Tribble Trouble (episode #1564)

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 Grant, the emails and phone calls are still pouring in. Every once in a while, we have a conversation on this show that prompts so much response. And I tell you, it’s like shoveling snow in a blizzard.

Oh, I think I know the call you’re referring to. This is the middle emotion call, right?

Yeah, I never expected it to produce so much response. But this was the call from John in Bismarck, North Dakota, and he was looking for a term that specifies the emotion that’s halfway between being deeply depressed and being euphoric. What is right there at that midpoint? And Grant, I don’t know why, but people responded to that like you wouldn’t believe.

So much thought and care was put into these responses. I know we both really appreciate that.

Indeed. And speaking of thought and care, here’s a wonderful one from Amy in Libreville, Gabon. She writes,

My first thought was placid, like a smooth lake without ripples. If you look at the ebb and flow of emotions, you see waves, riding the high waves of elation and crouching under the crushing waves of depression.

But then as Amy thought about it more in her email, she wasn’t totally sold on the word placid herself. And then she said, maybe the right word is still. She said, if you look at a lake with no ripples, it is still. If you’re without emotional ripple, you are still. Be still.

And I just, you know, I was reading that email and it just kind of caught me up short. Be still. And such a basic, simple word that can mean so much. S-T-I-L-L. Still. Halfway between deep depression and complete euphoria. That might be the one.

Although I might say that all the responses together combined, there might be an overlap between all these different words that are perfectly centered on the word still. It could be. I’m going to have to think about that response. That might be the perfect one.

But if you’ve got a response that you want to contribute, by all means send it along to words@waywordradio.org.

And we like to talk about words and language, slang and dialect, things the kids and the grandparents say, something that happened when you were arguing about language at work, a funny sign that you saw, something goofy on the internet, let us know on Twitter @wayword, or call us on the telephone, 877-929-9673, and tell us what you’re thinking.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Lori. I’m calling from North Georgia.

Hi, Lori. Welcome to the show.

Hey, Lori.

Thank you.

Hi. What’s up?

Now, this is a longstanding discussion. Is there a difference in the words unkempt and unkept?

Unkempt and unkept.

All right. So you said this was a longstanding question. Are you arguing with someone about this?

Yeah.

How long is it?

Well, not really arguing. Our whole family, we love words. We love books. And we’re always, you know, noticing different words and things. And years ago, I said something about a person, and I said, they look very unkempt. And my husband said, that’s not how you say it. It’s unkept. I said, no, it’s unkempt. And because I always thought that unkempt was how you keep a room. It’s how you describe a thing. And unkempt with the M in it is describing a person.

-huh. And what does someone who’s unkempt look like, Lori?

Oh, sort of like they’ve been, you know, sleeping in the bushes and their hair’s a mess and maybe they didn’t fix it this morning and they’re just very, very disheveled.

Aha. Aha. And Lori, you are absolutely right. In fact, it’s the word that I would use to describe someone who has a bad case of bedhead and just maybe looks like they got dressed in the dark or something.

But, I mean, it is true that unkept is a word. You might talk about an unkept promise. Or as you were saying, it is often used in terms of housekeeping, you know, an unkept house. But far and away, the word that you would use to describe somebody, especially who is disheveled, and I’ll get back to that in a second, would be the word unkempt. It actually comes from the past participle of a Middle English word, kemben, that means comb. So somebody who’s unkempt literally looks uncombed.

No way. That’s cool.

Yes. How cool is that? Yes, it’s etymologically related to the word comb. And the other thing that’s super cool, I love that we’re talking about the term disheveled, because people who know French might know that it has to do with the French word for hair, cheveux. And disheveled means to have disorderly hair or to have no hair at all. How cool is it in its most literal sense?

That’s a really neat connection there. And also, I didn’t know if you had no hair at all that you could even be disheveled. But that’s interesting.

Yeah, how about that?

So, I mean, you’re both right that each of those words is a word, but far and away the word that you’re going to use if somebody is just looking like a mess is going to be unkempt.

Well, that’s great that I get to be right. I love it.

Well, congratulations then.

All right. Well, thank you very much for answering this.

Sure. Thanks for calling.

Take care, Lori.

You’re welcome. Bye-bye.

I do see here that unkept has been used in places, unkempt as far back as the mid-1800s. As you said, Martha, you keep a house, so why can’t you have an unkept house? It just makes sense to a lot of people.

But, you know, there’s a phonological thing happening there, too. That consonant cluster in the middle, that MPT, sometimes makes unkempt sound like unkept because it’s just hard to say those three consonants together. So sometimes when you hear unkept, they meant to say unkempt. It just came out wrong.

True. Yeah. It’s a consonant collision there.

Yeah. 877-929-9673. Email words@waywordradio.org or chat us up on Twitter @wayword.

