Train of Thought (episode #1516)

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.

Cast the first stone.

Do unto others.

Am I my brother’s keeper?

So many phrases in English come to us from the Bible.

Land of milk and honey.

Root of all evil.

Judgment Day.

Those are some of the obvious ones.

But there are also lots of words and phrases that you might be surprised to learn apparently originated in early translations of Greek and Hebrew scripture.

And one of those is bottomless pit.

Oh, I did not know that.

How about that?

It means, of course, something that can’t ever be filled or satisfied.

Right.

A teenage boy in the kitchen.

Right, right, right.

Right?

But the first recorded appearance of this phrase in English is apparently William Tyndall’s 1526 translation of the Bible.

It’s from the book of Revelation, which includes this apocalyptic vision.

And the fifth angel blew, and I saw a star fall from heaven unto the earth.

And to him was given the key of the bottomless pit.

Oh.

Isn’t that cool?

Yeah, the Greek there that’s translated is abousos, which means abyss.

But it’s apparently the first recorded instance we have of bottomless pit.

Bottomless pit.

Wow.

Isn’t that cool?

That is amazing.

Guess what?

I have some more of those, and I’m going to share them later in the show.

And these are all from the Bible.

Yeah.

And the Bible, right up there with Shakespeare, is the number one or number two influence on English.

A really big influencer.

Give us a call, 877-929-9673, or tell us everything and email to words@waywordradio.org.

And you can go to our website and send us a message from there at waywordradio.org.

Hi there. You have A Way with Words.

Hi. This is Emily from San Diego.

Hello, Emily. What can we do for you?

So this happened last week. I was chatting with a colleague on instant message and discussing how it’s going to address this kind of random topic with another colleague.

So I was telling her my plan, and I was going to use an email to segue into this specific topic.

So on instant message, you’re kind of like hasty.

You kind of type quickly.

So as I was typing it out of the word segue, and I phonetically sounded it out, I typed it S-E-G-W-A-Y.

And then I hit send, and then I realized that the instant messenger actually autocorrected it and capitalized the S.

Then I realized, oh, my God, I actually spelled it incorrectly.

So I went to Google and I learned it’s spelled S-E-G-U-E.

So I was baffled.

So either I’ve been spelling it incorrectly my entire life, which is not realistic because I am a terrible speller.

But also the fact I might not have ever used it before in writing or I’m just kind of a product of this commercialization since the brand Segway came out right when I was graduating high school.

So I can’t imagine I’m the only one with this dilemma.

No, I don’t think you are at all.

So you’re worried that the brand name has replaced the traditional spelling in your lexicon as well as in other people’s?

Yes.

Okay.

You know, I have to tell you, I don’t have data on this, but I think I’ve noticed the same thing.

It just is a more natural pronunciation for that word because S-E-G-U-E does not look like English.

It is not a spelling that you would expect to find in a word that is so simple to say.

I agree.

Yeah.

So we’re on the same page here.

All right.

Thanks for calling.

No, I’m kidding.

So your deeper issue here is, though, what can you do to fend this off?

I guess it’s just I can’t believe I’ve just been doing it incorrectly this whole time.

And I kind of want to, why have I been spelling it incorrectly?

I understand because, you know, Segway is much S-E-G-W-A-Y is definitely much more phonetically appropriate for it.

But I think it’s just more of just curious about, I guess, others or how rampant this is and all that stuff.

Yeah, I think part of the issue is that we don’t have enough Latin classes.

Because if you go back to Latin, it comes from a Latin word, sequo, that means to follow.

It’s like, you know, the expression non sequitur.

It doesn’t follow.

But it came to us through Italian.

It came to us through Italian.

So the Latin pronunciation wouldn’t necessarily hold sway.

No, but I’m saying if you see the Italian, you can recognize the Latin.

So it’s a seguire in Italian, the verb to follow, right?

S-E-G-U-I-R-E.

Anyway here, so I don’t think there’s anything to be done about this.

It’s just one of the ways that language changes.

We can bemoan it and decry it, but we can’t necessarily stop it.

There’s a rule that some linguists use, which has kind of been borrowed from commerce and money, and it has to do with the simplest form of a word will win out.

The easiest, least friction will often prevail over centuries or even longer.

And I think that’s what’s happening here.

The brand name of this device is, it doesn’t even feel like a brand name.

I wonder what the marketing people of that company do.

It must feel so inspecific to them, so like unexceptional, like an ordinary word almost.

Yeah, I’d agree.

And then I would think if I was a Segway brand, that spelling is taking over for that term, for S-E-G-U-E.

So their brand is being used inappropriately in terms of marketing and searching for, you know, how their brand is doing it could kind of interfere with some of that traffic and that data that they get.

Yeah, I’ve had that happen to me when I’ve been dictating, too, on my phone.

Yeah, the brand names stick in there, right?

I do see, if you look on Twitter, it’s a real great snapshot of how people spell when they’re just typing on the fly and not writing formal documents.

