Tip of the Iceberg (episode #1677)

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

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

And, you know, Grant, if you want to express skepticism that something’s never going to occur, you might say, yeah, that’ll happen when pigs fly.

And we say that without thinking, but, you know, it’s really picturesque, right?

I mean, you’ve lived on a farm.

Right. Majestic pigs soaring through the blue skies.

Majestic. I hadn’t thought about that.

But yeah, we say in English when pigs fly, but there are expressions in other languages that are at least as clever and colorful.

There’s one in Tagalog that translates as when the crow turns white, when the heron turns black.

Which just means not going to happen.

Not going to happen.

Or in Hungary, you say when red snow falls.

And another one that I really like is that in a lot of European languages, they have an expression that translates as, that’ll happen on St. Never’s Day.

Yeah.

One of my favorites, St. Never’s Day.

Right.

St. Nimmerleinstag.

Today is St. Always Day, though, because we’re always going to welcome your calls and texts to our toll-free number, 877-929-9673.

And if you’re somewhere else in the world, go to our website and you can find our WhatsApp handle and our social media handles.

That’s at waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Dax. I’m calling from Santa Cruz, California.

Hello, Dax. What’s on your mind today?

I’m wondering when are we going to, you know, as a culture, English speakers, when are we going to stop saying 20?

And what I’m talking about is the date, the year, like the year is 2026. And I just feel like we’ve been in the 21st century now for 26 years, more than a quarter of a century. It’s like, don’t we all know that it’s 2026? Like we all know the 20 part, right?

Like at what point, like I have some kids and a couple are going to graduate in 28.

If I say my kids are graduating in 28, you understand what I’m saying, right?

Or do I have to keep saying my kids are graduating in 2028?

And I’ve discussed it with my kids and they think that I’m just crazy and that the 20 needs to keep going for a long time.

One said into the 50s and the other one was like, no, into the 80s.

Like, well, at that point, we’re almost at 2100 and then the whole thing starts over again.

Yeah, yeah.

You guys remember, like, you know, Y2K, it was 98, 99.

And then, you know, Y2K 2000, like, that was so weird.

But kind of cool.

And then we had that decade of just really awkwardness.

Remember 2001?

Yeah, people trying to coin all these terms for it, like the aughts and the nots, which didn’t really stick.

But people trying to make it happen.

Yeah.

There’s two key points that I want you to take away, Dax.

The first one is we’re not going to decide this all together as a group by talking about it.

It’s just going to happen when we make that switch over to saying the two-number year instead of the four-number year.

And the second thing is it’s complicated by the fact that we have incredible archives of information from the last century.

So it’s not a problem that they had in the 1900s.

So in the 1900s, they didn’t have constant easy reference back to media like films and music from the 1800s.

Right. So they didn’t really have to worry about the confusion about saying, oh, back in 22, people kind of knew what you were talking about.

The other thing is it’s going to take a while before 1900 years, the 1900s, stop being a common everyday reference.

You know, we still talk about political things that happened, important political things and wars and so forth that happened in the 1900s.

So as long as that’s happening, we’re probably still going to use the four number reference.

But once we kind of reach that tipping point where we’re more interested in what’s been happening in our current century, that’s when we may see, if there’s some kind of cultural consensus, we may see people switch over to just doing the two-number year.

So that’s where we stand with this.

So this century is behaving differently than the last century because we have this media memory, all this data and these historical records from the 1900s that can be called up at the press of a mouse or the touch of a keyboard.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

Okay, cool.

All right.

Thanks for calling.

Appreciate it.

Oh, thank you so much.

I love your show so much.

It’s really great to talk to you.

Take care now.

Bye-bye.

Thanks, Dax.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, A Way with Words.

This is Maureen Sullivan.

I’m calling from Unadilla, New York.

Unadilla.

That’s a heck of a name.

What’s on your mind today?

Well, my husband is from the northern part of New York State up near Montreal.

And he came from a kind of French-Canadian family.

You know, Grandma and Grandpa were Mimi and Pippi.

And he has this expression that I’d never heard before, and I’m still unable to figure out what it means.

And when my husband would get mad, he would say, that burns my onion.

And I thought that was the honest expression I’d ever heard.

It burns his onions?

Yes.

Is that one or more onions?

I don’t know, but I believe it’s singular.

Oh, it burns my onions.

My onion.

Yes.

Yeah.

Do you know anything about it or have any thoughts?

People have been saying that burns my onions for a while, at least since the 1970s.

And I don’t know, to me, it’s kind of this diffusing kind of term.

I mean, it’s funny.

It makes you think about what that would look like.

And I don’t know.

I think there are a couple of explanations for this term.

It’s not expression.