Hi there. You have A Way with Words.

Hello.

Hi. Who’s this?

This is Stephen Plunkard from Cavendish, Vermont.

Welcome, Stephen.

Hi, Stephen. Welcome to the show.

My question is about rhyming. I grew up in England in the 50s and 60s, and my grandfather was a Cockney, and I was just wondering if, you know, sort of what are the origins of rhyming, and is it just in the U.K., or is it spread to other places?

Can you give us a couple of examples of that, Stephen?

Sure. Well, here’s one example, and I’ll just read it as I would when I was a child. There I was on the dog and bone with me mate Charlie. When my trouble and strife took a tumble on the apples and pears, I couldn’t Adam and Eve it.

Oh, yeah. Okay, let’s see if we can break this down. There I was on the telephone with my mate Charlie when my wife took a tumble on the stairs and I couldn’t believe it. How’s that?

That’s correct.

Yeah, so rhyming slang is what you’re referring to. And you learned some of that from your grandfather.

Right, right.

Yeah, and those are classics, right? Apples and pears for stairs.

Yeah, apples and pears. That’s the one when you ask somebody to tell you some rhyming slang and they come from that tradition of slang. That’s one of the ones they pull out right away. It goes back to like the 1850s. It’s been around so long that it has this offshoot of other slang terms. For example, it can be shortened to apples on its own. It has created the term apple dancing, which means to steal from multi-story buildings. People have made other slang out of it. So fruit can just mean stairs, or you can just say oranges and lemons to mean apples and pears, which means stairs. So it’s just slang out of slang out of slang.

Trouble and strife for a wife is another classic, although I have heard people say joy as a short shortened for joy of my life. So there’s a positive one.

That’s nice. Dustbin lids for the kids, right?

Yeah.

And another famous one is Barney, short for Barney Rubble, which means trouble.

Right, right. I remember that one, yeah.

You know, I don’t know how it would fit in with today’s language standards. I mean, with, you know, being discriminatory and everything else. I mean, I don’t even want to go there in terms of how it would be perceived today.

But back in, you know, we would have entire conversations around the dinner table, and I would go away not wondering what we said.

It was just to keep up with my grandfather.

Yeah, mystery to the kids.

And that’s part of the role of the rhyming slang was to make it opaque to outsiders, to make it a little hard to understand.

And then when you realize the outsiders caught on, it was time to shift to something else, time to change it up again.

Some of the travelers language, the Irish travelers, they also have some rhyming slang of their own.

And they also used reversed Irish Gaelic, where they take the Irish Gaelic words and turn them around in order to disguise some of their talk so that they couldn’t be understood by outsiders.

Rhyming slang never really caught on all that much in North America.

And there have been pockets of it.

Always the criminal underclass.

It’s sometimes used as a novelty among people in the know, but it never really had that pervasiveness that it’s had in the UK and even in Australia and New Zealand.

Rhyming slang never really has been the thing here like it was elsewhere in the English-speaking world.

It’s been very informative.

Thank you for looking into this. It’s great.

Take care and be well. Bye-bye.

Okay, bye.

I don’t know, Martha, of another language that does rhyming slang like that.

French has a few little playful things that they do with rhyming city names with verbs that sound kind of similar to mean things like to die or to get money or to hide.

But it’s not really as deep and as broad as rhyming slang is.

It’s just pretty interesting.

A lot of languages do backslang.

French has this whole big thing of words turned around where one thing like femme means, meaning woman becomes mouf.

But rhyming slang is kind of its own thing in English.

English rhyming thing is its own thing.

Yeah, it’s very interesting.

You would think it would be in other languages, but not so much.

It’s more the reversing of syllables and things like that.

Yeah.

Those language traditions of your parents and grandparents are sometimes hard to let go of.

And we know they’re lingering there in your mind.

And you’ve got questions about the things that you kind of half remember.

Let’s uncover those together, 877-929-9673, or send a question about it to us in email words@waywordradio.org.

You all are still sending us those pangrams, those sentences that use every single letter of the alphabet, ideally in a very succinct way.

We got one from Laura Tucker in Colts Neck, New Jersey, who writes, I quickly mixed up a dozen jelly donuts for the Big Variety Show.

Oh, wow.

And that just sounds like an ordinary sentence.

Yeah, yeah.

So she gets extra points for that, for sure.

Yeah.

Sometimes they sound really contrived, but that just sounds like something plucked from a book or a biography or something.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well done, Laura.

That’s much better than the quick brown fox, right?

877-929-9673.

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

I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

And we’re joined by that dashing quiz master, John Chaneski.

Hey, John, how’s New York?

John, come back.

Hey, Grant.

Yes, I’m dashing all over the place.

I’ve got to stop myself and bring myself back to tell you that I have quite a quiz for you today.

