Tweet, Tweet! Polly Wanna Cracker!

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You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

It’s not every day that you get to see a new body of language appear practically before your eyes, but that’s what’s going on with the Twitter community.

Are you familiar with Twitter, Martha?

Oh, sure, but let’s explain it for everybody else.

Twitter is a kind of micro-blogging service, I guess is the way to describe it.

You post a short message of about 140 characters or less, and then the Twitter service sends it out to anyone who wants to follow what you’re doing.

And it can also send it to you by SMS or text message on your phone.

So if I post, I am eating a cheese sandwich, then all of my friends will know Grant is eating a cheese sandwich.

It’s pretty simple. It’s pretty straightforward.

It’s just really, what are you thinking? What are you doing?

It’s a way to keep up with people without all the elaborate paraphernalia required for, say, even email or chat because you can do it on your phone.

And it’s a way for one person to tell a lot of people what they’re doing.

Imagine you had to send those text messages to all your friends one at a time.

It’s efficient.

But what’s really interesting to me, obviously there’s a language angle here, right?

Of course.

Is that with the millions of users that are on the Twitter service, a new jargon is being created.

And so you don’t send a message when you use Twitter.

You send a tweet, which I like.

I like that, yeah.

You tweet other people.

And, of course, a Twitter user is a tweeter, T-W-E-E-T-E-R, tweeter.

And if you flirt using Twitter, which I must say does happen, although I never respond because I’m married, flirting on Twitter is called twerting, or at least so they say.

But it’s just really interesting to see this language that had to spring up among all the users in order for them to use this service efficiently, right?

If it’s all about efficiency, you have to have a language of efficiency as well.

Well, and Grant, what I find interesting about it, too, is that it does demand a certain writerliness.

I mean, I look at my Facebook updates from various people, and there are some people who have mastered that 140-character medium much more artfully than other people.

You hear their voice in that really small space.

It’s fantastic because one of the problems I have with blogging is that, theoretically, there’s infinite space on a blog, and people aren’t constrained in any way to be concise or come to the point.

And so the difference between being able to post, say, millions or even just thousands of words on a blog and 140 characters on something like text messaging or Twitter, that’s immense.

It requires creativity, efficiency.

It requires a conciseness, an understanding of what you’re saying instead of just letting it roll off your keyboard and not bothering to edit.

I find myself spending more time on Twitter sometimes than I ought to because I just want to get it right.

Yeah, I know what you mean.

It’s like haiku or maybe high-tech-ku.

High-tech-ku.

Not a bad, not bad.

You can’t waste a word.

Well, the good news is that A Way with Words is now on Twitter.

You can follow us at twitter.com slash Wayword, W-A-Y-W-O-R-D.

If you want to talk with us about words and how we use them, you can also do that by calling 1-877-929-9673.

That’s 1-877-WAYWORD.

Or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Or in 140 characters or less, send us a tweet to Wayword at Twitter.

Isn’t that tweet?

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Lee from Philadelphia.

Hello, Lee.

Hi, Lee.

Hi.

What are you calling about?

Well, my wife and I have this big green Amazon parrot that during the summertime we’ll take with us in its cage to go sit outside and have a cup of coffee with us.

Wait, your parrot drinks coffee?

Well, no, but we do.

He sits on the table and speaks to passersby in both English and maybe Portuguese.

His first owners were Brazilian.

Oh, do the thing.

He speaks something that may sound like Portuguese to us, but, you know, I don’t speak Portuguese.

And he loves the attention, and people come up, and they, you know, wave at him and so on and so forth.

But nearly everybody who comes up to see him says, Paulie, want a cracker?

And his name’s not Paulie.

His name’s Alexander Hamilton.

We named him after the founder of the Federal Reserve System.

Because he’s green or what?

Well, no, because my wife has this thing for Alexander Hamilton.

She thinks he’s one of the most important founding fathers and doesn’t get the credit he deserves.

And so a parent is an appropriate tribute.

That’s right.

And usually, like, if we know someone well enough to come to our house, they know enough not to say,

Paul, you want a cracker?

What do you do when they say that for the first time?

Do you correct them?

Do you punch them?

What?

It isn’t really correcting them.

I mean, he probably does want a cracker.

He probably wants lots of other stuff, too.

But we say, you know, his name’s not Pauly.

It’s Alex or Alexander Hamilton, if we’re going formal.

And, you know, and then we start talking, and there’s stories back and forth.

But it’s amazing.

Everybody says Pauly want a cracker.

This has been going on for a very long time.

Let’s talk about Pauly for a second.

Pauly is a kind of newer form of Paul, P-O-L-L, which was a nickname for parrots as far back as the 1600s.

So we’re talking 400 years of parrots being typically called Paul,

And a little later, Pauly, which comes from the name for a woman, Pauly.

-huh.

But the part that is interesting is, what is the deal with the one at Cracker?

I’m with you on this.

It is incredibly annoying because people will do it 99 times out of 100.

The first use that I can find is a cartoon published in a humorous publication called The John Donkey.

John Donkey.

John Donkey.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And it’s a cartoon.

Shows a boy about to hit a parrot with a stick.

And the caption underneath is,

Polly want a cracker?

And my impression is that clearly the boy was sick of people saying,

Polly want a cracker also.

No, I don’t know.

