Up Your Alley (episode #1504)

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.

Grant, let’s say it’s a hot day and you’re drinking from a water bottle and I’m really thirsty.

What if I said, hey, can I get a swig?

I’ll birdie.

I don’t know.

What is that?

It means I’ll drink the water without putting my mouth to your bottle or your glass or whatever.

Got you.

So to stop the spread of germs.

Yeah.

Oh, nice.

Although you’re still getting my backwash.

Right?

I hadn’t thought about that.

There should be another word for that.

But wait a second.

So there’s a term for taking a drink out of someone else’s water bottle without putting your lips on the container.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You might hand the bottle to me and say, make sure you birdie it.

Make sure you birdie it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But I did an informal poll of my friends.

And the other term that’s used a lot is water falling.

Water falling.

Yeah.

Just pouring it into your mouth rather than drinking.

Yeah.

My friend Elwin is a champion water faller.

He’s got a reputation.

How do you get a reputation for waterfalling?

I guess you do it a lot.

But who knew there were terms for this?

I only learned these terms recently, which is why I’m bringing it up.

There’s probably more than two.

There are.

Some people call it baby birding, and some people call it airing.

Like not air on the side of.

So there’s an air gap between your lips and the mouth of the bottle.

Nice.

That makes perfect sense.

Yeah.

It’s the kind of thing that you think that should have a term for.

Yeah, that should have a term.

And I love that these arose kind of independently, and there are probably more.

And we definitely want your calls and emails about your terms for drinking out of a bottle without putting your lips on it.

877-929-9673.

And you can always email us, words@waywordradio.org, and talk to us on Twitter @wayword.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hey, how’s it going?

Going well.

Who’s this, and where are you?

This is Father Constantine Lazarakis.

I’m calling from Southampton, New York.

Well, welcome to the show.

What can we do for you, Father Constantine?

Okay, cool.

So this is kind of fun.

I read to my kids for the second time, actually, Peter Pan.

We finished it a couple of months ago.

And when I got to the last paragraph, I read this sentence, and it kind of confused me.

So I’ll tell you what the sentence is.

It says, when Margaret grows up, Margaret, of course, is Wendy’s daughter.

Now, Wendy’s an old lady now, right?

It says, when Margaret grows up, she will have a daughter who is to be Peter’s mother in turn.

And thus it will go on so long as children are gay and innocent and heartless.

And when I read the word heartless, I said, huh, because we don’t think about kids as being heartless.

And I thought, first I thought maybe heartless had a different meaning at turn of the century in the United Kingdom.

I don’t know.

You know, maybe it meant like lighthearted or maybe it meant free.

But then as I started to think about it, there’s this theme throughout the book of how cruel it was of Wendy and the boys to have left their parents,

And how Mr. And Mrs. Darling suffered so much while they were gone, you know?

So maybe he does mean heartless, like we mean heartless when we say it now in 21st century America.

And then I was talking to my wife and my kids and my father-in-law about it.

We said, well, there is kind of a heartlessness in being free.

Maybe it kind of means both, you know?

Because when you are carefree, you’re kind of insensitive to the needs and the feelings of others, maybe.

I don’t know. It’s just really interesting.

So I said, I’ve got to call these guys and see what they have to say about it.

I would fully expect a man of the cloth to do a really great textual analysis like that, by the way.

That’s funny.

That’s outstanding.

I think you’re 99% of the way there.

The heartlessness is about the undeveloped nature of a child’s heart where they haven’t experienced the setbacks of true loss yet.

So they don’t understand what they’re doing to other people when they do something like run away.

And so there is a tradition that’s now considered archaic or rare of using heartless to mean lacking understanding,

Where you’re not aware of your effects on other people

Or the aware of the effects of your own actions.

So Barry is saying that the children don’t experience the same heartbreak

And brokenheartedness of adults.

They seem strong in the face of what adults would consider to be loss.

The adults can’t really fathom that, that children are so,

We call it resilience, don’t we?

Right.

But the old-fashioned word heartlessness really means

It’s as if they don’t have a heart

Because they can’t be hurt as bad as adults can be hurt.

Well, it’s funny, too, because the other two things he says, right, he says innocent and gay.

So, you know, innocent and happy.

But I think there’s a connection, too, because they wouldn’t be so innocent and happy if they did have that level of empathy.

They’re not really weighed down by understanding the difficulty of, like, I don’t know, whatever, life or parenthood or the difficulty of caring for another.

Right.

That’s really interesting.

