Tiger Tail (episode #1540)

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.

Grant, you and I are often asked what our favorite word is.

Yes.

And I like to throw out mellifluous and preposterous.

But I realize that I’m usually throwing out words in English.

And maybe it’s time we shared words in different languages.

So what’s your ancient Greek one?

Oh, gosh.

I know you’re not ready for that.

I’m sorry.

Well, in Spanish, the word ojala is a wonderful word.

It’s from the Arabic, and it roughly means the same as inshallah, hopefully, or if God wills it.

And I love it because it demonstrates that Spanish isn’t that pure Latin language that sometimes it’s people, English speakers think that it is, right?

Yes.

It’s got all this influence from Arabic.

Absolutely.

It’s got this rich history.

Yeah.

Yeah, and the other thing I love about ojalá is that it’s followed by the subjunctive,

Which we use so rarely in English, and it’s used a whole lot more in Spanish.

Yeah, so ojalá…

Ojalá que puedas hacer algo.

Right, so it suggests the possibility of doing something.

You could do that.

Yeah, yeah.

Do something, right.

Yeah.

So if you’re going to do Spanish, then I’ll do Spanish.

Okay.

But mine’s going to be a little different too.

When I was young and learning Spanish in junior high from somebody who did not speak Spanish very well, I realized that she was an English speaker who spoke Spanish very poorly in seventh grade.

I listened to shortwave radio and I listened to international broadcasters, including the propaganda station from Cuba, Radio Havana, Cuba.

I loved the music.

I didn’t care about the propaganda, but that’s how I improved my Spanish.

And so I listened to a lot of Spanish.

And I swear at the time I heard somebody give his name as Jorge Hueves, which translated in English is George Thursday.

And I just loved the way he said his name, Jorge Hueves, Jorge Hueves.

And so ever since I was about 13, I just will just say the name Jorge Hueves.

And now here I am in 2019, and there’s a television show that’s been on for a few years called Endeavor.

This is a story, it’s the Morse story.

It’s the prequel to the Morse TV series, which has been on for a million years in the UK.

It’s on ITV, I believe.

And in it is a detective whose name is George Thursday.

Oh, really?

Which I think is hilarious.

But anyway, that’s my favorite Spanish words, I guess, is Jorge Hueles.

Jorge Hueles.

And you’re going to have to say it with a special curl of the lip.

Jorge Hueles.

Well, we’d love to hear your favorite word in Spanish or any other language.

Call us, 877-929-9673, or spell it out in an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, I’m Therese Inverso calling you from Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.

Wilkes-Barre, welcome to the show, Therese. What can we do for you?

So the word is yipka, which my friend when I was living in New Jersey taught me, Y-I-P-K-A.

Yipka.

And she told me it was a Yiddish word, and it means your house clothes.

And the wonderful thing about this word is that it’s not male or female.

A woman goes around in a house dress, and that kind of means the same thing,

But a man doesn’t want to wear a house dress.

So Yipka covers both of us.

So she taught that to you, and now you use it?

Yes, yes, I use it.

If somebody says, do you want to go somewhere, and I’ll say, well, let me change.

I’m in my Yipka.

That’s a new one for me.

I don’t want to go outside and wear my Yipka.

It’s definitely old clothes you wear around the house.

Yeah.

I’m curious, too.

I mean, when my spouse and I get home, we put on our play clothes immediately.

That’s what we call them.

Oh.

Well, you’re welcome to use the word Yipka.

Well, I like that.

I like that a lot, although I like play clothes, too.

But I like Yipka.

That’s nice, but Grant has a million databases on his computer.

I don’t know that one.

I mean, I just know Shimada, which most people know for old clothes, right?

Right. But that can apply to any old fabric.

Right. Yeah. I mean, I’m not a native Yiddish speaker. I just know stuff from books, you know.

Well, here’s the thing. So I talked to my friend yesterday who told me about this just to confirm it.

And she said she learned it from her husband’s mother.

But Aunt Eileen, who was 93, said, oh, that’s not a Yiddish word. So-and-so made that up.

Oh, how about that?

So we’re not actually positive, but we still think it’s a good word.

Yeah, I agree.

Put that in the language.

Yipka for the clothes you wear around the house.

The stuff with the holes in it and the tear and the paint stains.

But it’s comfortable.

And if you have any self-respect, you don’t cross the street with it to get the mail.

You could walk out on your porch and pick up the mail.

You might answer the door to accept a delivery, right?

Right.

Yeah.

But the yipka, you wear it around the house because it’s comfortable,

You wouldn’t wear it to the store, right?

Right.

Yeah.

So my friend Carol and I were trying to spread this word anyway, whether it’s legitimate or not.

Therese, I think you just did.

We’ll see how it goes.

And maybe in a few years, everyone will be talking about the yipka they wear around the house.

Yeah.

If we can get people to describe Mr. Rogers’ red sweater, his cardigan, as a yipka, then I think you will succeed.

Yeah, but he could definitely wear that to the 5 and 10.

I mean, that’s something to be proud of.

Are there 5 and 10s now?

There almost are up here in Wilkes-Barre.

I think they’re $5 and $10.

Yeah.

Oh, Therese, thank you so much for your call.

We really appreciate it.

Okay.