It’s not that common. But to me, it’s of a piece with all these other expressions that express anger involving just everyday cooking in the kitchen, you know, that steams my clams or that fries my bacon or burns my bacon or frost my cookies. But it might also be functioning as a euphemism. You know, people sometimes say that burns my biscuits and biscuits and onions, you you know, they might be stand-ins.

They might be euphemisms for similarly shaped body parts.

Your rear end, I guess.

Yeah, your rear end, but also as part of the male genitalia.

Yes, correct.

So there’s lots of verbs for that.

So there’s burns or scorches, my ass or my butt or my guts, and all of those are just kind of just really about this is physically affecting my body.

I’m so angry.

Yeah, yeah.

Or I remember in Kentucky hearing that burns my grits.

Burns my grits.

And that is a heck of a smell, too.

When you smell burned grits, that is one of the most unpleasant smells.

Yes, it’ll make you angry.

Wow.

I love your show.

I love it.

I’m devoted to it on Sundays where I live.

We hear it on WSKG.

And, yeah, you guys are great.

And I’ve learned so much from you.

Oh, that’s nice.

Thank you, Maureen.

Well, thank you so much, Maureen.

And give our best to your husband.

Thank you.

Take care now.

Bye-bye.

I will.

You take care.

Bye-bye.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

My name is Frank Lewis, and I’m calling you out of Crescent, Pennsylvania right now.

I live in Bolivar, Pennsylvania.

All right.

Frank, welcome to the show.

What’s up?

Growing up as a pastor’s kid, we moved around a decent bit.

And I would hear this term, this saying used differently.

It’s getting ahead of the curve or getting ahead of the curb.

So my thoughts were always that it was getting ahead of the curve as in baseball, but I have heard it used on radio broadcast, TV programming as get ahead of the curb, which I couldn’t quite understand potentially unless it had to do with parking.

So I figured I’d call you all up and see what you had to say about that.

Well, just because it’s hard to hear on audio, we’re going to spell those.

So the two differences are ahead of the curve, C-U-R-V-E, and ahead of the curb, C-U-R-B, as in boy.

So it’s one versus the other.

And which one do you lean toward when you speak and write?

I always get ahead of the curve because I was in Little League as a child.

And so I knew about curveballs and sort of just figured you had to get your swing ahead of the curve, although I was horrible at Little League.

So that was probably completely wrong.

And that’s just the one I’ve always used.

The knowledge, but not the technique. Very familiar to me. Yeah, definitely.

Well, first of all, Frank, it’s good to talk to a fellow PK.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. What’s a PK? Frank, you want to tell them what a PK is?

Pastor’s kids.

Oh, okay. Gotcha.

Yeah. And you’re right. A head of the curb is not very common. In fact, it’s what we call an egg corn, which is a phrase that’s not quite correct, but it still makes kind of sense.

Ahead of the curb with a B is sort of like other phrases like that’s a mute point when you’re supposed to say moot point.

Absolutely.

I’ve heard that used.

Have you?

Have you?

Okay.

Well, I teach high school, so sometimes they get the sayings weird.

The colloquialisms and the sayings.

And you’re there just trading them out.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, Martha, the best choice then is the curve, C-U-R-V-E version.

Correct. The curve.

And it doesn’t have to do with baseball.

It has to do with the kind of curve that you would see plotted on a graph, specifically to represent the power produced by a machine among airplane pilots.

The term power curve shows the relationship between the engine power and the aircraft performance at different speeds.

And I have to say that in addition to having PKs out there, we have a lot of pilots who listen to us.

And so they’re going to be listening very carefully.

They’re going to set us straight, guaranteed.

Yeah.

It’s my understanding that in aeronautics, if you’re ahead of the power curve or just ahead of the curve, it means you have more margin to maneuver.

And if you fall behind the curve, that can be dangerous.

You don’t want to be behind the curve.

And so we’re talking about, you know, actually plotting on a graph different elements that have to do with speed and performance.

And then it found its way into more mainstream conversation ahead of the curve, particularly in politics in the mid-1960s and 1970s.

That makes a lot of sense.

And that actually clears that up a great deal.

Thank you so much.

Well, good.

It’s so interesting.

We’ve got that interface between aerospace and government, you know, in the military.

That’s where those two industries kind of pass their jargon back and forth.

I can totally see it leaping from the engineering side into the political side.

Okay. I like it.

Thank you so much.

Take care of yourself, Frank.

Thanks for calling.

Y’all have a great day.

You too. Bye-bye.

Bye.

In Japan, if you’re talking about something irresistibly cute, especially if you’re a grandparent talking about that cute, cute little baby, you can say something that translates as, even if I put it in my eye, it wouldn’t hurt.