Yeah, that is a mark of growing older, right?

The trade-off.

It is certainly the trade-off.

And the whole experience of the book for me, and I haven’t read it in a long time,

I think I was 11 or 12 when I read it,

And kind of right there between those two things,

True childhood and the incipient adulthood, and kind of getting that.

Part of me said, how irresponsible, right?

The adult part was already speaking up.

Totally.

But the child part was like, I want to do that.

I want to be that.

I was talking to this friend of mine, I don’t watch this show, but apparently there’s some show on network television where Peter Pan is one of the characters that’s like this mishmash of all these different fairy tale characters.

Yeah, once upon a time.

And I guess Peter Pan is a villain in it.

And I said to him, well, he’s a villain in Barry’s novel, too.

Like, if you really read it, he’s not a nice guy.

He’s like totally self-centered, can’t remember anything Wendy says unless it’s about him, you know, ready to kill the wild boys if need be to get to hook.

You know, he’s a ruthless little character.

He probably did a bunch of panspleaning, too, right?

Yeah, right.

Well, there’s a reason they coined the term the Peter Pan complex.

Right.

Well, I guess so.

Because there are people who have some or all of those traits.

But it’s cool that all this discussion that you’ve had with your family comes out of this single old-fashioned word choice.

And I think that you’ve really hit upon a thing that happens to us when we don’t only read the book of the moment, when we go back to some of these fundamental classics.

Yeah, really fun.

Well, I deal with stuff like that all the time in the church, you know.

Yeah, some of your texts are a little older, I understand.

Yeah, a little bit older.

We had this big debate when I was in high school about passions.

Everybody’s like, oh, passions are great, you know, because you’re passionate about something.

You want to pursue it.

But the Church Fathers all say, you know, you’ve got to do battle with your passions.

They’re afflictions.

They’re not—it’s very—so that’s another word, but I guess that’s for another day.

I love it.

Father, thank you very much for your call.

We really appreciate it.

Hey, you guys, God bless.

Thanks for the call.

It was really fun to be on the show.

Love what you guys do.

Thank you.

Call us again sometime.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

What have you been reading?

What did you come across that stumped you?

Give us a call.

We’ll all talk about it, 877-929-9673, or send us an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Grant, a word that’s new to me is pegan, P-E-G-A-N.

Some kind of vegan?

Yes.

Somebody that eats only peas?

That’s not healthy, don’t do that.

Boy, that would be a really extreme.

What is the P part of the P-gan?

The P part of P-gan is paleo.

You know, the paleo diet, which is all about living on unprocessed food and whole sources.

But it’s kind of meaty, isn’t it, the paleo diet?

It’s got that kind of protein in it, I think.

But then you combine that with vegan, in which you don’t have any animal products at all, including eggs and dairy.

Somehow, this is supposed to be a super healthy diet.

So what’s left is grains and nuts.

Fruits, vegetables.

Greens, whatever you can forage in the fields and forests.

Yeah, but apparently a lot of people are following the pegan diet.

Pagan diet.

Share your new words with us, 877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Judy from Tallahassee, Florida.

Hi, Judy. Welcome to the show.

Hey, Judy.

Thank you.

I have a friend whose husband was a journalist and a great wordsmith.

And he used to describe his wife as a spendthrift.

And I know this woman well.

And Sally can spend money like nobody’s business.

And she enjoys it and she’s generous and all that type of thing.

But for him to call her a spendthrift, I always found kind of ironic because anytime it had the word thrift in it, it sounded to me like somebody who could be thrifty.

So I just wondered where the idea of a spendthrift came from.

Yeah, it’s a confusing word, isn’t it?

It is.

And the key to it is that there’s an old sense of thrift that means acquired wealth or prosperity.

And the light bulb for me, when it comes to that word, was learning that it’s related to the word thrive.

So it’s the result of thriving. Thrift is the result of thriving.

But over time, thrift has come to mean being very careful with your money and your wealth.

And so if you’re spending your thrift, then you’re spending your wealth.

Oh.

Does that make sense?

It does, but that’s very surprising to me.

Yeah.

You may have encountered thrift in that usage as another name for a savings bank or a savings and loan.

Sometimes they’re called thrifts.

Yes, I remember that.

There’s an old term, by the way, that’s very similar, which doesn’t have this confusion.

It’s spend all.

Somebody who is a spend all.

That seems to make more sense to me.

Sounds like Sally is a spend-all.

Yes.

Yeah, she goes for those spendorphins, huh?