All right.

Thank you very much.

Okay.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Yipka.

I like it.

I do too, but it’s not something that I’ve ever heard before.

And it’s not in any of the Yiddish dictionaries or books that I have.

That’s because her friend made it up.

I know.

But you know, you have one hopes.

One hopes that you can find the answer out there, that it’s going to be in your books.

I did come across the thing that they used to shout in New York City when they would go down the street with the wagons to collect the old clothes in Yiddish.

Altazaken, altazaken, old clothes, old clothes, right?

Because when clothes were precious and you would sell your old clothes for a little bit of money.

But now they’re just like a throwaway commodity almost.

Well, call us with your language question.

We’ll try to ferret out the answer.

877-929-9673 or send all of your stories about language to words@waywordradio.org.

A word I learned this week is the word bundu, B-U-N-D-U.

In British English, it means a largely uninhabited wild region far from towns.

It comes from a Bantu word and is used in South African slang out in the bundus.

Interesting.

That sounds similar to Boondock, but unrelated.

I know.

I know.

Isn’t that interesting?

877-929-9673.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Oh, hi.

This is Stephanie.

I’m calling from Green Bay, Wisconsin.

Hi, Stephanie.

Welcome.

Well, I have a question about a phrase I heard a colleague at work say.

We were in a meeting, and we were talking about a system that we use that has a lot of challenges and data issues.

And we were talking about some of the solutions, and she said it’s like grabbing a wolf by the ears.

And I looked over at her.

I’m like, what does that mean?

What did she say?

She said it has something to do with an impossible task or once you let it get so far out of control, it’s hard to get it back.

Yeah, that’s pretty much it, right?

That sounds about right.

So she didn’t have direct experience with this.

This was just a figure of speech for her, right?

Well, she didn’t give me much more information.

I didn’t think to ask where she heard it from because I was just still thinking and processing the phrase itself.

A lot of times it’s used as a synonym for to have a tiger by the tail.

Do you know that one?

I have heard that.

Was there a notion when you were talking with your co-worker about that it was kind of a lose-lose situation,

Which is no matter what she did, she was going to end up in a—it wasn’t going to work out very well,

Whether she fixed it or she didn’t fix it, it was just not going to be good?

Yeah, yes.

There’s a sense of that just because the nature of the system that we were talking about,

We both work in it, and so I know I got the idea where she was going with that.

Yeah, because that’s the idea of having a tiger by the tail, too.

You’ve got this tiger.

Sometimes it’s called riding a tiger.

You can ride the tiger, but if you ride the tiger, you’re in trouble.

If you get off the tiger, the tiger is going to eat you.

So either way, you’re in trouble.

You’d be delighted to know, I think, that this whole idea of having a wolf by the ears goes back to the Roman times.

Oh.

Yeah.

In Latin, Martha has the better Latin pronunciation, so correct me, Martha, if you will.

It’s tenere lupum arabus.

Mm—

It’s to hold a wolf by the ears, and it goes back to the Roman playwright Terence.

Okay.

And sometimes translated as to hold danger in your hands or to take a bull by the horns.

And another expression that we don’t use anymore in English that you might run across in old books is to catch a tartar with a capital T, meaning these, the ancient ruffians of the East, these old rascals.

And I guess they were often seen as the enemy from the East.

Yeah, violent, strong.

Yeah, violent, strong enemies were always marauding and invading the tartars.

If you got somebody like that by the shoulders, what are you going to do next?

What are you going to do?

Right.

You’ve caught them.

Now what are you going to do?

It’s kind of a cliffhanger, right?

Yeah.

But, you know, this expression shows up again and again throughout classical literature.

Chaucer has a mention in the tale of Meliby.

Erasmus has a mention.

And it starts showing up in proverbs and sayings.

And there’s a lot of variations.

And sometimes it’s attached to an expression about law, the practice of law,

That to practice law is to catch a wolf by the ears because law is its own entanglement.

So to bring a suit against someone or to pursue a legal case entraps you as much as it entraps the other person.

Somebody also mentioned something about it was used when they were trying to do away with slavery.

Yeah, Thomas Jefferson used it in that sense,

Talking about, we have a wolf by the ears and we can neither hold him nor safely let him go.

Justice is in one scale and self-preservation in the other.

Yeah. That’s amazing.

Yeah. It’s interesting that your colleague brought that up because I really don’t hear it in casual conversation.

It seems a little bit more elevated than that, doesn’t it?

Yeah. I wonder if they had been reading something, some kind of literature or something,

And it just caught hold of their fancy and it just showed up in everyday speech.

She is a big reader. She loves to read.

Well, there you go.

There you go.

And I believe that there are versions of this in other languages, too, like the Romance languages.

Oh, yes, definitely.

Because of the Latin origins and showing up in the classical literature, it’s going to be pervasive throughout Europe and European cultures.

Yeah, so a whole lot of history in that conversation.

There was.

There was.

There is.

I’m going to have to ask her if she read it somewhere.

Cool.

Well, Stephanie, thank you so much for calling.

Well, no, thank you.

And you have a great day.

You too.

Take care.

We will now.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Thanks, Stephanie.

Bye-bye.