You do see a few people out of every hundred mentions of the word who mean segue as in a transition and not segue as in the two-wheeled vehicle.

But it does look like my own feeling that the brand name was pushing out the spelling of the word isn’t necessarily borne out by the evidence.

So perhaps you and I both have an issue where we’re seeing the outlier cases and feeling like they’re dominating.

All right. I think that’s good. Thank you very much.

Emily, thank you for your call. We really appreciate it.

All right. Bye.

Take care.

Thanks, Emily.

877-929-9673 or email words@waywordradio.org or talk to us on Twitter @wayword.

Here’s another phrase I was surprised to learn comes from a particular translation of the Bible, sign of the times.

Oh, wow. Really?

Yeah.

That was a fantastic album.

It was.

It was, and I’m betting that Prince appreciated that.

Well, I don’t know if he knew or not.

But it comes from Matthew 16, where Jesus is talking to the Pharisees, and they ask him for a sign from heaven, and he says,

When it is evening, ye say, It will be fair weather, for the sky is red.

And in the morning it will be foul weather today, for the sky is red and lowering.

O ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky, but can ye not discern the signs of the times?

Wow, that’s fantastic.

Isn’t that kind of a tinkly passage, right?

Yeah.

The back of your neck feeling?

Yes.

Yeah, wow.

Yeah, in the Greek there is semia.

For signs, it’s like the word semaphore in English.

Or semiotics, perhaps.

Yeah, exactly.

Semantics, yeah.

Fantastic.

Well, we’d love to hear from you.

877-929-9673.

Hello, welcome to A Way with Words.

Hello, good afternoon.

Good afternoon.

Who is this?

My name is Pankaj.

I am calling from Dallas, Texas.

Well, welcome. We’re glad to have you.

What would you like to talk with us about?

I wanted to discuss with you about the word called part and parcel.

And I have read this word quite a lot, especially when I’ve been reading a book called Bhagavad Gita, as it is, which is a spiritual book in Hinduism.

And they have used this word quite a lot, part and parcel, part and parcel.

And I kind of researched a little bit.

But what I am very curious to know is part, which is really a part of it and a parcel, which is really whole.

So how does this whole thing come together, which is part as well as parcel?

What does it really mean and how to use it properly?

Okay.

Oh, I love this.

Part and parcel is just one of those expressions that you otherwise would just read past and not really look into it very carefully, right?

Right.

Part and parcel.

Right.

And it means an essential component or something, right?

It’s one of many, many legal doublets.

Part and parcel basically in that phrase mean the same thing.

Back in the 16th century, the word parcel meant an essential component of something.

So if you’re talking about a part and parcel, you’re really talking pretty much about the same thing.

And it’s the kind of expression that you see a lot in legal language, like law and order or cease and desist or will and testament or soul and exclusive.

It usually appears in legal language.

But as you’re saying, you’re reading it in your religious text, right?

Yes, quite a lot, yeah.

And so it sounds like what was kind of catching you up here is that maybe to the modern ear, parcel doesn’t seem like a part.

It seems like a whole.

We think of a parcel of land as being a whole piece of land, and we think of a parcel like a parcel from a store being a whole collected thing.

But in truth, they’re both just smaller components.

A parcel of land is a piece of the larger landscape, or a parcel is one of many packages that you might bring home from shopping.

So it sounds like part is really a part, but parcel could be a part, but by itself, in itself, it is a complete thing also.

Yeah, in this expression, parcel means a part.

So it’s redundant, and all of these doublets that Martha is talking about are redundant, and they often are redundant because the words have different etymological origins, right, Martha?

Some are English and some are French, or some come from high language and some come from low language.

Right, which is helpful in legal terminology because you just make sure that there’s no room for error whatsoever.

Okay, it makes sense, yeah.

And in this context, the sentence goes something like this, that soul is part and parcel of God, for example.

That’s one of the places where they have used, or the energy is part and parcel of the larger energy.

Right.

Something like that.

It’s essential, yeah.

Right.

Perfect.

Pankaj, thank you so much for your call.

We really appreciate it.

Thank you very much for taking my call.

Thank you both of you.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

So these doublets, by the way, are actually a few triplets where these three words that more or less mean the same thing are put together in these pat phrases.

The only ones I know, they’re all legal, right, title, and interest, and maybe give, devise, and bequeath.

That one’s actually even rare in legalese, I believe.

Yeah.

There’s also ordered, adjudged, and decreed.

Ooh, nice.

There are several like that.

We know that you read a lot because you’re A Way with Words listeners and A Way with Words fans, and we’d love to hear about what you’re reading, something you came across that was interesting or sparked questions in your mind or that you think the world should hear.

Give us a call, 877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org or talk to us on Twitter @wayword.

Grant, have you ever used the phrase land of Nod, or do you know what it means?

Land of just going to sleep, right?

Yeah, going to sleep.

That also comes from the Bible.

I did know that.

I don’t know how.

It’s a joke.

A what?

It’s a joke.

There are jokes in the Bible.

