enough.

And finally, Gilbert Pompassini writes in with this anecdote.

A father who settled in Maine 30 years ago asked an old Mainer, that’s a resident of Maine,

If, after so many years, his children finally qualify as real Mainers.

The old-timer says,

If your cat had kittens in the oven, would you call them biscuits?

Well, we’re hoping this caller will spark some emails with a peeve about the seemingly salacious wording of a public service announcement he hears while waiting for a daily commuter train.

Hi, this is Archie from Washington, D.C.

Here in Washington, D.C., in the D.C. Metro, when a train stops on the tracks and there’s a train in front of it that’s at the station in front of it, they often say there’s a train servicing the station in front of me.

Dr. Freud, paging Dr. Freud.

Exactly.

To me, servicing is what Monica Lewinsky did to Bill Clinton.

Or, I mean, you could service the debt or have a car serviced.

Wow. So you take the train to work then?

Yeah.

Do you meet other commuters’ eyes when they say this?

I think everyone’s just become so jaded that they’re used to it.

Okay.

But you’re alert. You’re paying attention.

Or is this one of those things that’s been galling you for such a long time?

Yeah, this has been going on for years.

The train is servicing the station.

Surely, Grant, they could come up with a different word for that.

They should have been aware of the double entendre, right?

Yeah. I mean, I’m looking at the Oxford English Dictionary and apparently the sense of services in the Monica Lewinsky, Bill Clinton thing goes back only to the 1960s, which surprises me.

In other words, serve in that sense has gone back to the 16th century.

But still, I think it’s been around enough that that would really give me pause.

What do you think, Grant?

Archie, aren’t we talking about inanimate, I mean, non-living things, a station and a train?

Sometimes a train is still a train, right?

Right.

It’s possible here that we’re overinterpreting and it’s not a sexual act being performed.

I mean, trains going into tunnels and coming out of tunnels.

Well, Grant!

I don’t know.

What do you think, Archie?

Wouldn’t you say that the train is serving the station?

I think that’s a little better, but…

I think it’s definitely better.

And I think that’s probably what they meant.

Maybe they just had a bad copywriter.

Yeah, somebody got paid money to write that.

It’s become something that every conductor says.

Oh, the conductor says it.

Yeah.

With a straight face.

With a straight face.

Well, or so we think.

Right, right.

Or maybe not.

Yeah.

They’re giggling every time.

It’s an end joke.

Well, Grant, I think Archie and I are on the same side here, but you’re disagreeing with us.

No, I’m not disagreeing at all.

I’m with you.

I’m with you.

I think that they should have been a little more careful.

I mean, we are kind of.