Yes.

The high you get when you’re spending money.

And there’s an even better one that you might like enough to keep using.

It’s an earlier word, and it’s kind of fallen out of fashion, but it’s a ding-thrift.

A ding-thrift.

Yeah.

Ding-thrift.

The ding part basically meaning that they’re doing damage to their savings.

Is that right?

Oh, there we go.

Now that makes sense, too.

Ding-thrift.

Yeah, so if you’re spending your thrift or you’re dinging your thrift, you’re spending a lot of money.

Yeah, think of the…

Think of the expression to if you ding somebody for a fee or ding somebody for a contribution, it means you’re asking them for a fee or contribution.

Fantastic.

Well, it sounds like Sally’s fun to be with.

Oh, she’s a dear friend, and I’m very thankful for her in my life.

Oh, that’s nice.

That’s nice, Judy.

Well, thank you for calling.

Thanks, Judy.

Take care now.

Thank you.

Bye-bye now.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Spend all ding thrift, spend thrift.

Ding thrift I like a lot.

Right?

Because there’s a suggestion there with the ding about you’re going a little nuts with spending this money.

Well, it makes me think of ding bat, too.

Right, exactly.

877-929-9673.

I didn’t realize that there was an actual term for something that I’ve thought about from time to time.

It’s cultural cringe. Do you know this term?

Cultural cringe. I think I read something about it, but fill me in.

You probably did. It’s used in anthropology or sociology to refer to an internalized inferiority complex that causes people in a country to dismiss their own culture as inferior.

I think sometimes one’s hometown doesn’t really appreciate what one has done until they go off to another part of the world and make their name there and then they come back and then they’re legitimate.

I’m thinking we should call that a hometown wince maybe, cultural cringe and hometown wince.

I think the cultural cringe that I know is from linguistics.

It’s the way that people will denigrate their own language or their own dialect because they know that the outside world does.

And so they think of themselves and their family and their community as speaking a bad English rather than just a variant.

Yeah, I thought you’d bring up that example.

Yeah, the term cultural cringe originated in Australia, and it was coined by a social commentator there in the 1950s.

But, yeah, it makes perfect sense that you would apply it to language as well.

Yeah, so when you have a chip on your shoulder about something that’s normal and natural.

Yeah.

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 our quiz guy, John Chaneski.

Hi, John.

Hi, Grant.

Hi, Martha.

Hi, John.

What’s up, bud?

Well, you know, I was thinking lately about math.

You know, sometimes we try to mix up letters and numbers here.

Now, everyone can do math.

There’s no reason to be afraid of it.

Well, I’ve come up with something I call writer’s math.

It’s similar to other puzzles we’ve done here.

I’ll give you a sentence with a number hidden in it somewhere.

That is the word, the name of a number.

All you have to do is find it and tell me that the sentence equals whatever that number is.

Okay.

Now, you’ll probably need a pencil for this just to scribble down what I’m saying.

If I say, launch yourself on every wave, you would say that that sentence equals?

One.

One, yes.

Can you tell me why?

On every O-N-E.

Yes, very good between.

On and every there is O-N-E.

Now, that happens to be from the journals of Thoreau, by the way.

Now, just as a hint, there’s a break between letters in every hidden number.

That is, it’s between two or more words.

Gotcha.

Just as a hint.

Good.

Here we go.

Anything that won’t sell, I don’t want to invent.

Anything that won’t sell, I don’t want to invent.

Right.

Oh, I know what it equals.

What is it?

What is that?

Two.

Equals two, yes.

That won’t.

Won’t, right.

T.W.L.

That’s a quote from Thomas Edison.

Here’s the next one.

Oh, that I could travel even though on foot and in utmost poverty.

Oh, that I could travel.

Even though on foot and in utmost poverty.

Yeah, I know what it is.

Eleven.

Eleven, yes.

That is a Baha’i prayer.

It equals eleven.

Travel even.

I like that these are famous things.

Yeah, me too.

Yeah, I happened to find a lot of really cool ones.

Let’s see.

This one, I’m not sure where I got this from, but it’s a nice one.

The hard knocks of our teen years were not as bad as they seemed back then.

The hard knocks of our teen years.

Oh, I have it.

Go ahead, then.

14.

Equals 14, yes, of our teen years.

Oh, nice.

Three words.

Yeah, very good.

How about this one?

A chicken in every pot, a car in every garage.

A chicken in every pot, a car in every garage.

Let’s see, chicken.