Now, I’ve mentioned before that I consider cryptic crosswords, what the British call crosswords, to be the golden standard of word puzzles, and it’s going to be cryptic class again today.

Now, in each cryptic puzzle, each clue is a distinct puzzle in and of itself.

It contains both a definition of the answer and a description of it through wordplay.

Now, part of the puzzle is figuring out which part is the definition, which part is the wordplay, and also what specific type of wordplay is in use.

Today, we’re going to look at charade clues.

In a charade cryptic clue, the wordplay clues different parts of the word.

Now, here’s an example.

Scarlet single is overhauled.

This is a six-letter word.

Now, that would charade the word redone.

Scarlet is? Red.

Red.

Single is? One.

One.

So, scarlet single, red, one.

Put together is overhauled, redone.

All right?

Now, sometimes in a cryptic clue, the indefinite article A just stands for itself.

Here’s an example.

A barrier for first man.

Now, can you guess what that might charade?

First man.

A dam, Adam.

Right.

A is just A.

Barrier is dam.

A dam, you get first man, which is Adam.

Right.

Now, in the following clues, just remember two things.

I’ll always put the word play first to make it simple, and the article A will always stand for the letter A.

Here we go.

A boxing match is concerning.

About.

A, B, O.

Yes, about.

How did you get that, Grant?

A boxing match is about, B-O-U-T, and concerning.

Something is concerning something else.

It is about it.

Right.

So the A in the clue is A, and then boxing match is about.

Very good.

Here’s the next one.

A Catholic ritual to bring together.

A mass.

A mass, yeah.

How’d you get that?

So you amass wealth.

You bring your money together.

And mass is a religious ceremony in a Catholic church.

Right.

Proceeded with the article A.

Right.

How about this one?

A flower got out of bed.

A rose.

A rose, right.

A and rose, a rose.

You guys are doing very well.

Here’s the next one.

A Spanish chicken for Greek god.

Very good.

Apollo and a pollo.

Apollo, right.

Apollo, right.

A and pollo.

A and pollo.

Apollo, that’s awesome.

Nice.

You guys are doing great.

You know, I’m just going to switch it up a little.

A little.

Remember, the wordplay is first.

The definition follows, and A stands for A.

Here’s the next one.

Deep hole, a spot for falafel.

Well.

It could be well.

It could be pit.

Pita?

Pita?

Pita.

Perfect.

Pit A?

Pit plus A is pita.

Yes, very good.

Here’s the last one.

Matriarch, a New York City institution.

Like a museum, you mean?

One of them.

How about MoMA?

MoMA, yes.

How’d you get it?

Mom and A.

Mom and A.

MoMA, yes.

Very good.

You guys did very well in cryptic charades.

The A, the A class.

You guys get an A.

Congratulations.

Thank you.

I don’t think we’ve done this one on the show before.

No, those are great.

This is good, John.

Thank you very much.

Appreciate it.

Glad you liked it.

Hey, you know, Martha and I love to do puzzles on the show.

And you’ve got something you think that we can’t figure out and we can’t Google, send it along an email to words@waywordradio.org, or just try us with your questions about language and literature and books and writing and everything like that, slang and new words, on the phone, 877-929-9673.

Hi there. You have A Way with Words.

Hi. That’s Trevor from Austin.

Hey, Trevor. Welcome.

What’s up, Trevor?

So I wanted to tell you guys about an experience we had with our eight-year-old son that I found really interesting.

You know, like a lot of the kids these days, right?

He’s grown up with his iPad and does everything electronic, video games all the time, the usual kind of stuff.

But lately, during the pandemic, right, we’ve kind of coaxed the kids into doing more physical art, so drawing, painting, et cetera.

And he had mastered drawing a cat.

And he was doing all these variations on drawing cats.

And he brought it to me one evening.

And he said, hey, Dad, I want to show you this cat I drew.

And he started talking me through it.

And he said how he had misdrawn the tail.

And what he decided to do was delete the tail and redraw the tail.

And I thought, delete? Not erase?

And I didn’t say anything to him.

I just kind of let it go.

Right?

And my wife and I were talking about it later.

We thought, that’s really interesting.

You know, we always talk about how things get transposed from one medium to another.

And for my kids, when they remove something, even from a physical drawing, they delete it.

They don’t erase it.

So I thought that was really interesting.

That’s super interesting.

Right.

Yeah.

It’s a language change happening before your very eyes.

But Trevor, wouldn’t you say that erase and delete are pretty good synonyms?

Yeah, I think so.

Right.

We talked about it later.

We’re like, well, did you, my wife was like, did you correct him?

And I said, no, I didn’t correct him.

I think it’s probably proper usage in his mind, right?

And it didn’t seem wrong to us, right?