Or it could be cracking the parrot on the head.

Yeah, exactly.

I think that’s the joke.

I think the joke is very broad and not subtle at all,

And it’s about making a joke that he’s going to crack the parrot.

So my guess is that even by 1848, this was a pat-set phrase in English.

And, you know, that’s in New York.

That’s a New York publication.

But wouldn’t you think that the joke would be about actually giving the bird a cracker

And that crackers were hard biscuits that sailors took to sea with them?

Well, yeah, but there’s a pun there to be had on a cracker being a crack with a stick,

You know, cracking him over the head with a stick.

That’s the pun.

Yeah, I guess we should explain what a cracker is as well.

It’s basically what we eat today only in a more crude, rude form, right?

Not your saltine, something a little thicker and more like unleavened dough, right?

Mm—

In any case, but a year later in December 1849, there’s something really interesting.

There’s an article that appears in a fake newspaper that is published in The Knickerbocker,

Which is a magazine from New York, New York City.

And this fake newspaper is called The Buncombe Flagstaff and Independent Echo.

And the whole thing is all satirical articles in this fake dialect with intentional misspellings and just kind of like low and colloquial speech that’s meant to be humorous.

And in there, again, this is 1849, is a fake classified ad.

And it says, for sale, a Paul parrot.

So it’s Polly without the Y, P-O-L-L, parrot, cheap.

He says a remarkable variety of words and phrases, cries, fire, fire, and you rascal.

And Polly won a cracker and would not be parted with,

But having been brought up with a sea captain,

He is profane and swears too much for the subscriber.

The subscriber meaning the person who put the ad in the paper.

So by this point, I think the joke was around enough.

That people would get the idea that this is the thing that parrots say.

Everyone knows by 1848, 1849 that parrots say Polly won a cracker.

So that’s as far back as I can trace it.

150 years, that’s a really long time for something like this to be going on, don’t you think?

It is. So somewhere it actually became sort of standard by then.

Yeah. Polly always does want a cracker, though, doesn’t he?

Well, Alex will always eat a cracker and just about anything else that you give him, as long as it’s not meat.

How old is Alex?

He’s five.

So he’s got a long road ahead of him then, right?

Well, he’ll live to be in his 60s.

Really?

Yeah.

In his 60s?

Parrots of this type can easily live 60, maybe 70 years.

Well, Lee, this has been a lot of fun.

Thank you so much for your call, Lee.

Thanks.

All right. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

We’d love to help you unravel some mysteries or even something more conventional about how to write something for your everyday work.

Give us a call, 1-877-929-9673, or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello. You have A Way with Words.

Hello. This is Melanie Hayward from Madison, Wisconsin.

Well, hello, Melanie. How are you doing?

I’m doing all right today. How are you?

Super. What do you got on your mind?

I’m wondering, is there ever an instance in which it is appropriate to end a sentence with a preposition?

And in particular, I’m wondering about emails, because sometimes I find that if you put the preposition where I think it’s supposed to be, it sounds a little pretentious or maybe just kind of choppy.

And then also sometimes when verbs carry the preposition with them, like involved in, if you should split those up.

Melanie, I’m going to sound like Barack Obama here, but yes, you can.

You absolutely can end a sentence with a preposition.

Let’s end this prohibition once and for all.

Absolutely.

And Grant, I know you agree with me.

I do indeed.

It is almost 100% perfectly fine to end a sentence with a preposition.

What’s the deal with the rumor that you can’t?

Do you want the nice answer or the mean one?

I kind of like the mean answer, but I’ll take both.

Well, I’ll give you a compromise answer. This rule has been spread by the uninformed, and it’s held onto by people who haven’t updated their grammar education since the fifth grade.

Yeah, this is a rule that started to come about 300 years ago or so, back when these grammarians were trying to standardize the English language because it was still a little unruly at that time.

And so what they did for a lot of their rules was they looked to Latin, the much older language, the much more established language with a lot more established rules.

And one of the things that they noticed about Latin was that in Latin, a preposition is always followed by its object.

I mean, think about the words from Latin that we have in English, ad infinitum, post mortem, cum laude.

You don’t see those prepositions at the end of a sentence, but that’s Latin.

And English works a little differently.

The same thing happened, Melanie, with split infinitives.

You know how people say, don’t split an infinitive, don’t say to boldly go where no man has gone before?

The reason is because in Latin, the infinitives are just a single word.

That’s interesting.

Yeah.

You know, I was a Spanish and a French major in college, so that kind of made this be a little more concrete with me because in French and Spanish, that’s the case too.

Aha, you’re exactly right.

And so, of course, you can’t split an infinitive in Spanish or in Latin because it’s one word.

But you can’t really apply that to English because then you get people saying faithfully to execute the office of president of the United States.

Then you get a rather embarrassing moment in front of the world, don’t you?

Right, for the chief justice of the Supreme Court.

And so these are a couple of these so-called rules that have been handed down to us.

But they were created by these blue-nosed grammarians who were trying to apply the rules of Latin to English.

Well, they falsely believed that Latin was a perfect language, didn’t they?

Right, and it’s not.

No, it’s just a different language.

And English works differently.

So, yes, absolutely.

You know, Winston Churchill is one of many people who have described that rule as nonsense up with which I will not put.