Oh, I can tell you some Bible jokes.

But yeah, actually, the land of Nod was in Genesis, and it’s where Cain, after he murdered Abel, was exiled.

The land of Nod.

But wags like Jonathan Swift thought it would be funny to say land of Nod, like meaning the place that…

Isn’t that funny?

It is funny.

Yeah.

So Jonathan Swift in 1738 in his complete collection of genteel and ingenious conversation first used that.

Yeah.

The guy had a little bit of pride in his work, didn’t he?

Very full opinion of himself.

Off to the land of Nod.

Hey, this show is about words and language and we’d love to hear from you.

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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 on the line from New York City is our quiz guy, John Chaneski.

Hi, John.

Hi, guys.

Great to be back.

I have something very interesting this week.

This quiz is about ease, the letter E.

Now, you may have heard about the novel Gadsby by Ernest Vincent Wright or The Void by Georges Pérec, both of which are examples of what they call constrained writing.

Supposedly, neither of those books uses the letter E even once.

Have you heard of those?

Yes, absolutely.

I checked the Pérec novel, and it’s true.

They’re lipograms, are they not?

Is that the word?

They’re lipogrammatic, yes.

Lipogrammatic.

Now, this puzzle is the opposite of that.

The only vowel in each of the answers to the following clues is E.

For example, it’s where you place items when you don’t need them for a long time, especially if you want them to be very, very cold.

The answer would be?

Freezer.

Icebox?

Freezer is good.

That’s three E’s.

I’ve got a two-word phrase that has five E’s.

Deep freeze.

Deep freeze, yes.

Deep freeze.

We’re going to try to go no fewer than five E’s for fun.

Wow.

Okay.

So maximum E’s.

Yeah.

Very good, yeah.

Now, the first is just one word, and it’s the bubbly quality of drinks like seltzer and champagne.

Oh, effervescence.

Effervescence itself.

One word, five E’s.

Very well done.

Yes.

This 1968 John Wayne movie was about the United States Army’s Special Forces, the same group that was the subject of a 1966 number one hit by Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler.

The Green Berets?

The Green Berets.

Yes, five E’s there.

Very good.

If you have a Twitter account, you likely see this phrase often.

It’s at the top of the page every time there’s been a recent post to your feed.

Three words.

Something tweet.

These new tweets?

I don’t know what it is.

Oh, you got the second two words is correct.

See new tweets.

See new tweets.

See new tweets, yes.

Very good.

As a film actress, she starred in Ed TV, which only has one E.

She has her own record company, 1111, which has six Es, just like her name.

Who is this former stand-up and talk show host?

Ellen DeGeneres.

Ellen DeGeneres.

Not just Ellen DeGeneres, but Ellen Lee DeGeneres.

Oh!

Nice.

From five to seven.

Here’s another one.

During World War II, these two words described an area stretching from the Ionian Sea to the Aegean that had been liberated by the resistance of a certain Mediterranean country.

Peloponel.

Grease something.

Yeah, well, it’s something Grease.

They were liberated.

Free Grease?

What’s that?

Free Grease?

Free Grease, yes.

Free Grease.

Five E’s right there.

Five E’s, okay.

Yeah.

She completed Tom Cruise in Jerry Maguire.

She was a B in B movie, and she was Bridget Jones twice.

Who is this actress with six Es in her name?

And one of them has an accent.

Renee Zellweger.

Yes, Renee Zellweger.

2017 saw the second sequel to a horror movie franchise that shares its name with a 1938 song that has the lyric, where’d you get those eyes?

Jeepers Creepers, where’d you get those peepers?

Jeepers Creepers has six Es, but the sequel?

Jeepers Creepers 3.

Jeepers Creepers 3 has eight.

Or, depending if you’re at the Roman numerals, it’s got three I’s, but we’re not going to go into that.

Anyway.

Okay, you guys have been excellent.

Excellent.

That’s got all E’s in it.

Sure, yeah.

That’s what we’ve got.

So, I’ll see you next time.

Thanks, John.

Really appreciate it.

Take care.

Bye, John.

As you can see, we do a lot of goofing around about language here, and we’d love to talk with you about it.

877-929-9673, or send your emails to words@waywordradio.org.

There’s a word in Swedish that means a special place that’s close to your heart, some place that isn’t easy for other people to find, where you can just relax.

And it sounds like smoltronstella, something like that.

And it literally means wild strawberry patch.

Isn’t that a lovely way?

I have to find my smoltronstella.

Right, your special place to get away from the troubles of the world.

Yeah, your wild strawberry patch.

Talk to us on Twitter @wayword.

Hi there. You have A Way with Words.

Hi, thank you. My name is Isabella. I’m calling from Dallas.

Welcome, Isabella. What can we do for you?

Well, my question is very simple, but it’s been haunting me forever. I just want to know why spinach is pronounced spinach and why stomach is pronounced stomach. So, like, why is the C-H sound different? Why is spinach pronounced spinach and stomach pronounced stomach?