It’s funny that even all these years later, erase with a pencil eraser still has a connection to that original meaning of the word.

You know, the etymological root is about scratching or scraping, the idea of scraping something off of a sheepskin or a parchment or paper.

Trevor, I was just wondering if your son’s peers use it that way as well.

Have you heard that?

I haven’t.

I would assume they do, but I haven’t had a chance to overhear the conversation, you know.

During the pandemic, they’re quite private about when they’re talking to their friends.

Right.

Well, there is something that happens, Trevor, when a word, let’s just kind of play this out.

If delete took over for a race, there’s something called lexical borrowing between domains.

Domains are areas of speech special to a profession or a field, a technology or a behavior.

And so sometimes when we borrow, when we have lexical borrowing, sometimes the meaning narrows.

And sometimes it widens.

In this case, delete seems to be widening.

So it’s widening beyond the technical definition, the technology definition of delete to include the analog offline definition of a race.

And so sometimes when that lexical barring widens, it becomes a complete synonym for another word that already existed.

And sometimes one of them then becomes obsolete.

So that’s what could happen.

There’s a really good example in the history of English. In 1490, William Caxton, who was a publisher, tells a story that someone from the north of England tried to buy eggs from someone in the south of England.

But in the north, they used eggs, E-G-G-E-S, from Old Norse. And in the south, they used erin, E-Y-R-E-N, from Old English.

And these two people didn’t understand each other. They didn’t know that they were both talking about the same things.

They were both talking about eggs. Of course, we know now that the Old Norse word for eggs won out.

These two perfect synonyms competed for a while, and one won, and the other one disappeared.

And so maybe that’s what could happen with delete versus erase. Say, I don’t know, maybe our great-grandkids or our great-great-grandkids would find out.

Yeah, that’s really interesting. But in the meantime, I guess the question is, do you correct a kid for using the term delete when they’re trying to erase it?

I’m inclined to, well, what are you inclined to do, Trevor?

I wouldn’t correct it, right?

Mostly just because I’m fascinated by the language and I want to see, I’ve kind of pushed that usage a little bit and see what happens.

But, yeah, I don’t think I would correct it, right?

And I wonder if we’ll get to a spot still one day where the little eraser icon on the computer is called the deleter.

I kind of like that, even though it’s a weird word.

It’s just an automatically funny word, the deleter.

It’s like a superhero.

A funny action movie.

It’s like the action hero who never really quite does the job.

The deleter.

He splashes white out on everything.

Deleter.

You’ve been deleted.

I mean, I guess it’s an opportunity, too, to talk with him about the fact that there is more than one word for an action.

Oh, yeah, sure.

Well, eight years old, he’s still developing his vocabulary and his writing style and his language.

You know, it’ll be interesting to see when, say, he’s 18 or 20, does he still have this in his vocabulary?

And that’s something you can keep track of, Trevor.

Remember this conversation and find out when he’s 18 or 20 and see, does he use delete in that same way?

Yeah, awesome.

Right, so call us in 10 years.

Will do.

All right, take care, Trevor.

Thank you for the call and best of luck.

Thanks.

Be well.

Bye-bye.

I know our listeners have a lot of opinions about this.

Even this many decades into the technological revolution that is desktop computers and the Internet.

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

Hello. You have A Way with Words.

Hi. How are you?

I’m doing well. Who are you and where are you calling from?

Well, I’m Elsie and I’m calling from Fredericksburg, Texas.

Well, I was calling about the word gummy sack.

I know what a burlap bag is or a burlap sack, but I didn’t know what a gunny sack was.

Oh, what put this into your mind?

I was reading a book, and it said they used a gunny sack. And I thought, is that the same as a burlap bag?

Okay, yeah, good question.

Well, you know, it can be. How are they using the gunny sack in the book? What was happening? What was going on?

They were filling a bag. I presume a bag. Ordinary usage of a bag.

Oh, okay. Yeah, so a gunny sack often is basically the same thing as a burlap bag. It’s made from this coarse fabric, often made from hemp or jute. These are fibers made from natural materials.

And what’s interesting is, at least to me, is that gunny sack kind of means sack sack. Because the gunny part of the word goes back to a Sanskrit word that means sack. And then from Sanskrit, the original word entered all of these Indian languages where it often means sack or bag or it means the fabric that the sack is made out of.

And it sounds like things that are similar to gunny, like gunny, goony, goony, gon, gaon, things like that. And it’s from these languages, particularly Hindi, one of the most common languages spoken in India, that the word gunny, for the name of this fabric, entered English in the 1700s through British domination of that country and the subcontinent and through trade.

So a gunny sack would be a sack made out of gunny, made out of this fabric.

Okay, well that answers that question then. Now, since you’re from Texas, let me ask you, have you ever heard of a toe sack?