All right.

Well, that’s really good to hear.

So to reiterate, you can end sentences with a preposition.

It’s possible.

It’s legal.

It’s allowed in English.

The only people who prevent it are people who don’t know better, and they need to throw that rule right out the window.

Well, I will spread the word.

All right.

Thank you for your call, Melanie.

Okay.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Well, if you’ve begun to wonder if something you long held to be true in English isn’t, give us a call.

1-877-929-9673.

That’s 1-877-W-A-Y-W-O-R-D.

Or email us at words@waywordradio.org.

Stay tuned for a word puzzle that’s next on A Way with Words.

You’re listening to A Way with Words.

I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

And we’re joined once again by our puzzle man, Greg Pliska.

Hello, Grant.

Hello, Martha.

Hi, Greg.

Hello, puzzle man.

I’ve got puzzles cooking for you.

I’m going to hold your feet to the fire and make you sweat.

Well, what kind of puzzle do you have today?

Well, I call this one crown playtime.

Crown playtime.

Crown playtime.

Can you figure out why?

I need to know all the crown heads of Europe over the last 250 years.

Yes, exactly.

Isn’t that great?

Not again.

There’s one word that can be added to each of those three to make a new word or a new phrase.

So it’s, what is it, crown what?

Crown playtime.

Crown playtime.

How about triple crown play?

Triple, you know what I’m trying to say.

Triple crown, triple play, and triple time.

Absolutely.

Okay.

Absolutely.

Because this puzzle is all about triples.

Sometimes you’ll add the word before, sometimes after.

Does that make sense?

Yes.

Yes, sir.

All right, then.

Here we go.

Here are your first three words.

Blue, six, throat.

Deep.

Yes.

Without even inhaling.

Wow.

Boom.

Deep blue, deep six, and deep throat.

Awesome.

Absolutely.

All right, here’s another one.

Bending game reader.

Bending game reader.

I was going to say weekly bending, but that’s not it.

Mind.

Mind bending, mind game, and mind reader.

Nice.

Very good.

Here’s another one.

Bullet gravy toilet.

Bullet gravy toilet.

What a terrible experience they had in that restaurant.

I’m not speeding gravy.

Well, I was thinking of gravy as good gravy or…

Toilet boat?

Good toilet?

Yeah, bullet boat, gravy boat, toilet boat.

Train.

Yes, very good.

Bullet train, gravy train, and toilet train.

All right, here’s one.

Actor, flaw, witness.

Character.

Yes.

Nice.

Very quick.

Character, actor, character flaw, and character witness.

Yes.

Very good.

All right.

Here’s one.

Office, spring, turtle.

Office?

Box.

Oh, nice.

Very good.

Box office, box spring, and the famous box turtle.

Oh, and spring box.

And spring box.

Very nice, very nice.

Ooh, clever.

Extra points if you get them both ways.

Extra points if it goes on both sides of the word.

And it’s spelled differently.

Right.

How about C, S-E-A, center, and weight, W-E-I-G-H-T?

And center, C-E-N-T-E-R.

Dead.

Very good, yes.

Dead C, dead center, dead weight.

Dead weight.

Very nice.

Yes.

And another one of my favorites, guest Lincoln master.

Bedroom.

Bedroom.

The Lincoln was kind of the giveaway.

Yeah, just kind of peg it for you.

Well, I have a bonus for you.

Oh, there’s four in this one.

No.

Here’s how the bonus works.

All of the answer words in the sets we did today can be combined with one other word to make a new word or phrase.

What?

So they form a big set.

Let me read them to you.

These are the answers.

These are the answers of the puzzles we’ve done today.

All right.

Let me read all of them, and then you can guess.

And they all will combine with one other.

They will all combine with one other word.

Here you go.

Deep.

Mind.

Train.

Character.

Box.

Dead.

And bedroom.

Deep mind, train, character, box, dead, and bedroom.

What’s the one word that can be added to them to make new words and phrases?

Set.

Absolutely.

S-E-T.

S-E-T, set.

So bedroom set, dead set, deep set.

I can’t read that one.

Train set, character set, box set, and…

Mind set.

Grant, that’s so impressive.

Did you say that because it has the most entries in the dictionary?

Well, no.

Well, that actually is not a bad path to take.

That’s why I picked it.

That’s not a bad one.

Actually, I was, you know.

Bedroom was the odd one out here because bedroom is not going to be in a lot of combining forms.

Oh, right, right, right.

So I worked on bedroom first.

I worked on bedroom first.

Very smart.

Very smart.

And there are actually seven or eight more I had available for us to play with.

I mean, there’s quite a few things that can be paired with set to make a…

Oh, I bet.

Yeah, I bet.

Greg, thanks.

You’re welcome.

Thanks for having me.

Thank you, Greg.

This was tremendous.

Well, if you have a question about wordplay, language, grammar, slang, regional expressions, or some strange old sayings, call us.

The number’s 1-877-929-9673.

That’s 1-877-W-A-Y-W-O-R-D.

Or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello.

Hi, who’s this?

This is Julie calling from Fort Worth, Texas.

Well, hello, Julie. What’s on your mind?

Well, I’ve always been taught that there’s no such word as towards with an S on the end,

But I see it that way all the time, so I’m confused as to which is correct.

Is it toward or toward?