Yes, so the C-H sound. Are you a native English speaker, first language speaker?

Oh, no, it’s my second language, so maybe that’s why I have a million questions about English.

What’s your first?

Spanish.

Spanish, okay. Yeah, trust me, the English speakers also have a lot of questions about the language. And one of them is, why doesn’t pronunciation match the spelling more? And it has to do with these accidents of history that lead us to all these different places that English got its word. And I’m hanging on to the old pronunciations and hanging on to the old spellings.

So spinach and stomach have different etymological roots. That’s basically the story. So spinach ultimately comes from Arabic and Persian words, espinic, something like that. And then over time, that pronunciation got changed through French. So you can blame the French, which really don’t do that hard C sound at the end of very many words. There’s just a handful of words in French, like flick and freak and things like that. So that hard C changed to the ch or sh in French. Spanish keeps it, though. Espinaca, right?

Espinaca, yeah. Spanish keeps it. And then similarly for stomach. Stomach comes to us from Greek, basically means mouth of the gullet, something like that. So the stomacus, and there’s a hard C sound. And we kept that hard C sound from Latin into Old French, stomac. Again, there’s the exception. So it’s many French words. They don’t do the hard C sound at the end words. Sometimes they do. And then it was borrowed into Middle English hundreds and hundreds of years ago. And we just kept the pronunciation, even though the spelling changed a little bit over time.

That makes total sense. Every word has its own story. There’s no wholesale effort that really radically changed whole big groups of words all at once, except for something known as the great vowel shift, when a lot of vowels in English kind of changed over a 150 to 300-year period.

Yeah, that’s awesome. I bet you never had a spelling bee, right, in Spanish?

Oh, yeah. We actually did have spelling bee in Spanish.

Really? And my friends here were like, but that makes no sense. You need to know your accent, I guess. But there are dialects of Spanish where they leave out syllables or they leave off the terminating vowels, that sort of thing. So that’s kind of English’s problem. It borrowed from a variety of different dialects from French and English and other things. And so there’s no one consistent central language which provided all of the roots for all of the words.

Yeah, that makes sense. Thank you so much for answering my question.

It was our pleasure, Isabella. Thanks for calling. We’re glad to help. Take care.

Okay, have a good one. Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

Grant, I didn’t realize that the term hue and cry is an old English legal term.

Hue and cry?

Yeah. Yeah, according to Black’s Law Dictionary, in Old English law, it was a loud outcry with which felons such as robbers, burglars, and murderers were anciently pursued, and which all who heard it were bound to take up and join in the pursuit until the malefactor was taken.

Oh, wow. The old language is just thrilling, isn’t it?

Isn’t that great?

Yeah. Hue and cry. We don’t write like that anymore. I wonder if at the time if it seemed like deep bureaucratic jargon that people rolled their eyes at like we do bureaucratic jargon today. Because now it sounds fantastic and wonderfully archaic.

You and cry.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Jay Southgate.

Hi, Jay. Welcome to the show. What’s up?

Thank you very much. I have been thinking about two words. One is casual, and the other is casualty. And how on earth are they related? I can’t begin to imagine.

Where are you that you came up with this question? Do you work in insurance or something?

No, but, I mean, I listen to your show, so I work a very unintellectual job. I think about words all the time. I love them.

Oh, yay. Okay. That’s us. That’s our people right there. Yeah. Well, let’s see if we can help with that. I think the best way to think about the words casual and casualty is to recognize that they both go back to a large family of words. It has to do with the notion of falling. They both go back to the Latin word cadere, which means to fall, and the past participle of that, casus, which means fallen. They’re related to a whole bunch of words like accident, which is something that befalls you. Cascade is something that falls. And even cadaver is something that has fallen.

Yeah. And so if you think about casual, it’s sort of like how things fall, almost like dice falling out of your hand. If something’s casual, it’s by chance and it’s not planned out. And casualty is an old word that has been used for a long time to refer to a falling or a loss, like in a military sense back in the 1500s. It was used to mean a loss from a regiment or a loss of munitions, something like that. And then it wasn’t until I think the 19th century that casualty came to be talking about a soldier, an individual soldier who has fallen. So if you think about how they’re connected in terms of falling, I think it kind of makes sense.

Yeah, it does. I had speculated about what it might be. What occurred to me is that a casualty could be the result of lack of diligence on the part of the commander. He was too casual about his job. And, yeah, so that’s good to know. Now I know.

Yeah, that casual meaning kind of irregular or informal or not according to the usual strict standard is relatively modern. And so the groups of words that Martha was talking about go all the way back to Latin. And many of these meanings were already kind of firmly in place before they were borrowed into a variety of languages, including French, and then eventually into English.

Cool. Very interesting. Jay, by the way, where are you calling from?

I’m calling from Barry, Vermont.

All right. Thank you for your call. We really appreciate it.

Okay. It was nice talking with you. Take care. Bye-bye.

Bye.