No, I’ve heard of a P-O-K-E sack or a poke.

Yeah, a poke is an old-fashioned word for a sack. A poke is just a pig in a poke. It means a pig in a bag or a pig in a sack.

Well, a toe sack is another name for these. Toe is another fabric like burlap that’s made out of jute or hemp.

Okay, well, that’s exactly why I listen to this program. I learn things.

Well, that’s why we like to do the show, because our listeners make us learn things.

I think you have all the answers. Thank you.

We’re glad to help, Elsie. Take care now.

Thank you. Bye.

Bye, Elsie.

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

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, I’m Polly from Martha’s Vineyard. Thanks for having me on today.

Hi, Polly. Welcome to the show.

Hey, Polly.

I work at my local library here on the Vineyard, and it’s been chilly lately. So the other day I wore a knit cap to work, like a beanie. And when I got to work, my wonderful co-worker, my friend Anne, said, I love your hat, but you need a tribble. It’ll be really cute on top. It keeps your head warmer, and plus they look really cute.

So I was like, what’s a tribble? And she said, you’ll see. I’ll bring you one.

So the next day I came into work, and on my desk I found this little fur ball. It looked like a faux fur ball or what I would call a pom-pom for my hat. So I attached it to my hat and she was right. It looked super cool. It made my head a little warmer.

And I went to thank her as any coworker would. And she said, I said, thanks so much for the pom-pom. I love it. And she said, no, it’s not a pom-pom. It’s a tribble. And I asked her why it was called that. And she said, everyone in the, you know, I’m surrounded by librarians and there’s a lot of knitting, sewing people. And she said, we just know them as tribbles. And to me, it’s a pom-pom.

And then we were kind of sitting in a group and talking about it. And everyone started to weigh in and Google. And I just said, hold on a minute. I’m going to call Martha and Grant at A Way with Words and let’s see what they say. So here I am.

So I’m pretty sure that your colleagues probably came up with the story of the word.

Tribble, which is that it’s an invented word that had to do with creatures in a Star Trek episode.

Is that what they came up with? Well, people did start saying that. One of the librarians did, and I’ve never watched Star Trek, so I wasn’t sure. And then a few others were like, oh, I don’t know, maybe that was a word before Star Trek or not.

No, apparently it was invented by the writer David Gerald, who came up with the term Tribble for these furry little creatures that don’t do a whole lot more besides coo and purr and reproduce. And if you’re going to watch a Star Trek episode, this one is really a classic because they’re brought onto the starship and they start reproducing. And it’s just really cute because they’re these cute little things.

I used to have pink bedroom slippers that looked a lot like Tribbles. You know, they’re just these fuzzy little creatures. And the episode was called The Trouble with Tribbles. And David Gerald later said that originally they were called fuzzies in his story, but he decided to come up with a different word. And he was just goofing around and came up with the word Tribble. And people picked that up.

That episode was from 1967. And people have picked that up because it’s a useful word. It sort of sounds like what it looks like, right? Yeah, absolutely.

And the word pom-pom, on the other hand, has been around since at least the 1500s. It goes all the way back to Middle French, possibly this term that means a tuft of ribbons. And it may come from the word pomp, as in ostentatious display. So it’s a little thing that you put on your hat to make it a little bit more ostentatious. I guess, a little bit more decorated. But that term has been around for a long time.

But the term Tribble comes from that Star Trek episode. It’s funny because when I said thank you for the pom-poms, she said, no, pom-poms are only made of yarn. And as a knitter and all these people who are very well-versed in that, she said, no, we only refer to pom-poms as yarn. So I think Tribbles seem like they’re a new, obviously, but have certainly caught on. And she said that’s just what everybody calls them in that world.

Yeah, and if you Google this and kind of do a Google search where you do minus Star Trek and minus some other things, you will find plenty of people in the crafting world and the knitting world who use tribbles to refer to this decoration, and they don’t even ever mention Star Trek. They just only know this particular fur item as a tribble. That’s the way that they use it. So it’s actually taken on the second meaning.

Yeah, it’s nice to see lexical change happening before our very eyes. Thanks for all your hard work, guys. Seriously, it means so much to us. Say hi to everybody. Take care, guys. Okay, bye. Bye-bye.

Well, lexical change is around us, and something happened at your work that made you go, what? Where does that come from? Well, we’re the people who can tell you. 877-929-9673. Email words@waywordradio.org or talk to us on Twitter @wayword. More about what we say and why we say it. Stick around for more.

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 I’ve never thought of myself as an earth-born dirt cider, but I suppose I am.

I didn’t ever call you that. That sounds rude. No. These terms are new to me. Earth-born, meaning somebody born on planet Earth, which makes sense. And dirt cider is a person who lives on a planet in contrast to a person who lives or frequently travels in space.