So T-O-W-A-R-D-S, you’ve been told by whom that it’s incorrect?

By my English teacher in high school that it’s not a real word.

Toward with the S is not a real word?

That’s what I was told in high school.

Okay, and how do you feel about that?

Well, it’s kind of become a pet peeve of mine when I see it with an S, and then I see it everywhere.

So now I’m starting to think that maybe he was wrong.

Julie, I have some advice for you.

Don’t move to England, whatever you do.

Okay.

Okay.

Because that’s one of the differences between British English and American English.

Over there, you will see towards much more often than you’ll see toward.

But in this country, the prevalent usage is toward without the S.

There’s no harm in just sticking toward, and there’s no harm in following the rule,

But I would say that if you’re getting peeved off every time you see somebody using an S,

Just remember that there are tens or hundreds of millions of English speakers who do use the S.

Well, I haven’t berated anyone or anything.

It’s just been an internal irking.

You didn’t break any windows or key any cars or anything like that?

No, no.

It was violent.

Yeah.

That’s great.

Yeah, well, I would just say simplify your life.

This is a grammar tip for tough economic times.

Just simplify.

Just use toward.

Leave off the last S for savings, yes.

Okay.

Thank you very much.

Thank you for calling, Julie.

Bye-bye.

Well, if you want to be pointed toward the correct answer, or an interesting answer anyway,

Give us a call.

The number is 1-877-929-9673.

Or you can email us.

The address is words@waywordradio.org.

Hey, Grant, I have another old-time riddle for you.

Oh, please.

All right.

Here it is.

What goes around the world but stays in a corner?

The equator.

The equator stays in a corner?

I have no idea.

I don’t know.

What goes around the world but stays in a corner?

I don’t know what.

I love this one.

A stamp.

A stamp.

That’s very nice.

Yeah, yeah.

I kind of had to think back in the memory banks the last time I used a stamp to send something by postal mail.

That’s nice.

Do you have another one?

Yes, I do.

I can run but not walk.

Wherever I go, thought follows close behind.

What am I?

My mouth.

Close your nose.

My nose.

Your mouth can run, yeah.

I was thinking of running in my mouth and being ahead of my brain.

Happens all the time.

That’s great.

If you’ve got a riddle you’d like to share with us, give us a call, 1-877-929-9673,

Or send it in email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Zach McCarley.

I’m calling from China Lake, California right now.

Zach in China Lake?

Yes.

Okay.

What’s up, Zach?

I’m an F-18 pilot, an instructor at Miramar.

And we were having a conversation in the radio room the other day about the word deconflict.

And what we do, we put it on flight schedules or talk about each other.

If we’re going to share an airspace or a piece of sky,

We have to deconflict that airspace to make sure that we don’t have conflicts,

So we don’t hit each other.

And I was using the word in the right room the other day,

And somebody pointed out that it was not a word.

And so I thought that was kind of strange.

I argued with them until we looked it up, and they were right.

It’s not a word.

I’m not sure if any other word works for it or will.

Do without it being a word. Well, let’s talk about a couple things here. So the word is

Deconflict. Will you spell that, please? Right. It’s D-D-E, then the word conflict,

The C-O-N-F-L-I-C-T. And you use that mean to remove yourself or your equipment from a kind of

Possible conflict situation, right? Right, right. So like two airplanes,

We could deconflict the altitude, like pick different altitudes to fly or different,

You know, laterally say, hey, I’ll be north of this point and you’ll be south of that point.

Some way they remove the conflict of the possibility of collision.

Where did you look this word up?

I looked it up in a couple dictionaries, one of the Websters and then on dictionary.com online,

And they had nothing for it.

Here’s the thing, the bottom line.

Deconflict is a perfectly fine word.

It is a word, absolutely, 100% sure.

There’s no doubt in my mind whatsoever it’s a word.

Paul McFedry’s at WordSpy has an entry for it.

He traces it back to about 20 years or so.

It’s probably older than that.

He does spell it D-E hyphen conflict, but either spelling will work, and they both are used in exactly the same way.

And here’s the why.

Here’s how we know that it’s a word.

You say it, and your coworkers understand it.

That’s it.

That’s all that it takes for that to be a word.

Somebody says it, and somebody else understands it.

It does not require that it be imprinted on the onion skin pages of a dictionary.

Yeah, and it’s a really important word, right?

I mean, you guys have to understand it, and you have to get that idea out there really quickly, right?

Right, and without the concept, obviously, you can fly safely.

That’s right.

It does its job.

Without the word, you have to communicate that concept.

Right.

In any case, even if you did think having it printed somewhere was somehow kind of a validation of this word,

I can offer you evidence.

Go to the Department of Defense websites, and you will find thousands, thousands of uses of this word.

De-conflict, de-conflicting, de-confliction, all the different kind of conjugations of the verb and the noun forms as well.

This word is widely used across all branches of the service, throughout the defense and the military, even in the private sector, in the public sector, everywhere.

Everyone uses this word.

It is a real word that’s doing a good job.

You should continue to use it.

As you always have.

Awesome.

Well, that’s great news.

I appreciate your time.

That clears it up a lot for us.

I’ll pass that.

Thank you for your work, Zach, and thank you for your call.

Hey, thank you.