It’s that cute.

Even if I put it in my eye, it wouldn’t hurt because it’s so kawaii.

That’s kind of like a form of cute aggression, right?

Violence with cuteness, where you just want to eat little toes, or you just want to gobble up a kitten.

Yeah.

It’s called cute aggression.

Yeah, yeah.

That urge to squeeze or pinch or just, you know, mush with your hands something unbearably cute.

Well, don’t put it in your eye.

Put your phone up to your ear and give us a call at 877-929-9673.

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

I’m Martha Barnette.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And wearing white shoes after Labor Day, it’s our quiz guy, John Chaneski.

Hi, John.

I’d like to make the point it is always after Labor Day.

Sometime.

It’s long after Labor Day.

Or maybe you’re just ahead.

Somewhere in the world right now it’s 5 p.m. after Labor Day.

That’s right.

I am fashion forward, maybe a little too forward.

We’re coming to the alphabetic end of years and years of takeoffs.

And that’s where we take a letter off the start of a word, creating a new word.

Now, we’ve been working our way towards a Z.

And we’re at a point now where not enough common words begin with U.

So we’re going to go with V and W.

OK, I’ll give you a clue to two words.

One begins with either V or W.

And the other is the same word with the first letter taken off.

For example, he plugged his guitar into the loudspeaker and began an improvised intro would clue both amp and vamp.

Gotcha.

Got it?

So that’s the V.

Some of them might have Ws.

Some of them might have Vs.

This one’s very simple.

What place?

This place.

Where?

Here.

Yeah, where?

Here, right here.

The simplest one we have.

I am making way too little for someone as old as I am.

I mean, that’s just a life problem.

That’s just me, yeah.

Your wage is not sufficient for your age.

That is correct.

My wage doesn’t match my age.

I guess my worst habit is when I finish a soda, I chew on the cubes.

When I finish the soda, I chew on the cubes.

So W or V.

Your vice?

Yes.

Oh, yeah.

Your vice is chewing ice.

Good, Martha.

Thank you.

If that’s my worst habit, I’ll take it.

I have an intense desire to join a coven.

An itch to be a witch.

I have an itch to be a witch.

I spent the entire blistering summer harvesting grain on my grandpa’s farm.

Harvesting grain.

W or V?

How about a W?

Yes.

You were harvesting wheat in the heat.

Wheat in the heat.

Yes, very good.

From my chamber high above the street, I could hear the sound of race cars speeding past.

That’s what they sounded like, yeah.

You’ve almost got one of the words there.

Vroom and a room.

Yes, vroom and room.

Finally, I hefted the bag in my hands and could tell it was a bit over seven pounds.

So the weight was almost eight weight was eight that’s it a simple one for the last and you got it way to go well done or l done i don’t know it’s just nice work i want to say wow that was an ow some of those thanks john bye-bye and if you’d like to join in on the fun this is the place to talk about any aspect of language whatsoever.

So give us a call 877-929-9673 or send us an email.

The address is words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Elima calling from Vancouver, Canada.

Hi, Elima. Welcome to the show.

What’s up?

Hi. I had a question about being a vegetarian and the word meat.

So my daughter and I have been vegetarian for several years.

And this past Christmas, my sister was asking me about what that means.

So first she asked me if I was vegan and I said, no, we’re vegetarian.

And then she said, oh, so chicken is okay.

And I said, no, because chicken is not a vegetable.

And then she asked me, well, what about fish?

And I said, no, being a vegetarian means we don’t eat meat.

And she said, oh, well, to me, meat means red meat and not poultry or fish or other foods like that.

So yeah, it just got me thinking, to me, the word vegetarian is pretty straightforward, and I’ve never had confusion about what it means, but this actually wasn’t the first person who had questions about this or had that kind of confusion.

So I was wondering if you could give me a little more information about that.

So what we’re talking about here, just to be clear, is really what vegetarian means and what the word meet, M-E-A-T, means to people.

Yeah.

Well, Aleema, I think we maybe can be helpful from a linguistic point of view because a lot of people have this same experience that you do, of course.

But in linguistics, there’s a theory of categorization called prototype theory.

And this is the idea that any given concept in any given language has a real world example that best represents that concept.

So, for example, if I asked you to think of an example of a bird, to picture a bird, you know, you’re probably going to picture something like a robin or a sparrow and not an ostrich or a penguin, but those are birds too, right?

Right.

And so categories often

Have these central prototypes and then they have fuzzier edges where, you know, we don’t think about those things so much. And when we’re talking about meat, there’s the category of meat that definitely includes beef and pork, right? Red meat is often the default for meat, but then you have these fuzzier edges where people have different ideas about poultry and fish and shellfish, because a lot of people don’t eat red meat, but then they’ll make exceptions for fish and shellfish and chicken.