You know, another interesting word from that family of words involving falling is caducity, C-A-D-U-C-I-T-Y, which refers to the fleeting or perishable nature of something, and it is used more and more to refer to fleeting cognitive abilities as you get older. So it’s a medical term, caducity.

Give us a call at 877-929-9673 or email words@waywordradio.org.

Another phrase you might be surprised to learn comes directly from the Bible is fight the good fight.

Fight the good fight?

Yeah. And where is that?

It’s in 1 Timothy 6.12, and the longer phrase is, fight the good fight of faith.

Oh, nice. How about that? Fight the good fight. It’s just everywhere.

It’s everywhere. The Bible has just left these footprints throughout the language.

Yes.

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

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Tony Ochoa. I’m calling from Reno, Nevada.

Hi, Tony. Welcome. What’s going on?

Hey, I have a question regarding the term for the spacing that people put between themselves, you know, like saying a line or a queue at a bank or a fast food restaurant. My brother-in-law and my wife refer to it as personal space, but I’m kind of looking for something that’s a little more specific because I think that personal space can apply to, like, being in the ballpark or just any time that people are like jostling around or whatever.

The reason I’m asking is because I’ve noticed that the space is getting larger over time. Yeah, to the point where it’s not just the person who’s next in line. It’s the person behind them and then sometimes the person behind them. And I’m just wondering if there’s a term for that that could apply to just that giant space that sometimes people keep around themselves. And I’m also kind of wondering why it keeps getting larger. I’ve even noticed it this morning in a line in a drive-thru to get coffee, like with cars.

Huh, no kidding. I wonder if that’s just a Reno thing.

I haven’t noticed that in San Diego or when I travel that the space between people or cars is all that different.

I feel like psychologically there’s more space because people are looking at their phones.

Oh, interesting.

So they’re allowing for their own failure to catch up by giving more space in case they make a mistake.

I have noticed it.

I was thinking it might have to do with the people using pins at the checkout line.

And people may be giving people just a little bit more space just so they don’t feel like they’re looking at their pen or something.

Yeah, or here in California, if you’re lining up at the pharmacy, you have to give somebody space so that you don’t hear their health information and that kind of thing.

Yeah, they put that little line down there, don’t they?

Yeah, but it sounds like what you’re saying is if you’re lining up at the coffee shop or the airport or something like that, people are ending up farther apart, literally?

Yeah, I’ve noticed that.

And you want language for that space between people?

Yeah.

I can get you close to an answer, Tony.

There is a field that studies personal space or the space that people allow themselves in society or they allow each other.

And it’s called proxemics.

P-R-R-X-E-M-I-C-S.

And it comes from the word proximity.

So proxemics.

And this was coined in 1963 by a guy named Edward Hall.

And so there’s a whole field filled with jargon that describes many of the things that you’re talking about.

The way that we build our spaces to encourage people to either be further apart or to be closer.

For example, I believe the word is pronounced sosopital.

It looks like sociopital, socio plus p-e-t-a-l.

And these are spaces that are designed to bring people together.

You also have sosophagal.

It looks like socio-fugal.

So it’s socio plus f-u-g-a-l.

And these are spaces that are designed to minimize contact between people.

So, for example, when you have the markings on the line, say, at the pharmacy counter where they want to keep you back while the other person is conducting your business, that particular feature on the floor is sysophical.

It’s there to keep you away from the other person.

And there’s so much more of this.

And I just want you to Google the industry term proxemics and just dig into it.

You’re going to get more answers than you want.

So it’s so fascinating because they’re looking at the animal in us and how the human that’s kind of like tacked on top of the animal addresses those animal needs for space.

And the animal need for regularization.

It’s the whole joke about which urinal did you stand at when there’s more than one choice.

You’ve got to separate yourself out from the other people who are already there.

Right.

And then there’s that guy with his three urinals.

He goes right for the middle.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Some people just have no shame.

So there are other terms that are fairly functional, just kind of ordinary terms.

They talk about public territory and home territory, interactional territory, intimate distance, personal distance, social distance, public distance.

So there’s all this stuff that describes the way we behave when we’re alone, the way we behave when we’re with one other person or two people or groups of people, when we’re with family versus strangers.

And all of this is being studied by people who are designing buildings, figuring out the flow in stores and amusement parks.

It’s very fascinating.

I think that’s exactly what I was looking for is the proxemics.

Yeah.

That’s great.

Yeah, I love that word.

Google that.

I’ll come down to that.

Google that and you’ll have a whole new career for you.

Very cool.

Thanks, guys.

All right.

Take care.

Thanks, Tony.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

There’s a lovely idiom in Kazakhstan that translates as, I see the sun on your back.

And supposedly, according to a translator there, it means, thank you for being you.

I’m alive because of your help.

Wow, that’s right.

I see the sun on your back.

You’re out there in the fields helping to work in the field.

I don’t know.

I don’t know.

Or I’m still standing.

I can still see.

I don’t know.

If you hadn’t have told me, I would have thought it would be something negative.

I would have thought it would be related to, like, don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

Yeah, I know.

I see the sun on your back.