All right.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

If you want to give us a call, the number is 1-877-929-9673

Or email us.

That address is words@waywordradio.org.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hello.

This is Lindsay Pearson, and I’m calling from San Diego.

Well, hello, Lindsay.

What’s going on?

Well, there’s something that’s been on my mind for some time now.

It’s a question that my friend Peter and I came up with.

Basically, when somebody swears, say, on TV or on the radio, it gets bleeped out somehow, right?

But when it’s in print, you see a combination of symbols in the place of the swear word,

You know, pound signs and exclamation points and things like that.

And I was wondering if there’s a term for this, for that group of symbols that represents the swear word.

So you’re talking about the kind of just seemingly random punctuation that’s used, say, in comics or in humorous columns.

It’s not the kind of sort of thing you’d usually see in a regular newspaper story right there.

They would just use asterisks or blanks, right?

Right, and sometimes it’s four symbols.

Sometimes it’s a string of ten or more.

Right.

Yeah.

Well, the best word I know for this is growlix.

Growlix.

How do you spell that?

You spell it G-R-A-W-L-I-X, Lindsay.

How do you like that?

Grawlix.

Oh, I like the sound of it.

Yeah.

It’s a fantastic word.

This word, Martha, who was it?

Mort Walker, right?

Yeah, there’s a funny story about this word because, you know, Mort Walker, the guy who is the cartoonist who does Beetle Bailey in High and Lowest?

Okay.

Yeah. Well, he once wrote a book, a joking book called the, what was it, Lexicon of Comicana, which was a book about all the little markings that you see in cartoons to indicate stuff, the visual vocabulary of cartoons, like when somebody’s sweating, you know, they’re really nervous and all these little sweat droplets come off of them.

He called those pludes.

Pludes.

P-L-E-U-D-S.

And he made up this word, Grawlix, G-R-A-W-L-I-X.

Wait a second.

I don’t think he made it up.

He borrowed it from Charlie Rice, who used it in the 1930s.

Okay.

All right.

Well, he put it into this book, and it was a collection of these kinds of words.

And he was doing it as a joke, but it kind of caught on.

And now a lot of cartoonists use those terms.

Well, that was simple.

Yeah, there’s a ton of that stuff.

We’re going to post some links to the website to some really interesting posts online, stories, articles that people have written about this topic.

One fellow has a bunch of little diagrams of Grawlixes from 1911 to about 1977 and just kind of shows the different ways and forms that they’ve been used.

It’s really interesting.

Lindsay, another one that I really like is, you know, when somebody in a cartoon is they’ve either been drinking too much from a jug marked XXX, or they’ve been conked in the head, and they have these little starbursts or circles kind of going around their head.

It’s called squeans, S-Q-U-E-A-N-S, squeans.

So there’s this whole visual vocabulary that some cartoonists use, and growlicks is one of those terms.

Refresh me here. He invented these. It was kind of a gag or a satire, right?

Yeah, yeah, but then it kind of caught on accidentally.

So what do you think about that, Lindsay?

Oh, I love it. I love it that it comes from comic books. I’ve always been a comic book fan.

What were you and your friend Peter talking about that you needed to know this?

Well, it started out talking about when you sign letters with XO, XO, and what that means.

And I had heard it on the show, of course, that the X was the kiss and the O is the hug.

And then from there, we started thinking of other combinations of letters and symbols that we could sign letters with and what they would mean.

And then all of a sudden I started seeing symbols everywhere, and I started trying to figure out what they could mean, and it became like a game.

Trying to figure out what the symbols, what these growlixes mean.

-huh.

-huh.

So you had little sweat droplets coming off of your head because you were thinking so hard about it.

Little pludes.

Exactly.

Well, they are a lot of fun, and we will post a bunch of them to our website.

Great.

All right.

Thank you so much, Lindsay.

Thank you, Lindsay.

Thank you.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

You know, Grant, another one of those that I really love is the Leukaflect.

Do you remember what that is?

Yeah.

No, what is that one?

It’s like a shiny spot on a surface of something.

You know how it looks like a little window, you know, like a big round bomb that’s about to go off and it’s shiny.

It looks like a little, it has a little Leukaflect on it.

Well, we welcome your question about punctuation and letters and anything that’s mysterious.

We’d like to solve your mystery.

Give us a call, 1-877-929-9673.

That’s 1-877-WAYWORD.

You can send us an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Mark, as you know, our email box is overflowing, and I wanted to take a minute to respond to one of these emails.

Amanda wrote to say,

I always thought the plural form of fish was fish, but I was wondering when it is appropriate to use the word fishes.

I’ve only seen fishes used when speaking of many different species, and I wouldn’t feel at all comfortable using the word myself.

Amanda, you’ve got it exactly right.

Fishes can be used with impunity as long as you are talking about several different kinds of fish.

For example, he attributes the longstanding confusion over the classification of these fishes to their rarity.

Right?

Okay, different, yeah.

Yeah, it’s a scientific use.

We’re talking about, say, salmon, and we’re talking about tuna, two different kinds of fish.

You can call them fishes.

If you’re talking about all salmon or all tuna, you probably would just say fish, right?

What if I go to the counter at the deli and I’m looking at all the different fish?

Well, probably in an informal, non-scientific situation like that, you probably just want to say fish.