And so that becomes, I think, confusing in everyday interactions. And also you see similar categorizations by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. They divide animal flesh into meat and poultry. And also for some religious groups, you might be avoiding meat on Fridays or during Lent, but you can still have fish.

Or maybe your religion teaches that you’re not supposed to mix meat and dairy, but it’s still okay to have a bagel with cream cheese and lox. So I think from a linguistic point of view, it’s interesting to think about these categories and how there are the central categories of red meat. But animal flesh is more than red meat, isn’t it?

Yeah, I guess, could I ask a follow-up question? Sure. So in the terms of the language or the wording, I guess the thing that was confusing me was people obviously understand that chicken is animal flesh, but is there a different word that is used in their mind to describe chicken meat? Would that just be poultry?

Or, you know, like, that’s where it was stopping me. Like, what word would I use to describe chicken meat or fish meat? Yeah, beyond those two, I don’t know. And I think you’ve also zeroed in on, you know, these places in our language where we don’t have words for people who make exceptions for chicken or fish.

Well, pescetarian. Yeah, people talk about pescatarian, but I’ve also seen people talk about pescapolitarian. Oh, goodness. They eat chicken and fish. And that complicates it. We don’t have real clear categories like that. I mean, pescatarian for sure.

And then there are different flavors of vegan, too. So it does take a lot of extra words a lot of times. That’s kind of where I was coming from, where as a vegetarian, I’ve always wanted to be accommodating of people and not impose my views on them. So I try to avoid excessively discussing what I eat and don’t eat.

And, you know, using these terms can try to clear things up, but sometimes it actually just leads to more confusion. Exactly. And, Elima, I’m betting that we have lots of listeners with lots of opinions on this and maybe solutions for us. So keep listening, and I’m hoping we’re going to hear from them.

Thank you so much for your call. We really appreciate it. Thank you so much. All right. Take care now. Bye-bye.

So what happens when you ask for no meat or no carne in a restaurant? What do you get? Do you get chicken and fish offered? Let us know, 877-929-973 or email words@waywordradio.org.

In English, we talk about just the tip of the iceberg. But in Afrikaans, there’s an expression that translates as just the tips of the hippopotamus’s ears. Ooh, that’s threatening if you know what you’re looking at. I know, I know, right?

You see those little sweet little ears sticking up over the water, but underneath. Yeah, with that kind of Shrek wiggle that they do where they kind of turn in odd directions. Oh, yeah. Yeah, and they’re powerful too. Dangerous predators.

We’re soft and gentle little furry mammals over here. And you can call us and not worry about a thing. 877-929-9673 or email words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hi, this is Colin. I’m calling from Los Angeles. I had a question about old movies. I’ve been watching a lot of movies from the 30s and 40s. And I noticed they call them screwball comedies. And I never really understood what that meant exactly.

Screwball, except maybe like a screw loose or something. Cause they’re, they’re pretty wacky, you know, a lot of the time. Yeah. And yeah, I just, I was curious where that term comes from. You know, because like something like bringing a baby for, you know, the Howard Hawks movie is really crazy, you know?

So I’m thinking like screwy. Yeah. Yeah. That’s part of the formula. But the word screwball itself probably came from baseball. It just so happens that during the 1930s when screwball comedy as a term came to be used in the film business and mostly in the reviewing side to start.

At the same time, there was a baseball player named Carl Hubble who paid for the Giants, the New York Giants at the time. And he was a left-handed pitcher, and he had this weird reverse spin where he’d roll the ball off the other side of his middle finger, and the ball just literally looked like it was a pig’s tail on the way to the base.

It was turning. And this was called the screwball because of the apparent shape of its path as it went from the mound to the plate. Now, the term screwball existed before that. It was used very briefly in cricket. And it’s been used a number of different ways over the years, including in tennis for balls that do unusual things.

But I think it was recoined for baseball. Early 1900s, it was used through the 1920s. And then in the 1930s, Hubble really made it a thing because he was just known for this pitch. At the same time in the 1930s, the film business picks it up. And we already have the term screwy and to have a screw loose, meaning to be weird or unusual or unhinged.

You know, we already had these in English and those have existed since well back into the 1800s. So it was a real natural thing that this term that was now flying around in baseball should take on this new role to talk about a script or dialogue that’s unhinged or weird or just kind of going in unexpected directions.

So in the 30s, when the movies were existing at that time, they were calling them screwball comedies. Absolutely. Yeah. We can find the term used almost right away in the 1930s. So, Colin, there you go. You’re making me want to watch some screwball comedies.

