Martha and Grant share listeners’ emails about language changes in the mouths of train conductors and military drill instructors. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Train Conductor Language”
You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette.
A while back, we had a conversation on the show about the language of train conductors. Remember that, Grant?
Yeah.
Yeah. It prompted an email from Jeanne Perry in Port Wing, Wisconsin.
Jeanne writes, you two may not be old enough to have ridden on the trains back in the day when conductors called all aboard when the train was about to pull out. I rode on long-distance trains in the 1940s and 1950s and still do, but it’s not quite the same.
There are two cartoons I saw years ago that I never forgot because they tickled me, so I want to share them. In one, in the first picture, a man is leaning into the door of an office where another man sits behind a desk. The man in the doorway puts his hand up to the side of his mouth and calls out a long line of gibberish, vowels and consonants that don’t spell anything and are unintelligible.
In the second picture, he leans in again with a different line of gibberish. And in the third picture, once again. In the last picture, the man behind the desk is shaking his hand saying, congratulations, you have the job as our new railway conductor.
Pretty good, huh?
Yeah, that’s pretty good.
And then Jeannie says the other cartoon is a Wisconsin joke. A lady and her young son are riding on the train when the conductor leans in the door of their rail car. The woman turns to her little boy and says, what did the conductor say? The little boy says, nothing. He just leaned in the door and sneezed. The mother says, get ready to get off. That’s our stop. Osh-kosh.
That’s pretty good.
And we had one other response in a different vein to that same segment of our show where we talked about language kind of being corrupted over time. Airman Mike Peek wrote to say that he’s in the military, and he just had to bring up the fact that the same thing happens on the parade grounds. For example, forward march sounds like, forward hutch! Or, oh! I’m not even doing it well.
And he says, when called to present arms or to salute, it’s yelled. He spells it like this, capital H, capital U, G-H-H-H-H-H-H-H. Call them half-letch hatch! Brought me to attention.
Yeah, but his point is very good. It’s that when you say something over and over, particularly when you’re shouting it, there’s a kind of corruption there. And I don’t know why we didn’t think of the military example. It’s one we’ve seen in a thousand movies, right?
Yeah, that’s a perfect example.
Or experienced ourselves.
Sure.
If you’ve got a comment on this or anything else we’ve talked about on the show, by all means, email us, words@waywordradio.org.
And we welcome your phone calls at any time, 1-877-929-9673.