Grant, as you know, author and essayist and friend of the show, Jennifer Michael Hecht,

Has a PhD in the history of science, but she told an interviewer that she believes deeply

In the power of poetry.

She said, if you look at a testimony of love from 2,000 years ago, it can still exactly

Speak to you.

Whereas medical advice from only 100 years ago is ridiculous.

And so, as a historian, I write poetry.

I’m profoundly committed to art as the answer.

Indeed, I don’t put science really as the way I get to any of my answers.

It’s just helpful.

It’s poetry that I look to.

It’s the clatter of recognition.

Ooh, nice.

Isn’t that great, the clatter of recognition?

And I’d never thought about that, about how quickly science ages and how little love does.

Yes, yes.

Well said.

877-929-9673.

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

I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett, and we’re joined by John Cherneski, our quiz guy in New York City.

Hi, John.

Hi, Grant.

Hi, Martha.

Hey.

It’s a pleasure to be back.

You know, it’s about time for my semi-annual mention of the National Puzzlers League, of which I have been a member for over 25 years.

Now, if you enjoy wordplay and grid puzzles and codes, cryptograms, you will enjoy the NPL, and you can find them at puzzlers.org.

And the NPL’s primary puzzle type, as you may remember, is called a flat, which is a sort of verse with several words masked with placeholders.

And you’ve got to figure out those words.

And each flat uses at least one kind of wordplay.

And the kind of wordplay we’re playing with today is called a terminal deletion.

All right?

In this case, the terminal we’re talking about are the first and last letters of a word, both ends.

And a deletion is, you know, a deletion.

So, for example, the word ample is a terminal deletion of the original word sampled.

Sampled, take out the S and the D, and you get ample.

Right.

Understood?

Mm—

Good.

Now, I’ll give you a clue to both the original word and the terminal deletion answer word.

You tell me what they are.

Now, for example, if I said, if you terminally delete a large wooden box, you’ll get a large rodent.

The answers would be crate and rat.

Got it?

Got it.

Here’s the first one.

If you terminally delete the soil beneath your feet, you’ll get a way to express yourself creatively.

So earth and art.

Earth and art is correct.

Oh, I see.

Okay.

If you terminally delete a warm winter accessory, you’ll get a common conveyance.

Scarf and car?

Scarf and car is correct.

Nicely done.

If you terminally delete a common first step in cooking ground beef, you’ll get an argument in the UK.

So brown and row?

Brown and row, yes.

If you terminally delete Weir or Lipinski, you’ll get Hepburn or Winslet.

So, Kate and Skater.

Oh, good.

Skater, yes.

I can see you came in through the back way that time.

Very nice.

If you terminally delete Oak or Maple, for example, you’ll get Oak or Maple, for example.

Street and Tree.

Street and Tree.

Nice.

Very good.

If you terminally delete a vehicle you might see at a cemetery,

You’ll get something you can use to listen to a eulogy.

So hearse and ears.

Hearse and ears, yes.

Very nice.

Finally, if you terminally delete a large bladed tool used to chop meat,

Well, I’m just going to get the heck out of here.

Cleaver and leave.

Cleaver and leave.

And that is my cue to leave.

Okay, you guys did fantastic.

I’ll see you next time.

Thanks, John. We appreciate it. We’ll talk to you next week. Take care.

And we’d love to talk with you. Call us 877-929-9673 or send your stories about language to words@waywordradio.org.

And if you just can’t wait, you can find us on Twitter. We are at WayWord.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello. Hi, this is Jolene Declan. I’m calling from Dallas, Texas.

Hi, Jolene. Welcome to the show.

What can we do for you?

Well, I have this word that we use in Trinidad a lot, and everybody’s always trying to discuss where it started from.

I’m from Trinidad originally, and we were once part of the British Commonwealth,

So we’re not sure if it derives from the British language or it’s just a Trinidad slang.

And the word is liming.

So basically, when you pick up a bunch of friends or you go over to somebody’s house, we’re going to go liming,

Which means to hang out.

But where did it come from?

Does it come from limey or is it a turn that word?

That’s what we’re trying to find out.

Liming as in a verb, huh?

We’re going liming?

As in a verb.

Yes, as in a verb.

Let’s spell that.

L-I-M-I-N-G.

Liming.

That’s correct.

Liming.

So the verb would be L-I-M-E, like the fruit.

Yeah, we’re going to go lime.

So when we get together, we’re liming.

Correct.

So informal socializing, hanging out, chatting, maybe going to a party, that sort of thing?

Correct, yes. That’s right.

And so you’re originally from Trinidad.

You’ve been in the United States for a while.

Then nobody around you probably uses this.

Nobody uses that.

But if I pick up the phone, I talk to another friend from Trinidad who lives in Boston, New York, wherever, and we say,

So are you going liming tonight?

Right away, they know exactly what I mean.

Yeah, I can imagine.

So there’s two prevailing theories.

And the first one is that it does come from Limey, L-I-M-E-Y, which is a derogatory term for a British person, except it kind of flipped.

The Dictionary of Caribbean Usage suggests that it came about during World War II as a derogatory term for white American soldiers who were at the naval base in Trinidad who hung around the bawdy houses, you know, where the ladies of the disrepute were.

And that’s one theory.

So it was kind of the American naval men who were up to no good, hanging around.