Do you have any other recommendations besides bringing up Baby? There’s two. The Preston Sturges movie, The Lady Eve, is incredible. 10 out of 10. And there’s a little-known movie that is one of my favorites called Midnight with Don Amici that was written by Billy Wilder. But he didn’t direct it.

Oh, nice. There’s a couple big names there. I think we can all use some screwball comedy right now. Thanks, Colin. We appreciate it. Are you in the film business being in L.A.? I am, yeah. Okay, gotcha. I’m a writer. So this is inside talk.

But I don’t write screwball comedies. Well, it’s time to bring it back, Colin. We’ll look for your product on the Netflix pages. Okay. All right. Bye-bye. Thanks. Thank you. Bye, Colin.

If you have a question about language, we know two screwballs you can call, 877-929-9673. Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hi, this is Vlasta from Colby, Wisconsin. Hi, Vlasta from Colby, Wisconsin. We’re glad to have you on the show.

Thank you. I’m excited to be able to look into my question about some terminology regarding root beer floats. Growing up in northern Illinois, we always referred to them, at home anyway, as black cows with ice cream and root beer. Then when I moved to Wisconsin, they keep saying root beer float everywhere.

No one uses the black cow phrase at all. Oh, no. Okay. Have you heard brown cow in Wisconsin? I have, but only from one person. A friend of mine uses the word brown cow, and she even made one for me. It’s, according to her, chocolate ice cream in root beer.

Okay, gotcha. So your question is, what’s up with that? Right. Is it a regional thing, difference from state to state, or is black cow something my family made up? It’s more than your family. It’s actually a fairly widespread term, and you’ll find it as far back as the 1920s.

Now, there are a lot of asterisks and footnotes on this, and many of them have to do with what’s in a black cow or a brown cow. So the ingredients can vary quite a bit. One definition I find from 1922, tell me how this sounds to you.

So you take a tall iced tea glass, you put three tablespoons of thick cream, a teaspoon of sugar, a few drops of lemon juice, and then you fill it with ginger ale.

So there’s no root beer at all.

Oh, no, I’ve never heard of that.

I’ve never tried that.

And you’ll find that again and again until the 19, well into the 1930s, that the recipe tends to be all over the place.

But what it does have in common is always some kind of dairy, which is why the cow is in the name.

And then there’s usually something dark.

So it’s either a dark drink or a dark syrup.

So some of the recipes, for example, have a Heyer’s extract, and Heyer’s was a root beer syrup.

Oh, interesting.

I never would have thought of variations in the recipes.

Yeah.

Such variations, too.

Yeah, many of them. And then Martha, I don’t know if you have, have you ever had a purple cow, Martha?

Because there’s other kinds of cows.

Yeah, that’s grape soda and vanilla ice cream, right?

Yeah, and you can have like pink cow, which is strawberry soda and ice cream.

And then in the Spanish speaking countries in South America, they have even more names for it.

But they’ll call it a black cow, a vaca negra or vaca preta.

So they’ll, means black cow.

And then they’ll have one which is mixed with guarana, which is a local fruit called a golden cow, which I love.

Oh, a golden cow.

That’s interesting.

And then here’s another one.

Oh, I’m having fun with this.

Food ones are always the best.

In Australia, New Zealand, particularly in Australia, like in Victoria and southeastern South Australia, they call them spiders.

Yeah.

And so you could have a lime spider or an orange spider.

Spider.

Same drink.

It’s ice cream in a soda.

You get a lot of these fun soda fountain drinks, you know, from the era when we had soda fountains in drugstores and that kind of thing.

Mud fizz and black and white.

Part of the reason that we have these fun names is there was this era when everybody was enjoying coining new soda jerk slang, as they were called.

And so you would get all these lists of soda jerk sling being passed around in newspapers and various periodicals.

But people would just have a really good time making new ones.

It’s about the time that the diner sling really kind of went nuts.

And a lot of it was never really used.

It kind of only exists on the list.

But black cow is for sure.

And brown cow is for sure a real term that is still used today and you can still find on menus.

I’m going to look for some new recipes now.

Very interesting.

I will say there are old cookbooks on Google Books and Internet archives.

So if you kind of restrict your cookbook date to, say, the 1920s and 1930s, you’ll come up with those old recipes and you can give them a try.

Yes.

Oh, great.

Well, you have much more background information than I ever thought would be available.

We should do this for a living, Marcia.

I thought it was just kind of a regional thing.

I was going to say, that’s what we do, Blasta.

All right.

You take care of yourself now, Blasta.

That’s true.

Thank you very much for all that information.

All right.

Sure thing.

Take care.

You too.

Bye.

Bye.

Call us 877-929-9673.

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

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

The book I’ve been recommending to friends lately is called Everything Is Tuberculosis.