I see the work that you’ve been doing.

It’s like this profound thanks for somebody really helping you a lot.

That’s fantastic.

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.

Earlier in the show, we were talking about some phrases that come from the Bible that are really obvious.

There’s some, like, forbidden fruit or salt of the earth.

I mean, most of us know water into wine and that kind of thing.

But there’s some of those that might surprise you.

For example, a house divided.

Oh, interesting.

You know, a house divided cannot stand.

I associated that with Abraham Lincoln, but apparently he got it from Matthew 12, 25.

Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation, and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand.

Nice.

Yeah, that phrase was picked up later by biblical commentators, by Thomas Paine and Abraham Lincoln eventually.

And another one of those is the powers that be.

Oh, how about that?

I know, right?

I would expect that to come out of the French political tradition or something.

Yeah, me too.

But apparently it’s from Paul’s letter to the Romans.

That’s fantastic.

Isn’t that wild?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And a lot of them aren’t direct translations, but they’re ideas that have influenced the way that we say things.

For example, fly in the ointment.

Oh, that’s biblical?

Yeah.

I didn’t know that.

Yeah.

It doesn’t come directly from Ecclesiastes, but there’s a line in Ecclesiastes 10.1.

Dead flies cause the ointment of the apothecary to send forth a stinking savor.

So doth a little folly him that is in reputation for wisdom and honor.

Isn’t that wild?

Wow, yeah, that’s wild.

Yeah, there’s nothing new under the sun, which also comes from, guess where?

The Bible, of course.

Ecclesiastes.

You know what I think of when I think of words from the Bible?

What?

It’s smote and smite.

Oh, those are good ones, right?

Because they’re not phrases and they’re not idioms, but they have this flair of the other age about them.

Don’t they? There’s something biblical about the word smote.

Smote, yeah.

I smite thee.

Well, I know we’ve got a lot of people of the cloth of all sorts of religions that listen to the show.

Share with us the words and phrases that you know come into English from your religious tradition, 877-929-9673, or email words@waywordradio.org, or talk to us through our website.

You can leave us a message there. Go to waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Cecily, and I’m from Indianapolis, Indiana.

Welcome to the show, Cecily. How can we help you?

I do love your show, and my mother and I both listen to it.

You had a caller a few weeks ago that had a roommate.

I wish I could remember. I can’t remember the particular phrase.

But the caller wasn’t familiar with it, and he was wondering if it was specific to the African-American community.

Do you remember that?

Yeah, we get a few of those now and again. I’m not sure which one you were talking about, but we do get those off and on where people know it’s not part of their own community and wonder if it’s part of another community.

Have you found in your studies that it’s common for certain phrases, because it doesn’t seem to be particularly just words, but certain phrases that begin in any type of a minority community to then sort of trickle upwards from small to big into the majority?

For instance, like even on your show, you say, hit us up.

Right.

Or there’s another show that’s called It’s Been a Minute.

Right.

And I’ve heard those particular things first in the African-American community, and then they sort of make their way to the majority community.

Is that something that’s been going on for a long time?

I mean, as in centuries?

Centuries, not quite.

Really what it took was African Americans coming into their own as a people with a strong identity and a lot of forward momentum and trying to get out from under the majority white culture.

I mean, if I can just put it plainly.

So by the 1960s, we firmly see, although it had already started before, we firmly see African-Americans becoming stars, TV stars, music stars, radio stars.

There had already been some radio stars for decades who were African-American.

Like Aretha Franklin, right?

Right, Aretha Franklin.

But I’m also thinking of like Eddie Anderson on The Jack Benny Show, who was a mainstay of this hugely popular radio show for decades.

And he, he, some of his catchphrases like, come now, and a few other things kind of became well known.

So what it takes is for people from the minority culture to rise to this real public presence and begin to impress upon the larger culture outside of their home group, different ideas, different catchphrases, different language, different ways of thinking, different ways of talking.

And certainly since the rise of hip-hop in the late 1970s, hip-hop has been a huge force for a lot of this.

And I also will look at today, although I don’t know if it’s been well-studied.

But RuPaul and drag culture and certainly African-American drag culture just keeps dropping all this amazing slang and language into popular culture that just like balloons outward and becomes mainstream.

So, yeah, it absolutely can happen that minority culture can make a gigantic impact on the larger majority culture.

That’s fascinating to me as well.

My mother would say that I’m easily entertained, but I’m really not.

It actually takes something with some thought behind it.

But that’s wonderful.

I was thinking that, but I wasn’t sure.

There’s a phrase I want to leave you with, a two-word expression.

It’s called covert prestige.

Covert prestige.

So you have what’s called the prestige language.

This is the language we speak, say, to judges and cops and principals and our grandparents, people of authority, people that we are supposed to show deference or respect to, right?

Right.

Then there’s covert prestige, which is where a minority language or part of a minority language gets its own moral force.

It gets its own cultural strength and begins to assert itself all out of proportion to the minority group’s true influence on the larger culture.