And they were called Limeys, even though they weren’t British.

That theory, I would grade that theory probably a C or a D.

Not very good.

Now, there’s another dictionary that I have, which I much prefer.

It’s a better dictionary.

It has a lot more evidence.

And it’s called the Dictionary of the English, Creole of Trinidad and Tobago.

It has a ton of information.

It’s got a lot of citations.

It dates this term back to the 1940s.

And a theory that it shares has a lot of evidence.

It says if you weren’t invited to a party and you wouldn’t go because it would be rude, you were said to suck limes.

Like you basically say, go suck limes.

You’re not invited to the party, right?

I know what that means.

And so if you didn’t go and you were sucking limes, you would go suck limes together.

It means you were liming.

And maybe you would go bus a lime or you would go ride a bus and suck a lime.

And so you were kind of liming together, meaning you were sucking limes together.

And that supposedly is their idea for the origin of the expression.

They also express some doubt about that.

But it sounds to me, it’s got that ring of like simplicity that I really like.

And also I love it when a dictionary expresses doubt about their own origins that they’re putting forth because it means that they’re not trying to pull one over on me.

Right, right.

Now, you know, that can make a lot of sense, but it’s such a social thing.

I don’t see, I mean, you know, Trinidad’s a very cosmopolitan, diverse background and everything.

And we’re such social beings in Trinidad.

So even if you’re a foreigner, stranger, wherever, and you come and somebody meets you, and they might meet you on the plane.

And you say, oh, well, what are you doing in Trinidad?

Oh, well, you know, I came for business and all that.

He says, well, listen, we’re having a lime at our house tonight.

You want to come over?

So it’s such a social inviting type of phrase.

Absolutely.

It kind of seems like the opposite.

Like if you suck limes, yeah, you didn’t get invited and all that.

But it means that we want you to be part of our social group, even if we don’t even know you.

Jolene, let me agree with you.

All the Trinidadians I’ve ever met have been like that.

I agree with you completely.

I do too.

But let me propose a theory and that lime has changed.

When we look at the early uses of this in this dictionary where they have it in print from newspapers and books and stuff from the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, it didn’t mean that exactly and originally.

Liming was hanging out on the streets doing nothing.

It was kind of like—

That sounds very true.

It was bumming around.

It was like smoking cigarettes.

It was teasing the girls.

It was harassing passersby.

It was goofing off.

It wasn’t going to parties.

It wasn’t any kind of sophisticated partying or anything like that.

No, you go liming on the block.

Yeah, exactly.

You go liming on the block and you go stand up there and smoke cigarettes and harass people.

And harass people?

So maybe liming only was the kind of liming where you were an outsider in the beginning

And it wasn’t the liming where you go to somebody’s house and put on your best clothes

And bring a little food and a little drink and have a good time and dance together.

Yeah, that could make sense.

And plus, you know, 40s and 50s and 60s was a totally different time.

It may not have been, you know, as social until it got maybe in the early 60s.

Is it correct to say you’re liming with us right now?

I am liming with you right now.

All right.

Thank you so much for sharing.

I’m just hanging out.

I’m not harassing anybody, but I am liming.

No, we’re liming together.

And I want to thank you for looking back for the words and giving me.

And so it’s given me a whole new perspective, too.

And I enjoy your show tremendously.

Thank you so very much for calling us.

We really appreciate it.

Okay.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Well, call us and Lime with us for a while.

877-929-9673 or send your stories about language to words@waywordradio.org.

You know, we often talk on the show about kids misunderstanding this word or that.

But as you get older, sometimes you still have misunderstandings, particularly in the case of homonyms.

And we heard a great example of actually a couple of examples from John Rodriguez, who lives here in San Diego, California.

He writes, my first job was in the seafood department of a local grocery store.

I was young and inexperienced and I didn’t want to show how nervous I really was.

One day a customer came up to me opening and closing her hand repeatedly and asked, do you carry crab crackers?

I was so wet behind the ears.

I said, I’m not sure, but you can definitely find oyster crackers on the soup aisle.

It wasn’t until later I realized crab crackers are tools used to crack the shell of a crab.

Not a thing that you eat with crab, but a thing that you crack a crab with.

Yes.

And then he continues, another day a customer asked me, do you carry lox?

You’d think the boy behind the seafood counter would know that lox is cured salmon.

I thought to myself and said, you can find lox on the hardware aisle?

And he said when he thinks back to those moments, he laughs about it now that he tried to help and technically gave honest answers.

He says miscommunication makes the best comedy sometimes, and those two moments will always bring me joy.

Talk to us on Twitter @wayword.

Hi there. You have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Dina, and I’m calling from Whitefish, Montana.

Whitefish, Montana. Well, welcome to the show, Dina. What can we do for you?

Well, my question is about a food.

I grew up in central Pennsylvania, and we had a food called pot pie.

And I was telling my husband about pot pie, and he had a big problem with it because it’s actually a soup.

It’s not a pie.

It’s more like a chicken noodle soup with homemade flat dumplings.

So I told my husband, so we have this food called pot pie, but it’s not a pie.

And he said, no, it can’t be called a pie if it’s not a pie.

There’s no crust.

There’s no pie pan.

There’s no baking.