The author, John Green, became interested in tuberculosis after traveling in Sierra Leone and meeting a charismatic 17-year-old with TB.

And he began researching the disease, and he became obsessed with it.

For Green, tuberculosis became a lens for looking at, well, everything.

For example, in terms of history, we learned that cities such as Pasadena, California, and Colorado Springs began as tuberculosis colonies.

In the late 1800s, at the height of tuberculosis in the United States, there were almost as many hospital beds for TB patients as for all other patients combined.

And we also learn about links between TB and the iconic American cowboy hat, between TB and the assassination that sparked World War I, and between TB and the Beatles.

Yeah, the Beatles, because after contracting tuberculosis as a teen, Ringo Starr spent two years in a sanatorium, and that’s where he took up drumming.

We’ve had effective anti-tuberculosis drugs for a decade, but it still kills more people than any other infectious disease.

And that’s because, Green writes, the cure is where the disease is not, and the disease is where the cure is not.

And his book lays out the case for funding TB programs in poor countries.

And the book is also remarkable because he’s quite forthcoming about his own struggles with anxiety and depression and obsessive compulsive disorder.

And as I was reading this book, Grant, I was thinking, gosh, this historian really has some writing chops.

And it was only later that I realized that John Green is also the novelist who wrote the wildly popular young adult novel, The Fault in Our Stars.

Oh. You know?

And so I wanted to share a lovely passage where Green mentions learning that a young TB patient had been rereading The Fault in Our Stars just before her death.

He writes, when you write a novel, you’re alone in it.

I wrote that book alone, sitting in airports and coffee shops and lying in bed.

But when writing, there’s always for me a hope that one day I will not be alone.

Not in this work, and not in this world.

It’s a bit like that old children’s pool game Marco Polo, where one person closes their eyes and swims around the pool trying to tag someone else.

Marco, the person with eyes closed says, and the other pool goers have to answer Polo.

Marco, Marco, Marco, cries one kid.

And the others reply, Polo, Polo, Polo. Writing is like that for me. Like I’m typing Marco, Marco, Marco for years. And then finally, the work is finished and someone reads it and says, Polo.

And Grant, I just loved that, not only as a writer, but just as a human, you know?

I mean, anybody who’s trying to be heard.

Maybe you’re the parent of a kid who doesn’t seem to be listening, you know?

And you’re standing there saying, Marco, Marco, Marco.

And then one day the kid responds.

Yeah, it’s exactly right.

I love it.

And there’s a really good reason he’s a bestselling novelist.

Yes. He’s a very good writer.

Yes. And I love that he tackled the subject out of curiosity and interest in the world.

Exactly.

And so that’s the other side of this coin.

To get that polo, you need to be interested in other people when you say Margot.

Yes. And he clearly is interested in the lives and the minds and the hearts of other people.

Yes. Yes.

I mean, it was not a book that I thought I would, you know, necessarily pick up.

I just happened to see it on the bestseller list again and again.

I thought, okay, I’ll give it a, you know.

Yeah, absolutely.

It’s not really something I would necessarily read, but I’m so glad I did.

And the book is called Everything is Tuberculosis, the History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection.

By John Green?

By John Green, yes.

We’ll, of course, link to that on the website.

Martha and I are big readers, and we know you are too.

And when you write to us about the books that you’re reading, it makes our day.

So send us an email to words@waywordradio.org, or you can text us to the toll-free number 877-929-9673.

Welcome to A Way with Words.

This is Tristan. I’m calling from San Antonio. Well, I have a question that relates to the color of my eyes. It actually came up a couple of decades ago, so it’s nice to finally get around to asking your opinion on it. Too bad I wasn’t aware of the show back then.

Okay, so 20 years later.

So for about the first three decades of my life, a little more than that, I knew my eye color to be hazel blue, or I just abbreviated that as hazel, to the point of listing hazel as my eye color when I got my first driver’s license.

And I was happy with that.

Nobody complained until I married my first wife.

She was Romanian with no dialect bias in English.

And she saw that on my driver’s license and was even a little bit shocked and challenged me to the point of me actually correcting my eye color on my driver’s license, which now reads blue.

So it no longer says hazel blue, but it used to.

Yeah, it used to just say hazel, but it wasn’t known for hazel blue.

Oh, I see.

Yeah, that’s a really good summary of this.

Hazel blue is extraordinarily rare as a pair of words in English.

We can look at corpora, these large bodies of text that linguists and lexicographers use to figure out what’s really happening in language.

And by far and away, hazel green, if we’re going to pair hazel with a color, is the pairing that you’ll see.

Followed by hazel brown.

And hazel blue is incredibly rare.