But in a scientific kind of academic environment, fishes is okay.

It’s going to be understood, and you’re not going to be laughed at.

I got you.

Anyway, thanks for your email, Amanda.

If you’ve got a question that you’d like us to respond to, by all means, send us an email to words@waywordradio.org.

And don’t forget that you can call our phone line 24 hours a day, 1-877-929-9673.

Prepare to parse some slang.

That’s next on A Way with Words.

Support for A Way with Words comes from National Geographic Books, publisher of I’m Not Hanging Noodles From Your Ears, a collection of intriguing idioms from around the world by Jag Bala.

Learn more at shopng.com slash noodles.

You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

It’s time for Slang This, the game where we try to stump a member of the National Puzzlers League.

Today’s contestant is Julia Parisi from New Rochelle, New York.

Welcome, Julia.

Hello, Julia. How are you doing?

I’m doing very well, thanks.

What do you do there in New York?

Well, I work at the United Nations. I’m actually an audio engineer.

An audio engineer. Now, what does that mean you do?

That means I record any of the meetings that are happening in the building in whatever language that needs to be recorded, and then I send it out to whoever needs to listen to it.

Oh, my goodness. No pressure there.

No, no, no, no. It’s quite an easy job most of the time.

-huh. Well, you’re around all these different languages at the crossroads of all these different nationalities.

Do you have a favorite slang term?

I do, but it has more to do with the quality of where I work.

I’m very fond of referring to our esteemed cafeteria as the crappeteria.

I think it’s just been in existence too long.

And then because I have to deal with many different people of many different levels, I refer to the people who work above me as stupid visors.

-oh.

Ooh.

Ooh.

Ooh.

Do they listen to this show?

I hope not.

Crappeterian stupid visors.

Okay.

For your sake, I hope they don’t.

Well, Julius, let’s see how you do with these slang terms, all right?

Okie doke.

Here are the rules.

I’ll give you a clue that describes one of two possible slang words or phrases.

Only one is correct.

Your job is to pick it.

All right?

Okie doke.

If you get stuck, just ask Martha.

She’ll be standing by.

Got it.

Here we go.

Number one, one bit of British rhyming slang for wife is trouble from Trouble and Strife, which rhymes with wife.

You might say, I’ve got to get home to me trouble.

Which of these also means wife?

Is it A, boiler house, or B, the stitches?

Ooh.

I’d have to go, I don’t know, I’ve never heard this before, but my gut is telling me to go with the stitches because it rhymes with the witches, which if you’re referring irreverently to your spouse, that to me makes more sense.

And I can’t figure how the boiler house would work.

You’ve actually got a clue in your own answer.

Boiler house rhymes with spouse.

I went the wrong way.

You’re so close.

I was sitting here going, huh, huh, huh?

But the answer is boiler house.

It’s more rhyming slang for spouse.

For some reason, it supposedly only means wife and not husband.

I don’t know why.

All right, let’s try another one, Julia.

See how you do.

Okey-doke.

Number two.

Most people call them sweets, treats, cakes, or candy.

But in prison, what do they call them when they buy them from the prison canteen?

Is it A, cho-cho, or B, Grimpenmeyer?

Grimpenmeyer, spelled G-R-I-M-P-E-N-M-I-R-E.

Chocho, C-H-O-hyphen-C-H-O.

Once again, you’ve given me two I’ve never heard before.

Chocho or…

Most people call them sweets, treats, cakes, or candy.

But in prison, what do they call them when they buy them from the prison canteen?

Is it A, Chocho, that’s C-H-O hyphen C-H-O, or B, Grimpenmeyer, G-R-I-M-P-E-N space M-I-R-E?

Grimpenmeyer, I don’t even have a clue.

Talk it out, talk it out, see if you can get to it.

Yeah.

I don’t know.

My gut doesn’t really seem to lead me in the correct direction.

Chocho sounded more correct to me.

Grimpen Meyer, I can’t see how that could relate to anything specific,

But cho-cho sounds closer to choo-choo.

Or chocolate.

Or chocolate.

I was thinking of like Charleston chews, you know, candy that I’ve had in the past.

I don’t know.

Martha, what do you think?

I’m with you.

For some reason, cho-cho sounds like something you’d eat.

You ladies are correct.

Indeed, it is cho-cho.

Oh, right.

Yay!

It probably comes from a brand name of an American ice cream bar called Chocho that featured a clown on the packaging.

I think the brand has since disappeared.

But there’s also a Spanish word chocho, which means sweets or candied nuts, depending on your dialect of Spanish.

Although in other dialects, the chocho means something very rude that I can’t say on the air.

The clue here was Grimpen Mire is a place name used by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in The Hound of the Baskervilles.

And I hoped that you would remember reading that story and go, oh, well, since Grimpen and Meyer was in the Conan Doyle story, it has to be Cho-Cho.

But you got to the correct answer anyway.

Oh, well, at least I got the right one.

Yeah, nice work.

Thank you.

Julia, I want to thank you for playing.

This is always fun.

And I always enjoy listening to them.

Okay.

Well, thanks a lot, Julia.

Thank you.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

Well, if you have a question for us about words or language or grammar or slang or what have you,

Give us a call. The number is 1-877-929-9673.

That’s 1-877-W-A-Y-W-O-R-D.

Or you can send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello.