It’s a soup.

He’s from the Midwest, so a pie is a pie.

We got to wondering how a soup could be called pot pie.

I had some people say, well, maybe it’s because you have the ingredients and you make it in a pot.

And that didn’t seem right to me, but I did ask my mom, who used to work as a cook in a nursing home with a bunch of Pennsylvania Dutch ladies, and she said, oh, it’s not pot pie, it’s bot boy.

And that’s what the Pennsylvania Dutch ladies call it, and somehow it became pot pie.

That seemed to make more sense to me, but we still have really no idea.

Pot pie?

I mean, it’s crazy.

That is correct.

It’s disappointing, too.

Yes, Martha and I are both nodding.

As a matter of fact, there is a really nice entry for this in the Dictionary of American Regional English,

One of our most trusted reference works that has an entry for chicken pot pie

That you think would be the pot pie that we all know and love,

But really it’s kind of like chicken dumplings when you read the description.

Yeah, and it does specifically say that it’s a Pennsylvania Dutch dish,

Sometimes also called slippery pot pie.

It looks kind of like a chicken dumpling stew.

Doesn’t have a pie crust.

Yeah, and I had to, I thought I was crazy in imagining things,

So I had to look it up and show my husband the recipe.

See, it’s not a pie.

It’s actually a soup, but we still, you know,

But he was like, I’m from the Midwest.

You can’t call it a pie.

You can’t call it a pie.

Well, what I would like to encourage your husband to do

Is just say, you know what,

Sometimes words have more than one meaning.

I think the other point that Grant and I would circle around to

Is the fact that, boy, anytime we talk about food on this show,

There are so many different opinions.

We were just talking about Long John’s, those donuts,

And we’ve gotten so much email about what you call those bar donuts.

But just accept that words have more than one meaning.

When it comes to food, words often have,

You cannot rely on even just across the county line

That the word is going to have the same meaning at all.

So it’s essentially just people in central Pennsylvania

Calling it what they want.

Yeah, mainly Central Pennsylvania and the North Midlands.

Okay.

Well, Dina, thank you so much for calling.

Appreciate it.

Yes, thank you for taking my call.

Take care.

Sure, and I say tell your husband if he can’t stand the heat.

Don’t eat the meal.

Right.

Yeah, stay away from the pie.

That’s right.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Well, if you have a dispute in your household over a word or phrase,

We’d love to hear about it.

877-929-9673 or send us the whole story in email.

That address is words@waywordradio.org.

Hi there.

You have A Way with Words.

Yes, this is Robert Pill from Oklahoma City.

Hi, Robert.

What’s going on?

Well, I had a question about something I ran into when I was traveling and working in the

Field years ago over in Siberia, Russia.

And I had brought over some CNC toys for some of the kids over there that worked for the company.

And when they played them, they were all shocked because all the animal noises were incorrect.

Like the rooster says cock-a-doodle-doo.

And they would say, no, the rooster says co-cock-a-ree.

And every animal on the CNC, from the farmer’s CNC toy, was different than what they said the animal noises were.

So you were in Russia doing what?

I was working as a mud engineer in the oil industry.

We used polymers that are in ice cream and chewing gum to make the mud thick,

Clean the hole, and we were trying to show them that they don’t have to

Just kill everything to drill a hole in the ground.

I put D-zone things in that.

But I was wondering, when they translate like a children’s story from Russian to English,

Do they translate it with the cock-a-doodle-doo,

Or do they translate it with the co-cock-a-ree?

It depends on the translator, really.

It depends on how much they want to keep the original flavor of the source material.

And I was also wondering, is it like that with every country, like Japan?

It’s on a language-by-language basis, yes.

Absolutely, yeah.

It depends largely on the phonetic inventory of the native language.

Right, Martha?

Absolutely, yeah.

And you can go online and find some fun illustrations of what animals say in different languages.

Some great YouTube videos, by the way, if you want to hear them spoken.

There you go.

There you go.

Yeah, so there’s lots to explore there.

I remember being shocked when I was much younger and met a Brazilian kid who said, no, no, birds go pew pew.

The laser guns.

Yeah, right.

But yeah, so that’s one of the cultural surprises you have when you encounter kids’ books, when you’re starting another language and you think all of this stuff that seems so basic to you, like, oh, I’ll start with the kids’ stuff.

That’s going to be easy.

And you’re like, oh, it isn’t even the basic stuff that I thought I knew.

So it’s not, it’s just, and even the other thing,

When you start with the sounds of the language,

You think, oh, A is for apple.

Well, they’re not going to use apple for the A sound.

They’re going to use something else.

And Z isn’t going to have a zebra.

It’s going to be something else if they even have that sound.

And so it starts really on in learning a new language.

Your mind gets blown again and again and again.

Yeah.

So thanks for calling and sharing your story with us.

All right.

Thank you very much.

All right.

Take care.

Thank you for calling.

877-929-9673.

Barbara Mayo Wells shared this story with us.

One morning when my son was developing a vocabulary,

I walked into his bedroom to find him stalking back and forth in his crib,

His very sodden diapers drooping down below his knees.

I’m King Wet, he announced.

I must have looked confused, for he elaborated.

So King Wet.

He was very King Wet.