People rarely use it for anything.

But part of the problem with this is that it’s been, people don’t always understand that the hazel is supposed to be the color of the hazelnut or the filbert, which is the same nut.

It’s kind of this, typically this light brown or yellowish brown.

So I have a little library here.

And looking in books devoted to defining color, their definitions of hazel are all over the place.

One says a brown tinged with red.

Another one says light brown to mildly green or golden in color.

My favorite one, though, is from an 1821 book.

It says that hazel is, quote, the color of the common weasel or the light parts of feathers on the back of a snipe.

Is that what your eyes look like?

No, like they’re more of a blue-gray.

But let me ask you, for you, is the word hazel, is that only about color?

Or does that suggest texture as well?

Because for some people, it’s about the almost spotty or checkerboard pattern of brown in the eyes.

Yeah, I think because I was trying to find out if it was just something I interpreted or if other family members also associate with the blue.

Because my sister also had what we called hazel eyes, but hers are more hazel green.

But she even thought mine were more hazel, and I think it comes down more to the texture, but kind of the mixture of, although in my case, it’s mostly just shades of blue and gray, but this idea of not a pure image of any given color.

Well, colors are notoriously hard to define, as we just learned from the dictionaries.

But you can also just get around the problem by calling your eyes avalanious, which also means the color of the hazelnut or the filbert nut.

A-V-E-L-L-A-N-E-O-U-S.

Avalanious.

But that sounds like it’s going to be more of a shade of brown than my own eyes.

Yeah.

All right.

Well, Tristan, thank you so much for calling.

That’s a really interesting question.

I never thought about it.

We appreciate it.

Thank you, too.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Call us anytime to leave a voicemail, 877-929-9673, or send your thoughts in email, words@waywordradio.org.

In Vietnamese, if you want to talk about something that’s completely improbable, there’s an expression that translates as, when the loach lays eggs at the top of the banyan tree.

Now, a loach, I learned, is a mud-dwelling fish.

So if something’s really improbable, it’s going to be when that mud-dwelling fish lays eggs at the top of a tree.

Which it’s just not going to do.

It’s not going to do.

That’s a firm no.

There’s a firm yes.

We would like you to call 877-929-9673.

Hello. You have A Way with Words.

This is Roger.

I’m calling from New Orleans.

We’re glad to have you, Roger.

What’s up today?

My father-in-law, who has passed away, had a phrase that he always used to say that we really didn’t understand where it came from.

We don’t know if he found it somewhere or if he came up with it himself.

Okay, let’s hear it.

The phrase was, he would have a list of things or someone would be talking and he would say, well, I had one gun, but the eggplant over there.

He would just kind of say that to maybe just make people scratch their heads or kind of make them stop for a minute and think, what did you just say?

And he’d say, well, I had one gunch, but the egg’s laying over there.

Just a non sequitur.

Yeah, right, exactly.

Is that anything that you’ve heard of?

Yeah, it’s a thing.

Was he the kind of guy that read Mad Magazine?

He may have, you know, as a kid.

I mean, he’s not a current subscriber.

So Mad Magazine had this as like a non sequitur expression since like around 1956.

But the word gunch is grunch with an R.

Everywhere else I’ve seen this expression.

But it’s exactly the same.

I’ve had one grunch, so G-R-U-N-C-H, but the eggplant over there.

And this is quasi grammatical, but really doesn’t make a lot of sense.

But there’s a deeper story than that being used in Mad Magazine.

It comes from humorist Roger Price, who had a book called In One Head and Out the Other, published in 1951.

Now, you might not know Roger Price, but he was one of the inventors of Mad Libs.

You know, that game where you come up with words to insert into a story, and then when you read the story, it comes out funny or nonsensical.

So this guy was pretty well established, used to write for Bob Hope’s radio show, and just had a really storied career as a humorist.

But in this 1951 book, he’s talking about something he calls the avoidist movement, A-V-O-I-D-I-S-T.

And so this is not a real thing.

It’s something that he’s invented.

But on the way to describing this, he’s talking about its main character.

And this is a supposedly real relative by the name of Clayton Slope, who, as Price says, lived avoidism.

And so Slope, Clayton Slope, was the kind of guy who took 11 months to be born, whose head was flat in the back from being a wallflower, and who once sat in a rocking seat on a porch for 22 months and only rocked once.

So just a guy who avoided doing anything.

And then he’s got this longer passage where he says, quote, he had developed the limp, repulsive handshake to a point of perfection seldom reached by any of us today.

He had a clever trick of saying any conceivable sentence so that it sounded like I had one grunch but the eggplant over there.

And for years he had avoided changing his socks.

Also, he pretended to be stone deaf.

So this is where this comes from.