Hi, who’s this?

This is Elizabeth from Indianapolis.

Well, hello, Elizabeth. What’s happening?

Well, not much, but I have a question about a word.

Oh, let’s hear it.

Well, when I moved to upstate New York from California in 1994, I experienced a lot of snow.

And I lived in a little village that was about five miles from where I worked and would have to drive down this road.

And I noticed that my car wheel wells would fill up with a lot of stuff, a lot of slush.

And we lived near a dairy farm, and so there was a lot of manure in there, too.

And I wondered if there was a word for this stuff, because I’d have to, when I arrived where I was going,

I’d have to try and push it out of the way out of my wheel well.

And in all these years since then, I’ve never encountered a word for that stuff,

And I think there should be one.

So you never heard anybody else there in snowy upstate New York talking about it?

Not really.

It was just a part of life, so there was never any discussion about it.

And at the time, our daughter was about three years old, and she came up with a word for it.

What is it?

Well, the word that she came up with was braxis.

Braxis.

Yeah, and I don’t know where she pulled this word out of,

But that was the word that came out of her mouth.

And so ever since then, that’s what we call it.

So could you use it in a sentence,

Mommy, I hear the braxis rattling around in the back, or what?

No.

Mommy, look, there’s a lot of braxis.

You have to get rid of it so we can drive the car.

This is the snow and ice that collects in the wheel well, right?

Yes.

You know, Elizabeth, it’s funny that you should ask that because we were just having a discussion about that on our discussion forum at waywordradio.org.

Because a lot of people were talking about all the different words that they had for it.

Really?

Yes.

I hadn’t seen Braxis, but I remember somebody was talking about them being called chunkers, and there was a snard contingent as well.

Yeah, apparently this was discussed on public radio before, and S-N-A-R-D was a word that people really liked.

In Paul Dixon’s Family Words book, he has a bunch more words for this, including grice, G-R-I-C-E, which is a combination of grime and ice.

Yeah.

He also has snow lactites, carsicles I really like.

Carsicles, that’s kind of nice.

Snert, you know, snow plus dirt.

Slud, S-L-U-D.

Nobicles, which I don’t think will ever apply, but it’s fun to say.

Nobicles.

And Snotice or Snotice.

I’m not sure how to say that one.

Oh, and, of course, Snowboogers.

How do you like Snowboogers?

Well, I think a child would like that.

Yeah, your daughter would probably like that.

What are you saying about me?

I really like that, too.

Yeah, that’s Paul Dixon’s book, the book of words that families have invented, right?

Right.

Or kind of shared around.

So it sounds like one of those things that you can call just about anything.

Yeah, but you’d think that there would be really a word for it because it’s the stuff that is just around all winter long.

There’s plenty of stuff that doesn’t have one simple single word names.

We use more than one word to describe it, and that seems to be sufficient.

I guess this is one of those cases where just calling it snow and ice and dirt or just snow and dirt is enough.

Well, it’s something that really looms in your life, though, if you’re living in a cold place and are having to chop that stuff off the back of the car.

Well, I’m leaning towards snow boogers or snard.

Snard probably.

Snard sounds pretty good.

I always like to get it off before I pull it into my garage so it doesn’t melt all over the inside.

Oh, yeah, and leave that horrible grime, that black kind of gritty, sooty puddle in the floor, right?

Yeah.

Well, Elizabeth, we gave you some more options, and we’re spreading your word to the world, or your daughter’s word.

Well, I appreciate that, and I know she will, too, although she’ll probably be a little embarrassed.

It’s all right. What is her name?

Her name is Laurel.

Well, Laurel, good job. We’re going to tell everyone that you’re the one that did it.

Okay, thank you so much.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

You know, I don’t drive here in New York City. I take the subway or I walk everywhere.

Maybe I’ll take a cab now and again.

So this is not something I encounter regularly.

But, you know, the winter of 2008, 2009 has been particularly tough in parts of the country that aren’t used to receiving that kind of snow.

So I could see why there’d be new life to this discussion about what to call that.

Yeah.

Well, if you have a word for it, give us a call.

The number is 1-877-929-9673.

Or you can email us. The address is words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Maeve, and I’m calling from San Diego.

Hello, Maeve. How are you?

I’m very good, thank you.

What’s up?

So I used an expression at work a while ago, and it definitely caused a couple of eyebrows to be raised.

I was talking about two people who got along very well, and what I said was that those two people got on like a house on fire.

And this caused people to raise their eyebrows?

It definitely did, because they didn’t know if I was saying that they got on very well or not very well at all.

So they had just no idea what it meant.

Oh, I see.

So I actually heard the term when I was growing up in Ireland.

I never really thought about the sense that house burning down would actually not be a very good thing.

So how come this phrase came to be when in terms of when it’s used with two people that it is actually a very good thing?

Well, I’d say that in general it’s – how shall we call this? It’s an intensifier that it falls under the category of like whopping and honking.

Like that’s a whopping big bruise you have there. Or he had this honking big piece of cake and he ate it all in 10 seconds. It kind of just does the job of making whatever is being said more of the same.

So to say that Martha and I get along like a house on fire means that we get along superbly. At the same time, to say that the economy is improving like a house on fire is optimistic and unrealistic, but never mind.