It’s like I’m being Have, right?

I’m so King Wet.

He’s King Wet.

She capitalized King Wet.

I thought that was so cute.

Thank you, Barbara.

877-929-9673.

This show’s about language examined through family, history, and culture.

Stick around.

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. Here’s a poem from Ellen Burkett Morris. It’s called Abide.

It is unfashionable these days to spend your time watching morning light radiate off wood floors.

Notice the rich grain. Linger over your old dog’s fur.

Marvel at the softness that still remains.

Relish simple flavors, the peach, the ripe tomato.

Get lost in sentences of Dickens.

Wander as they do through narrow alleys,

Or wind through the fields of wildflowers that is Austin’s prose.

Bathe in the sound of your husband’s voice

As he tells a long story of neighbors.

Allow the minute, the second.

Savor the tick, indulge the talk.

Pause what passes for your life, to feel the slow stretch of time, made slower for the pausing.

Wait until you feel your place.

Each breath a moment held, each breath given for the next.

Grant, I came across that poem one day when I was looking at my phone and just thinking,

Why am I still looking at my phone?

I’m just burning my eyes with that light from the phone.

And there was something about this poem that really struck me about just stopping and paying attention to my breath and all the sensory things around me.

I’ve been working on that a lot more myself.

It’s just trying to be a little more committed to avoiding rote action.

Oh, that’s a good way to put it, rote action.

Yeah, I was actually reading this poem on my phone, and I kind of glanced away,

And I was looking at the morning light radiating off the wood floors, just like she talks about.

But there was something that was kind of Mary Oliver and Annie Dillard about this poem that I really liked.

It’s called Abide. It’s by Ellen Burkett Morris, used with permission,

And it appeared in the anthology Running With Water from VPressLC.

877-929-9673. Email words@waywordradio.org.

And talk to us on Twitter @wayword.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Well, I sure am glad I do.

Who’s this?

Oh, sorry.

I was so excited to be talking to you that I forgot to talk.

My name is Mary Gordon, and it’s a double first name, like Peggy Sue.

And I’m calling from Austin, Texas.

And the reason I’m calling is because I called once last year, and Grant said to me,

I know he didn’t say it to anybody else, call us back sometime, and so I am.

Well, I am delighted that you did call us back.

What can we do for you, Mary Gordon?

Well, here’s the deal.

I’ve got to tell you a quick story and then tell you I don’t know how to tell it without y’all.

The last time I took my day to the doctor, he was 95 years old and still eccentric and beautiful as ever.

So I took him into the doctor’s office.

This is in a little town called Brownwood, Texas.

And the doctor was checking his skin out and said, Mr. Spence, will you unbutton your shirt?

So my daddy did, and as he unbuttoned his shirt, all these things fell out that he had stuffed in his shirt while he was wearing it.

And they were yellow crookneck squash or squashies.

Now, here’s where I’m having trouble.

I don’t know how you refer to a single squash.

So for a head of lettuce, you can say a head of lettuce or an ear of corn.

But I don’t know how to talk about the 10 squash or squashes that fell out of his shirt at the doctor’s office.

And that’s real important to the story because he would want me to include that his yellow squash crop that year was just fabulous.

So how do we talk about a squash?

Oh, my gosh.

Just one squash.

Or were they gourd squash or they’re edible squash?

Edible squash.

They’re yellow crook net.

I don’t know if y’all have those.

They probably have them in Texas.

Now, I looked it up on the web because I didn’t want to put too much pressure on y’all.

And Mr. Google said that the plural of squash is squashes.

-huh.

But have y’all ever heard of that?

Sure.

Yeah, and he had 10 of them in his shirt?

Yeah, they were small.

And he’s a big man, so he had somewhere under his arm.

And the doctor, I’m sure, threw him away.

But anyway, he had them stuck all around his shirt, but they were all just packed in there.

And he always does that.

He takes a little something to somebody, and then he’s hoping to get a discount on his medical bills.

But anyway, how do we say 10 squash or squash-eses?

I think I would say 10 squash.

I would say 10 squashes, but if it’s under his shirt and in his armpits, maybe the collective noun is squish.

Maybe it was a squish of squashes?

Ten squished squashes.

Now, we can say five squash plants, but I don’t know how to.

I mean, I’ll go and buy zucchini, and I’ll say I want three zucchini,

But I just don’t know if that’s correct, and I need your help.

Yeah, you can say squashes for sure.

I can tell you.

I just gave a speech to a bunch of gardeners, and they all say squashes.

Oh, thank you. I knew you’d be the expert, but never did, I think, for gardening.

So thank you.

So you can say 10 squashes.

Oh, absolutely.

Or 10 squashes.

Sure.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I think the other point is, Mary Gordon, you must tell this story because it’s a great story.

Well, if you knew my daddy, this is only one of his little eccentricities.

After that, we went to the hospital administrator where he took out another five or 10 tomatoes.

From where?

But I know how to say 10 tomatoes.

Wait, where were the tomatoes, I have to ask?

Well, you know, they were in a big pocket.

He wears a wool sweater all year long, so they were in his pocket.

Now, he has snuck a dachshund into the hospital in one of his pockets before to see somebody.

So you just never know when he unbuttons his shirt what is going to fall out.