And I think a lot of what is happening with African-American English or Black English is a really good example of this covert prestige coming to the fore.

I like that phrase, covert prestige, because there’s some things, if I say certain things, my mother will say reverting to the vernacular.

I’m going to say no, it’s a covert prestige phrase.

That’s right, you tell her.

We’re really delighted to take your call, and we’re so happy that you spoke with us today.

Thank you so much. I’m so happy to have spoken with both of you.

All right, take care.

Keep up the good work, and I’ll keep listening as well.

Okay, bye-bye.

Thanks a lot.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye, Cecily.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Gary Sarley in San Antonio, Texas.

Hi, Gary.

Welcome to the show.

Hi, Gary.

What’s up?

Yeah, I had a question about a particular thing called a train of thought or trains of thought.

Is that saying from before railroads were invented, or did it have something to do with railroads?

Like if you lose your train of thought?

Yes.

Yeah. Do you have a guess?

I would think that it’s older than that, and it refers to trains as in the train on a gown or something like that.

Well, you’re right. Yeah, when I was growing up, I always thought it had to do with the train just going off the tracks.

You know, I lost my train of thought.

But indeed, this expression goes back even farther than that.

And as you suggested, it has to do with a train like a bride’s train on her wedding gown or something like that.

It’s a really, really old word.

It goes back to Old French and has to do with the tracks or a trail or just something drawn out, whether it’s cloth or it could be a caravan or something like that.

But it definitely predates railroads by several hundred years.

Oh, okay.

All right.

Well, that answers my question.

And the train of thought, by the way, doesn’t come from the train either.

So the train of thought expression connects to the older meanings of train also before the existence of railroad trains.

So just to put that clear, so not only is train of thought not as old as trains, but it doesn’t connect to trains.

It’s not the source of the expression.

Okay.

Your hunch was right.

Oh, all right.

Well, that’s good.

I’ll try not to get sidetracked in the future.

Sidetracked.

Very nice.

Okay, Gary, thank you for calling.

Thanks.

We really appreciate it.

All righty.

Okay, bye.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

Grant, how do you say the name of that big orange ape?

Oh, no.

No.

What?

How do I say the name of the big orange ape?

Yeah.

I grew up saying it incorrectly.

Did you?

Orangutan.

As if there was a G at the end.

Yeah, I did too.

I did, too.

But it’s orangutan.

-huh, orangutan.

Yeah.

But I didn’t realize until recently that it doesn’t have anything to do with its being orange, the spelling of the word.

No, no.

It’s the man of the forest or something like that.

Yeah, yeah.

It’s Malay orangutan, which means man of the forest.

Exactly.

And they’re beautiful animals.

Yeah.

And they’re orange.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Allison Villalobos from Riverside, California.

Hi, Allison.

I love your guys’ show.

And I’m so excited that you guys took my call.

We are excited to have you on the show, Allison.

What is up?

So my husband and I recently got back from a trip to Asia.

We had a stopover in Beijing from Sunday at 10:30 a.m. to Sunday at about 3 p.m.

Then we flew to California, and the flight was about 12 hours.

But we landed at Sunday at 11 a.m.

As we were waiting for our ride, it was about Sunday at noon.

And we’re thinking about, okay, well, Sunday at noon, we were having lunch in Beijing, but that wasn’t yesterday. It was today, but it’s not now. And we realized we just didn’t have any language to talk about what happens when we travel in time from one time zone to another.

Oh, man. How did you deal with that? What did you say? It’s a free day.

I think we just kind of talked ourselves in circles and like, well, it was earlier today, but it’s today. And then we just laughed about it and had nothing more to say.

Oh, my gosh.

This reminds me, Allison, when I was in ninth grade, I was trying out for a play, and I had to memorize something.

And maybe this is useful.

I had to learn this little saying that goes, today was tomorrow yesterday, but today is today today.

Just as yesterday was today yesterday, but yesterday today.

And tomorrow will be today tomorrow, which makes today yesterday and tomorrow all at once.

Oh, my goodness.

Does that help?

We will put that on the website, I promise.

Yeah, I found that in the Bluefield Daily Telegraph archives from 1916.

But anyway, yeah, how do you talk about a day that you’ve already had that you’re now in?

All I can think of is Deja Noon, if it was noon one place.

Or maybe you’re groundhogging.

I don’t know.

That’s not helpful.

I will tell you, Allison, I think science fiction and movies that deal with time travel have a lot to teach us on this.

And there are always these funny moments.

I think there was one in a Terry Pratchett novel where they have this moment when they realize, oh, my, we don’t have the language for this.

But usually they just give up and basically say, if I went through it, it happened already, regardless of what the calendar says.

So it was yesterday, even though on the calendar it’s the same day of the week and the same day of the month.

And that’s just kind of where you go with it.

But like I said earlier, like a lot of people just treat those as free days, kind of like these scandalous days where you can do whatever you want.

You know, you blow your rainy day money because you’ve lived it once.

It’s a second chance, right?

It’s a second chance day, another Sunday.