So the book is published in 1951 and then Mad Magazine picks it up around 1956.

And then, you know, Mad just used it over the years in its various articles and columns.

And even in the letters to the editor, the readers of Mad Magazine picked up on it as well and often used it or asked about it.

And very popular with rascals and jokers like your father-in-law.

Wow, that’s amazing.

Yeah, the avoidist movement was really interesting, too, because it was exactly the kind of thing that Mad Magazine readers would catch on to.

And college students and high school students.

You will see this line of your father-in-law’s, I had one grunch with the eggplant over there, in college and high school yearbooks and newspapers and so forth.

But the avoidance movement actually kind of became a thing.

It also had the non-sequitur catchphrase of, I had one once, but the wheels fell off, which is just another thing you toss into conversation.

That sounds familiar.

Yeah. I feel like I’ve heard that one before, but not gunch or grunch.

Well, I didn’t know it went so deep as all of that.

Yeah, it definitely did.

Well, thank you so much for bringing that up, Roger.

Thank you so much for having me on.

I’ve listened to just about all of your episodes from about 2020 until now.

I just recently discovered you, but I’ve gone through them voraciously.

Wow.

Well, there’s more before 2020.

There’s many years before that.

But thank you for calling and take care of yourself.

Thank you.

Thanks again.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Call us with the funny thing your relative used to say, 877-929-9673.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Brittany.

I’m calling from Green Coast Springs, Florida.

I was wanting to get some information about a word that my mother used to use in referring to me when I was a child.

When I was younger, she’d be like, Brittany, quit being such a scooch when I was, you know, being kind of grumpy or irritated.

And I was wondering if there’s any origin to that word.

Am I hearing scooch?

Scooch.

How would you spell that?

I have no idea.

I can’t ask my mother.

She is no longer with us.

We know something about this, if this is the term I’m thinking of.

When she said, don’t be a scooch, what were you doing?

Being annoying or irritating or, you know, trying to get her attention or being kind of grumpy.

Yeah, that fits. That fits. Do you come from an Italian-American background?

Yes, and Irish.

And Irish. The reason I ask is that this word is common in Italian-American communities in New York and New Jersey and possibly some other places.

So it’s a known term that means a pain, like a pain in the neck or a pest, somebody who’s annoying.

And it comes from an Italian word, scocciare, S-C-O-C-C-I-A-R-E, scocciare.

And it means to annoy.

And so you might find it in longer forms like scucciatament, which means a pain in the head, or scucci di badans, which means a real pain.

And then a couple other ones, which mean a pain in the genitals.

So I don’t think she meant that one.

Yeah.

So all of these are just about being an annoying person.

And they all come from dialect pronunciations and don’t sound much like modern day Italian.

So they’re kind of specific to the Italian American communities.

Gotcha.

That actually makes sense.

My mom grew up in Long Island.

There we go.

Yeah.

And so it’s definitely part of the Long Island scene.

One really interesting side note.

We talked about this years ago and got an email from Maria in Uruguay who says in Uruguay and Argentina, they have also borrowed that Italian words, scocciare.

And so they now have a Spanish verb, escuchar, meaning to annoy.

So it’s funny that it was borrowed twice out of Italian, once into English and once into Latin American Spanish.

So they use it in Argentina in what’s called Lomfardo, a slangy kind of Spanish, heavily influenced by Italian.

That is really cool to hear, though.

Right? Isn’t it interesting?

Because I never hear it here in Florida.

So I never hear it here.

I’ve only ever heard it from my mother.

Yeah, so you’ve got these memories and associations attached.

Well, hang on to that.

Well, I pass it on because I tell my children, quit being such a skunk.

That’s how it works, right?

There you go.

That’s how it works.

We’re going to get a call in 20 years from your kids going, what did my mom mean?

That is awesome.

Well, I greatly appreciate you guys letting me know.

All right.

Take care now.

You too.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye, Ruth.

Bye-bye.

Well, don’t be a scooch.

Call us 877-929-9673 or email us words@waywordradio.org.

A Way with Words senior producer is Stefanie Levine.

Tim Felten is our engineer and editor, and John Chaneski is our quiz master.

Go to waywordradio.org for all of our past episodes, podcast links, and ways to reach us.

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

1-877-929-9673.

A Wayword Words is an independent nonprofit production of Wayword, Inc.

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

Although we’re not a part of NPR, we thank NPR stations throughout the United States that carry the show.

And special thanks to our nonprofits volunteer board.

Michael Breslauer, Josh Eckels, Clare Grotting, Merrill Perlman, Bruce Rogow, Rick Seidenwurm, and Betty Willis.

Thanks for listening. I’m Grant Barrett.

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

So long.