Earthborn and dirtsider are terms that I just learned from the wonderful new Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction. It’s a new comprehensive quotation-based dictionary of the language of science fiction. And it’s online, it’s free of charge, and it is an absolutely extraordinary resource for language lovers of all kinds. If you’re a science fiction fan, this is a treasure trove for you. It’s at sfdictionary.com.

And as you know, Grant, it’s the work of lexicographer Jesse Scheidlauer, who is a former editor-at-large at the Oxford English Dictionary. And this project grew out of something called the Science Fiction Citations Project, which was this crowdsourced effort initiated in 2001 by the OED when he was managing that project. And that led in 2007 to a print historical dictionary called Brave New Words. And in early 2020, Scheidlauer, who has since left the OED, got permission to continue the project independently and I’ve lost a good hour to it already and I look forward to losing many more.

Yeah, I’ve checked it out as well, browsed the pages and I love it. It just reminds me of books I’ve enjoyed and authors who have impressed me and it just reminds me of books that I met to read and never got around to and I might have to find, you know, at the library or the used bookstore, just some wonderful stuff in there. Just kind of brilliant footprints of the great writing that has led to some of the movies and TV shows that we’re enjoying to this very day.

Shows like The Expanse have these marks on them left by great writers, and you can see the language in this dictionary that’s showing up in bits and pieces in these new works. So it’s just, I don’t know, it’s feeding into culture even today, stuff from the 50s and 60s and even earlier.

Well, yeah. Speaking of which, I mean, think about Operation Warp Speed. That’s a term that originated in science fiction back in 1952, which you can learn if you go to this website, sfdictionary.com.

Well, thank you, Martha. That’s a wonderful resource. I’ll add that immediately to my list of dictionaries like I need another one. 877-929-9673. Email words@waywordradio.org or everyone talk to us on Twitter @wayword.

Hello. You have A Way with Words. Hi, this is Bud from Council Bluffs, Iowa.

Hey, Bud. Welcome to the show. Here’s the deal. I was fishing. This has been the last spring, last summer. I was fishing at a local pond, and there was a guy I knew that was there. I was surprised to see him. I hadn’t seen him before, but I knew him. Not a friend, but an acquaintance.

And we struck up a conversation, and the fish weren’t biting very well. And we commented about that, and he said, we must be holding our mouth wrong. He said, that’s what my dad used to say. And I said, well, I’ve heard that before, too. You know, we’re not catching fish because the fisherman is holding his mouth wrong. And so I told him, I said, hey, I’ve listened to NPR, A Way with Words, and I’ll bet they could maybe tell us where that originated from. That’s my question.

So why do fishermen say to each other, are you holding your mouth wrong? Yeah, when you’re not catching fish, the reason must be that you’re holding your mouth wrong. Have you ever heard that?

Yeah, we sure have. Absolutely. Yeah, lots of different versions of it, too. Like, oh, son, it’s all in how you hold your mouth. I mean, it’s true, right, that if you’re the picture of concentration, you’re probably twisting your mouth or holding it in a certain way. Biting your lip, right, in that certain way, like crunched up in a way.

I mean, I like to juggle. I do some juggling, and any time I look at video of myself, my mouth is wide open when I’m doing it. I look like a fish. Holding your mouth in the juggling way.

Yeah, I look like a fish about to bite something. Michael Jordan, you know, the basketball player, known for sticking his tongue out when he’s concentrating. He said that that was something that his grandfather did. So it’s basically this useless act that supposedly is going to help you accomplish what you’re trying to do.

But it’s about these situations where you’re not 100% sure why sometimes what you’re doing works and sometimes it doesn’t. Like, why is it easy to get through international customs really fast one time, but not another time? Or why did the car start for your spouse, but not for you? Or why did this recipe work for one batch of cookies, but not for the next batch? Must have been holding the mouth wrong.

Yeah. Why did your friend catch, you know, two great big bass sitting next to you and you didn’t?

Catch anything and you’re using the same bait and you’re in the same boat, you know, because you’re not holding your mouth right.

The earliest use I can find is from baseball, by the way. Mooney, this is 1890, mind you. Mooney knocked an easy one to the second baseman, but the man on first did not hold his mouth right and muffed the thrown ball so that everybody kept on running.

Okay, so this goes back a ways. But I’ll tell you, bud, there’s one from 1894 that I really like where it’s about fishing. So they’ve been using it for fishing since at least the 1890s. And this one, this guy adds another spin on it. He says, you don’t hold your mouth right, me boy. Keep your other eyes shut and they won’t recognize you. So he gets this other spin on it. Hold your other eyes shut and the fish won’t recognize you is what you got to do to get some.