You can say this was literally the longest day of my life.

Yeah, right.

That’s nice.

That’s very nice.

How nice that you could spend it together.

Exactly.

I’m going to put a call out to our listeners.

If you’ve gone through time travel and you’ve encountered this, any time travelers listening, give us a call.

Let us know.

Hit us up on your sensor phone or whatever, and we’ll find out what time travelers actually say when they’re traveling around the universe.

Yeah, I wish we had something more specific to give you, Allison.

Oh, a special message to the doctor.

We’re particularly waiting your call.

Okay.

Well, thank you so much.

I appreciate your time.

All right.

Take care, Allison.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

So, yeah, on shows like Doctor Who, they just kind of, it’s a little giggle here and there,

But mostly they just punt on the whole question of when and where.

It is funny, right?

It reminds me of driving down a long main drag in a town in Florida years ago, and the banks all had digital clocks outside.

And for some reason, they weren’t coordinated.

And so the farther I went, the earlier it got.

That was a really weird feeling.

That’s as close as I’ve gotten to crossing the international date line.

Oh, I could do that in my house.

The further I get away from the bedroom, the earlier it is.

Yeah.

So what is the word for that?

What is the word?

We have creative listeners who always come up with stuff that’s fun and funny.

If you have these new words for time travel, 877-929-9673 or email words@waywordradio.org.

Do you know the expression on the razzle?

No, it sounds British.

It is British.

If you’re on the razzle, then you’re celebrating wildly.

Oh, okay.

Nice.

Yeah, it has to do with razzle-dazzle.

You’ve got noisemakers or something going on.

Yeah, on the razzle.

Cool.

877-99-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Yeah, this is Tim Cross from Manhattan Beach, California.

Hi, Tim.

Welcome to the show.

What can we do for you, Tim?

Thank you very much.

My grandmother’s passed away a long time ago.

I’m an older guy.

But when I would visit her as a child, whenever we would go out into the neighborhood or shopping,

She would always have a brown paper sack.

And she would hold it as if you were holding the balloon upside down with a big round part on the bottom and a little knot at the top.

And every time she put something in there, she said she would always say something like,

I’m putting something in my poke sack.

And I believe she pronounced or spelled a P-O-K-E.

And it’s driven me crazy because she never knew why she said that.

And because she was from northeast Arkansas,

I thought maybe it was a regional thing because I’ve never heard it anywhere else.

And I wondered if you’d ever run across that before.

Oh, sure. A poke sack, huh?

-huh.

People sometimes use the word just poke to mean a bag or a sack,

And it’s usually a little one.

It’s something that you might carry a small quantity of groceries in,

And sometimes you do carry it, as you described, like an upside-down balloon, and you’ve kind of got your fist around the top of it, right?

Yeah, and poke is a very, very old word.

It goes back centuries, back to the early 13th century.

It’s related to words like pocket and pouch.

And it comes to us from French, right?

Mm—

It comes to us from French.

Poche, P-O-C-H-E.

Mm—

And so poke-sack is a real interesting combination because both poke and sack mean the same thing.

And so here’s a word for you, Tim.

It’s a pleonasm.

A pleonasm is a word that is redundant inside itself.

Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Sort of like tuna fish, huh?

A little bit, like tuna fish.

Yeah, kind of like that.

Yeah, and some people say poke bag, but a lot of people just say poke.

And you see that fossilized in English in the expression pig in a poke.

Have you heard that one?

Buying a pig in a poke.

I never knew what that was either.

Yeah, exactly.

If you’re buying a pig in a poke, then you’re buying a pig in a sack,

And you’re not getting to inspect it beforehand.

So it’s a metaphor, of course.

It’s not really a pig in a bag.

Yeah, it’s an old scam, though.

An old scam was they’d sell you a cat or a dog in a bag instead of a pig.

And so the bag would be sealed.

And if you bought it without looking, then you were making a mistake.

Yeah, but that’s the same poke.

Strangely enough, that’s put 70 years worth of inquiry to rest, finally.

How about that?

Yeah, and you said that she was from Arkansas, which fits.

Northeast Arkansas, yeah.

Yeah, which fits with what we know about.

It was like Fayetteville, Rogers, whatever.

My father’s people and my mother’s people actually are from southeast Missouri.

So she probably speaks a lot like my family does.

Yeah, that would be like in Joplin?

No, southeast would be the Bootheel and so forth.

Bootheel of Missouri over there.

You know that area?

Yeah.

Well, we’re glad to help.

Now, I’ve listened to you guys for a number of years.

I think you guys do a great job, and you’ve filled me in on a bunch of stuff that I didn’t know that I’ve always said that if I live long enough, I’ll get the answers to everything.

Well, here’s to many more decades.

Yeah.

Thanks for calling, Tim.

Call us year after year.

Okay.

All right.

Take care.

All righty.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

Thanks to senior producer Stefanie Levine, director Colin Tedeschi, editor Tim Felten, and production assistant Tamar Wittenberg.

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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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.