But he does grow beautiful squash and squashes.

Wow.

And we just never know what we’re going to get when we say hello, you have A Way with Words.

And, you know, here’s what I do.

I have to duct tape my mouth and my arms together so I won’t call you all more often

Because I just have so many questions and so many comments, you know, about language.

I am wearing a T-shirt right now that says I’m silently correcting your grammar.

Oh, dear.

And I try to wear it wherever I go.

Well, you are really, you’re the bright spot in my day every day.

So I really thank you for that.

Take care of yourself, Mary Gordon.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

Thank you for your call.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

Hello.

Welcome to A Way with Words.

Hi.

My name is Semby Ford.

I’m calling from Los Angeles.

And I have a question about a word.

I know it’s a part of Black English or African American English or maybe Southern English.

But the word is sadiddy.

If I had to guess how to spell it, it would be S-A-D-I-T-T-Y.

And it means someone who thinks that they’re better than others,

Maybe someone who puts on airs.

And another way of saying it is high sadiddy.

You can call somebody high sadiddy.

And I’ve always wondered where that word came from,

Because it doesn’t sound anything like anything,

Like any synonym for it to me.

Yeah, that’s a really good question. And so did you grow up with this word?

Yes, I grew up with this word, but it was something that people in the generation above me would use more.

I think that my grandmother would know that word, but also people in my generation use it as well.

But it was not a slang type of word. It was more of a grown folks word.

Gotcha. And so it’s an African-American word from way back, right? This is how you know it?

Yes.

Were your grandmother’s people from the South?

Yes.

Okay.

On all this, you’re just,

Everything that you’re saying

Is making 100% sense to me and Martha.

This is how we know it as well.

We know it from our callers and from our listeners.

So we’ve talked to people about this word before.

And also all of the reference works that I have,

You’re just, everything you’re saying

Is 100% down the line.

Here’s what we know.

The first use that we have of it in print

Is from 1948.

It does appear in all of the works

Of African-American English that I have in one way or another.

The spelling that you gave is one of the common spellings, S-A-D-I-T-T-Y, S-E-D-I-T-T-Y,

Sometimes S-I-D-I-T-T-Y, to put on airs, to act better than you’re raising, to be stuck up.

Yeah, to be stuck up.

Sometimes it means to act white, especially when you’re with black people,

To act like you’re not part of the community that you’re actually in.

And where it comes from is the real question.

And of course, this is always the problem with language,

Always the problem,

Even with some of our most mainstream words we don’t know.

And then when you get to language

That belongs to a smaller community, it’s even harder.

The theory that I like for Zididdi right now

Connects directly to the first in-print use that we know.

Bonnie Taylor Blake, I believe,

Found this first use from 1948.

And it’s describing a group of young African-American

Women working together. And what it says is they’re all talking about working together and

About being ladies and being cultivated. And it says, as frequently stated by them to be more

Sedate, and it’s in quotes. And in parentheses right after it, it says sedate, S-E-D-A-T-E.

And that particular parenthetical reference and some other uses in print that I’ve seen on my own

When I’ve been looking for this word

And trying to prove its existence over time

In different environments

Makes me think that what we’re looking at here

Is a mock fancy pronunciation of the word sedate.

In the same way that people do this

Mock fancy pronunciation of tarje for target.

It’s a joking way of saying sedate.

Sedate.

Wow.

That’s what I’m thinking.

And it just somehow kind of became

Permanently ensconced in the language.

I always talk about things being in its constant language.

And it just kind of stuck.

Now, I don’t know that that’s for sure, but there’s an air to it.

There’s a feeling to it.

That’s a good lead, yeah.

Yeah, it’s a lead.

And I’m not going to say that this is for sure the thing.

Other people have suggested maybe Sadidi is a corruption of Saturday.

It might be about the way that you look and feel when you dress up in your best clothes.

When you’re going out for Saturday night, you get your hair done.

You put on your best clothes.

You shine your shoes.

You know, you got a little spending money in your pocket.

You go to the nice restaurant.

You go to the nice club.

You polish the car.

One thing I always did think of is that I always compared it to the word bougie because the way that bougie is a corruption of bourgeoisie, I figured sedate must be a corruption of something.

But I could not think of a word that it could be a corruption of.

Like, you know, that makes sense.

It could.

Now, you might say sedate is just about being calm, right?

But it isn’t, particularly in the context of this.

But it’s not.

That’s not even the word you’d use if you really wanted to.

Sedate is, particularly in the context of this one particular 1948 citation, to be sedate is to be, how shall I put this, to be restrained and to be less than yourself.

To be what the larger culture wants you to be, which is to not be your true self, to not express your normal culture, to not be who you really are, to be what the white people want you to be.

That’s kind of what they’re talking about in this larger quotation here.

So I don’t really know for sure

Because I wasn’t there at the time

I didn’t write this

And I’m just reading this second hand

Many years later

So I don’t really know

That makes tall sense

But that’s my guess

There’s just so many layers

To this one word

About how one presents oneself

You’ve set my reading course

For me for a while here

I think I’ve got some reading to do

Well me too

Now I’m like okay yeah

Because I have a bunch of her books

On my you know how you

Like kind of cue books up

And then it’s like well

One day I’ll get to it. Now it’s like, okay.