Well, I’m anxious to tell my fishing acquaintance about that. Yeah. So that’s as far back as we know, and that’s what we know. But fishing definitely has some claim on it. But boy, it sure has spread into all other sorts of things. It’s just kind of an easy way to explain life’s mysteries about why there’s a little bit of chaos in the things that we do, why things sometimes just don’t go well, even though we’ve done everything right.

Well, yeah, that’s a good way to put it. That happens. That happens. All right, Bud, it’s been a delight. Thank you. Thank you very much for that. All right. Take care.

877-929-9673. Or you can talk to us on Twitter @wayword. Grant, you’ll recall that conversation we had with Scotty from Dallas, who was talking about the fact that in her family, if somebody suddenly changed the subject in a conversation, they would say Jack Roses, and nobody could figure out why, and we couldn’t either.

Yeah, yeah. We never did figure it out why. We had some theories, but they didn’t quite land. Yeah, yeah. But it turns out that different people use different expressions. At that point in a conversation, we heard from Christy Golden in Abilene, Texas, who said, in my family, when the subject changes midstream, I say, you didn’t put your blinker on. Or blinker, please.

Oh, and blinker is one of those lovely terms that not everyone uses for turn signal. Lots of people have other terms for it. Oh, that’s true. I didn’t even think about that. Yeah, blinker. I grew up saying blinker, and people looked at me weird for a while when I said it at college.

Is that right? Yeah, blinker. Yeah, I think I called it a blinker and then thought it was weird that people said taillight. Taillight or indicator or turn signal. There’s others. Yeah. Yeah, remember those old Mustangs where they had three different lights, and they would sort of go, did it it, did it, did it?

Oh, yeah, lots of new cars do that. Left to right, right to left. Yeah. Yeah, we call those did-it-it cars. Wow, that’s a path we’ve gone down. Well, we know that in your family, they say something else to change the conversation, or they have another word for the turn signal. Call us with that and more. What’s the weird thing they say at home?

877-929-9673. Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hi, this is Wayne from Wayland, Massachusetts. Hi, Wayne. Welcome. What can we do for you, Wayne?

I used to work on a construction job with a gentleman from Cuba, and he always had a saying that he would never explain to me. And the saying was, one hand washes the other, and both hands wash the face. I’m familiar with the first half, but I had never heard the wash the face part. He wouldn’t explain it, but I think I know what he meant.

What was happening on the construction site when he would say this? He was just generally just showing up. He wasn’t always on the site, and he would show up and use this saying. Would he just say it out of the blue, or was there a particular kind of situation that would prompt him to say it? No, it would kind of come out of the blue. But he would first say it in Spanish, and then he would translate it.

So what did you take it to mean? You said you knew the first part. The last part was a surprise, but you thought you had an idea of what that last part meant. What do you think he meant? Well, the one hand washes the other. I always thought of you help me, I help you kind of thing. So what I think he was saying was, I’ll help you, you help me, but we’re working for the boss, would be the thing.

Oh, yeah, that’s not a bad interpretation. So I didn’t know if it was just like a saying from Cuba or if it’s more common than that. It’s bigger than that. Your interpretation is pretty good. That last part varies. The one hand washes the other goes back to ancient Greece, actually to about 500 BC, believe it or not. In the writings of Epicarmus who put it in there, one hand washes the other and the finger helps finger.

Basically, the whole idea is you can’t help yourself. You need me to help you. But together, we can do things that we can’t do alone. And so I think your interpretation of together we work for the boss is a pretty good one. It’s certainly on a work site. And interestingly, over the millennia, this phrase has kind of gone in two different directions depending on the time and the place and the culture.

On one hand, it’s about neighborliness and friendliness. One hand washes the other might be, you know, mutual aid. It’s about today you, tomorrow me. It’s about our interdependence. But on the other hand, it can be about graft and corruption. And it can be kind of threatening. I pay you a little bit of money. You give me what I want. I pay you under the table. You do this thing for me that you’re not supposed to do. It’s you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. Or one good turn deserves another, which is kind of nearly always ironic. You know, the good turn is never really good, right? And one good turn deserves another.

Right. So from the Greeks to the Romans and Latin, it was manus manum lavat, which is the same thing. There’s a funny little bit, well, funny for the Romans. I don’t think they were that laugh out loud funny. But there’s a story by Petronius in his satiricon where somebody’s complaining about a very poor gladiator performance. And the gladiator says something like, well, at least I gave you a show. And someone replies, and I applauded, which is more than you did for me. One hand washes the other.

So it’s just kind of this whole idea like you do something half-hearted and I do something half-hearted back, you know. That’s, you know, you get exactly what you deserve when you do something poor. I do something poor in return. You do something great. I do something great in return. I do appreciate that insight about your boss. I’m picturing literally, you know, the face being above the hands. Yeah. That could be applied otherwise.