So your question is why do these kind of contradictory uses seem to be coexisting? Yes, yes. Right.

Yeah, I’m surprised that people didn’t understand what you were saying. I have a hard time imagining it being something negative in just regular speech like that.

Well, I think it was because it was a phrase that they weren’t very familiar with, so that probably threw them. Yeah, yeah.

We’re more familiar with houses on fire here in San Diego for unfortunate reasons. Yeah.

But there’s a little bit we know about the history of this. You might be surprised to find that it goes back more than 200 years.

Oh, okay. In digging on this, I can see a couple of uses that I think are funny. One of them is there’s a list of slang from Cambridge in the U.K. from the 1870s, and they use as an example sentence, it’s raining like a house on fire.

That seems very odd. Which is very odd. And then another one, it’s used from 1830. It says the home industry, meaning the building of homes, was raging like a house on fire.

Oh, no. That’s not the idiom I want to use when I’m talking about the home industry. Block that metaphor. That’s terrible.

Again, if you’ve ever seen a wooden house or any kind of wooden structure go up, have you ever seen this? I mean, this is probably the time of thatched roofs, and most houses were made of wood, and only the wealthy had stone houses or brick houses.

A wood structure burning goes up like nobody’s business. We’re talking about before lumber was treated to make it less flammable.

Right, rippingly, roaringly, energetically. Yeah, it’s just astonishingly fast.

You know, these recent fires in Australia, I heard somebody on the news talking about the speed of the fires. He said they were so fast that you couldn’t outrun them with a car. And that’s astonishingly fast.

And that’s what I think of. That’s the kind of speed of fire that I think of when I think of this phrase.

Okay, okay. Maeve, it was good talking with you. Thanks for calling. Thank you so much. Thank you. Bye-bye. Bye.

Well, if you have a burning question, give us a call. The number is 1-877-929-9673. That’s 1-877-WAYWORD. Or you can email us. The address is words@waywordradio.org.

Hello. You have A Way with Words. Yes. Good afternoon. Hi. Who is this?

My name is Tom DeLane, and I’m calling from Dodgeville, Wisconsin. Well, hello, Tom. Hi, Tom.

How’s things in Dodgeville? Well, recently I used, in context, a word called kittywampus. And I’ve done a little bit of research with the Dictionary of American Regional English, which seems to indicate that this verbiage has a Midwestern taste or flair to it.

And my question simply is, how did such a phrase ever come into existence? It just seems to defy most of the people that I talk to. They just can’t figure that out.

Yep. I’d say that’s about right. Well, now, Tom, you’re saying kittywampus. How are you spelling that?

K-I-T-T-Y, just as in the feline adolescent. Wampus, W-A-M-P-U-F. Usually hyphenated. Oh, yeah? Okay.

Because you see it a whole lot of different ways. In fact, I think of it as sort of this wacky Swiss army knife of a word because it can be spelled lots of different ways and mean lots of different things.

The way I usually see it is C-A-T-A-W-A-M-P-U-S, catawampus. -huh. Have you seen it that way?

I have not. -huh. Well, you said that you were looking at the Dictionary of American Regional English, and if you look up catawampus, you see lots of different things that it can mean.

It can mean askew or wrong. Some people use it to mean diagonally across from. So, like, I cut catawampus across the parking lot, you know, from one corner to the other.

And you see catawampusly used to mean utterly or completely. And catawampus, C-A-T-A-W-A-M-P-U-S, can also mean an imaginary monster. I think the catawampus is going to get you or something like that.

And, Tom, you’ve zeroed in on a problem that etymologists have. I mean, how all these are connected and if they are is a pretty big puzzle.

However it is spelled and pronounced, it seems to have universal usage across generations. Many young people, and I work in a public school, and I had an English teacher do an informal survey.

And roughly 50% of her students were able to define the word without using it in context. Yeah, you can kind of infer the askew idea, right? If you say that picture is catawampus or Aretha was wearing that hat that was catawampus.

But going back to the original question, it’s really unknown where it came from. Yeah, I mean, there are different ideas about this.

The wampus may come from a Scots word, that wampish, that means to twist or to swerve. It may be somehow connected with this idea of catawampus, the imaginary monster. I’m not sure we’ve really sorted it out.

No, certainly there’s been some work done on this term. People are able to find it in the 1800s in various printed sources. But as with so many English words, it’s lost the history so far.

Well, thank you so much for taking my phone call and at least tackling it. All right. It was our pleasure. Thanks, Tom. Thanks, Tom. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

We’d love to take your calls about language, grammar, usage, slang, how to say something, how not to say something. Give us a call, 1-877-929-9673, or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

That’s our show for this week. Support for our program comes from Mosey Online Backup. Got data? Visit mozy.com.

If you didn’t get on the air today, you can leave us a message at any time at 1-877-929-9673. Or email your questions to words@waywordradio.org. Or join the conversation right now on our discussion forum.

That’s at waywordradio.org/discussion. Stefanie Levine is our senior producer. Our technical director and editor is Tim Felten. Tim also engineered our theme music. Kurt Conan produced it.

We’ve had production help this week from Michael Bagdazian and Josette Herdell. From Studio West in San Diego, I’m Martha Barnette. And from the Argo Network in New York City, I’m Grant Barrett. Ciao, luego. Bye-bye.