Yes. Yeah, every bookshelf

In my house, yes. It’s a long list.

It’s filling over onto other people’s bookshelves now.

Hey, Simby,

Thank you so much for calling. Appreciate it.

Thank you so much. It’s been

So fantastic. Take care. All right. Bye-bye.

All right, you too. Bye.

877-929-9673.

Sarah Zock grew up in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and later she moved to Iowa with her husband,

And she called to tell us this story.

They were on their way to the movies, and they suddenly realized they had no cash.

So her husband sends her running into a local grocery store to get some money.

She says, I ran in, and the service desk was right there.

I looked at the boy behind the counter, and I said, quick, quick, where’s your time machine?

And he looked at me and literally said, what year are you going to?

And Grant, you, of course, know the misunderstanding there because in Florida, Wisconsin, and part of Michigan, time machines are ATMs, right?

Right, that’s their generic for ATM machine.

Right, right. It’s spelled T-Y-M-E.

It stands for take your money everywhere.

And I realize ATM machine is redundant, but join me in saying ATM machine.

ATM machine.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is David from Plainfield, Indiana, and I have a regional dialect word for you from where I grew up in Massachusetts.

Okay.

And a great story to go with it.

Yes, please.

I was looking at colleges, and I flew in to do a little tour of the college in Evansville, Indiana, way down in the southwest corner.

And the first morning there, we went to breakfast, and then we go start on our tour.

And there’s people from all around the nation. There’s people from Texas, Oklahoma, a few from Indiana.

I think we even had one from, like, Washington State or something.

And in the middle of the tour, we enter another building, and I’m thirsty, so I said, hey, where’s the bubbler?

And I get, like, 11 looks of, huh?

I’m like, you know, the bubbler.

And they’re like, what’s a bubbler?

I said, it’s in front of the bathroom. You get a drink from it.

The water fountain. And they’re like, oh, yeah, it’s over there.

Why didn’t you say that?

And I was like, I did say that.

And a few years later at college, I got one of those things came up and said,

Take this 10-question survey.

We can tell you where you’re from.

And I was like, yeah, right.

So I take it, and it comes back and says,

You’re from this little section of Massachusetts,

This small section of southern Maine, or this small section of Minnesota,

Because you use the word bubbler.

And I went, really?

Like, nobody knows what this is?

I mean, is it really that regional a word that it’s like these three or four small places in the U.S. Are the only ones that really use it?

Well, that’s a good question.

They’re different places.

I mean, I’m sure that that dialect quiz narrowed down your location because of some other things that you said besides bubbler.

Because where you hear bubbler, actually, for Water Fountain is southern and eastern Wisconsin.

All our Wisconsin listeners are going, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And in Massachusetts, what part of Massachusetts are you from?

Central.

I’m from Shoesbury, Massachusetts.

It’s the first town east of Worcester.

All right, Worcester.

And like everybody back in Massachusetts used it that I knew of.

Everybody in Worcester and Massachusetts and Shoesbury would know if you said, yeah, where’s the bubbler?

They’d go, yeah, over there.

Right.

Right.

So Wisconsin, parts of Wisconsin, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island do refer to a water fountain as a bubbler.

And I’ll tell you, David, that when we were, Grant and I did a couple of appearances in Wisconsin recently, a few months ago.

And we appeared in Milwaukee and Madison.

And when we were in Madison, folks gave us some T-shirts from the Wisconsin Historical Society.

On the front it says, it’s a bubbler.

And it’s got a picture of a water fountain.

And on the back, it’s got a picture of a fountain.

And it says, fountains are where you throw coins.

Oh, my God, yes. I need to get one of those. Where is that from?

Somewhere in Wisconsin?

Yeah, yeah. You can get them from the Wisconsin Historical Society.

So people have strong feelings about that.

I need to write that down. That’s priceless. I need that shirt.

Yeah, you do.

But you guys love regional dialect words, and I thought I would call in with that one.

That’s a great example, Dave. That’s a classic.

Yay! So it is like a really small group of us that actually know what it means.

So I’ll have to teach it to my kids and whatnot.

Buy them all T-shirts, yeah.

Yeah, you can go to wisconsinhistory.org and find them.

Wisconsinhistory.org.

Okay, thank you so much for that.

Thank you for your call.

Thanks for calling.

Bye.

Yep, bye.

Take care.

Call us with your weird regional word.

What was the thing that you said at school on that very first day when I said,

What are you saying, weirdo?

877-929-9673.

Or tell us on Twitter @wayword or email us the whole sort of tale, words@waywordradio.org.

Thanks to senior producer Stefanie Levine, director Colin Tedeschi, editor Tim Felten, and production assistant Caitlin O’Connell.

You can send us a message, subscribe to the podcast, get the newsletter, or catch up on hundreds of past episodes at waywordradio.org.

Our toll-free line is always open in the U.S. And Canada, 877-929-9673.

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A Way with Words is an independent production of Wayword, Inc.,

A nonprofit supported by listeners and organizations

Who are changing the way the world talks about language.

We’re coming to you from the Recording Arts Center at Studio West in San Diego, California.

Thanks for listening. I’m Grant Barrett.

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

Bye.

Thank you.