Mm— Well, that’s what we know. Yeah, so it’s not just Cuba and it’s not just that one man. Throughout European languages and cultures and probably the rest of the world. All right. I had no idea how far that went back. Way back. Yeah. Wayne, thank you so much for calling. We appreciate it. Thank you for answering it. All right. Take care. Take care. Bye. Bye-bye.

877-929-9673. Hi there. You have A Way with Words. Hi, this is Haley Johnson. I’m calling from Suitland, Maryland. Hi, Haley. Welcome. Thanks. I’m excited. Great. We are, too. What can we do for you?

So my mom is obsessed with coming up with new words by mashing two words together. So, for example, because of the pandemic, she’s trying to, like, hide her sneezes if she sneezes in public. And she called hiding a sneeze being incogsneedo. And she calls these new words sniglets. And so around Christmas, I was hoping to find a book for her full of sniglets for her. And I found out that sniglets really means more of like coming up with a new word entirely for something that doesn’t already have a word, but not necessarily by mashing two existing words together.

So I told her, I don’t think she’s making up sniglets like she thinks she is.

And I was just wondering maybe if that is what it would be called or what a sniglet really is.

Oh, yeah, this is a great question.

I guess your mom is probably more our generation.

She probably remembers Rich Hall and his Sniglet books.

Do you know about those?

No, she hasn’t said anything about them.

Well, there was a show called Not Necessarily the News on HBO,

And one of its stars was comedian Rich Hall,

And one of his segments was this bit where he would come up with these words

And these goofy definitions,

And they were all weird words, and the definitions were things that, like, didn’t really need a word, but they were kind of common experience, stuff that we all knew about and had all gone through.

Some of them were mashed-up words, as you put it, and some of them were not.

So your mom’s words could qualify as a snicklet.

The more linguistic term for those, by the way, those mashed-up words are blends or portmanteau words.

And sniglets almost has caught on as a generic word for any word made up to match a quirky or funny definition.

But, you know, I guess this is the evidence that it’s fallen out of use with the younger generations since your mom knows it and you kind of don’t.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, she’ll be really glad to hear that because when I said I don’t think they’re called sniglets, she just was not hearing that and said, no, they definitely are.

I think it’s funny, too, that you said that they’re not necessarily words that you need, but they’re common experiences.

Because I told her it’s funny.

She comes up with all these Sniglets, but we literally never use them.

So she never, like, repeats them besides when she comes.

Yeah, she just comes up with them, but then they never get said again unless she’s, you know, remembering it.

Well, Haley, I don’t know.

I really like Incog Sneeto.

I think that’s something we do need a word for because when I’m in public, if I have to sneeze, I try to be discreet about it at least, you know.

Yeah, you don’t want the look these days that somebody might think you’re sick.

Right, you don’t want the look.

So I think incognito is a good one.

I think my favorite is the term for, you know, you buy a picture frame, like a cheap picture frame, and there’s a photograph of happy people in the picture frame.

And somebody called those laminites.

I just think that’s hysterical.

One of Rich Hall’s sniglets that I like is aqua dextrous.

This is the ability to turn off the bathtub faucet with your toes or your feet.

Aqua dextrous.

That’s pretty good, but you don’t really need it, right?

No, but I do like that.

I do that.

So, yeah, that’s funny.

And Haley, your mom is coming up with these all the time? She comes up with one like every day. I mean, it’s what it feels like. She texts me with another one. And we just at this point are just like, thumbs up. Great job. There’s another one. But she sees them in everything. So it’s funny. It’s fun. Cool.

Haley, thanks for sharing. Thank you. Thank you for taking the call. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

If you’re having trouble getting going on a writing project, here’s some great writing advice from author Jodi Picoult. She says, you can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page. Oh, that’s true about everything. But yeah, I think you and I have talked about this, that we both feel like we can go with great confidence with knives and axes towards our own writing more than we can go toward a blank page. Like you and I are very comfortable hacking away at stuff that we’ve previously written, whereas writing on a blank page is much more difficult.

Exactly. I think that’s just the kick in the tuchus that you need sometimes. Yeah, that’s true. You can’t edit a blank page. You can fold it. You can crumple it. You can ignore it.

877-929-9673.

Thanks to senior producer Stefanie Levine, editor Tim Felten, and production assistant Rachel Elizabeth Weisler. You can send us messages, subscribe to the podcast and newsletter, and 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, or email us words@waywordradio.org.

A Way with Words is an independent production of Wayword, Inc., a nonprofit supported by listeners and organizations who are changing the way the world talks about language. Many thanks to Wayword board member and our friend Bruce Rogow for his help and expertise.

Thanks for listening. I’m Grant Barrett. And I’m Martha Barnette. Until next time, goodbye. Bye-bye.