Oh, there it is.

Nine.

That’s right.

This is a Republican pamphlet for, do you remember what president that was?

It was Hoover, wasn’t it?

Herbert Hoover, yes.

In every chicken, in every.

There’s nine.

How about this one?

Speaking of politics, the reason for public distaste of Congress is politicians’ obsession with re-election.

With three?

Oh, boy, that’s a long one.

With three?

With three elections?

Three is right, Martha.

Very nice.

You got it.

Equals three.

That’s Texas Congressman Beto O’Rourke.

All right.

That was fantastic.

That’s what I call writer’s math.

You guys did great.

Wow, I was thinking, like, you know, amount per word for articles submitted, but okay.

That’s what a writer would think of when he thinks of that.

And 120 days to be paid.

That’s right.

Thank you, John.

Thanks, John.

I really appreciate it, buddy.

We’ll talk to you next week.

Thank you, guys.

Talk to you then.

Take care.

We do a lot of goofing around with language on this show.

We’d love to goof around with you.

So call us with your language question or story, 877-929-9673, or send it to us in email.

The address is words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, welcome to Way With Words.

Hi, Grant. This is Alice Sweeney calling from Atlanta, Georgia. How are you?

I’m fine, Alice. Glad to have you on the line. What’s going on?

I have a question about orphans.

My mother-in-law were watching some daytime soap opera,

And someone made mention of a kid being a half-orphan,

So we just kind of joke and we’re like, you can’t be a half-orphan.

That makes no sense.

So we started talking a little bit further, and I was like, well, is there a word for an adult that has no parents?

Because that doesn’t seem right either.

Like, if you’re an adult, are you still an orphan?

So that’s my question.

Is there a word for an adult who has lost both of their parents?

So a half-orphan is someone who’s either motherless or fatherless?

That’s the context they were using it in, yes.

I see.

Okay.

And so you’re wondering if there’s a term for an adult who loses both parents fairly early in life, not necessarily childhood.

Or at any point, right?

Why can’t you be 70 and lose your parents and still be kind of orphan?

Well, yeah, that’s what my husband said.

I was saying for myself, my parents passed away before I was technically an adult, but I was like an older teenager.

So I was like, well, was I like only an orphan for like a year?

And what am I now?

Because I still don’t have parents.

Huh.

I don’t know of a specific word for that.

I’ve heard adult orphan and elder orphan for older ones.

I’ve also heard midlife orphaned and just orphaned adults.

It’s a kind of ordinary English phrase.

Yeah.

I mean, the word orphan throughout the centuries has tended to apply to children, not always.

And by children, meaning people who are under the age of the majority, not just simply the offspring of another person.

Right.

That’s one of the problems that a child can mean an adult, right?

Because you are still the child of your parents, even if you’re 28.

Yeah.

Right.

And it is a particular state that I think deserves some kind of recognition.

I’ve lost both my parents, and it’s quite a step in your life.

Exactly.

Exactly.

Yeah, and it’s also kind of a feeling of, like, you are, there is a kind of a loneliness about it where it’s just you.

And it’s more so of that feeling where when you’re a kid and you think, when I’m an adult, I’m going to understand all this.

But I kind of feel like you never really have that, oh, I’m an adult all the way on my own until you have that kind of realization where it’s like, oh, no, I’m literally on my own.

Right. And I’m literally next.

Right.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Easier with siblings, perhaps, or aunts and uncles who are still around.

Right.

I don’t know.

Oh, I’m sorry. Go ahead.

No, go ahead.

I feel like maybe it would be easier with siblings, but not necessarily aunts and uncles because they’re not my parents.

Like, I have aunts and uncles, but they’re not, it’s not the same feeling.

Yeah, it feels like the next generation coming to the top, you know?

Yeah.

It’s significant.

It’s a significant feeling.

Infantry moving up to face the enemy.

Yeah, yeah, you’re now on the front line.

I hadn’t thought about that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, I wonder if anybody else listening has a thought about that.

I hope so.

I’d be really interested to see that.

Well, if you have a suggestion for us, a better term besides adult orphan or elder orphan,

Give us a call, 877-929-9673, or send it to us in email.

The address is words@waywordradio.org.

Alice, thank you for your call.

We really appreciate it.

Thank you so much.

Love the show.

Thanks, guys.

Thanks.

Bye.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Karen Graham from Waco, Texas.

Hey, Karen. Welcome to the show.

Hi, Karen.

Well, I am a 7th grade English and history teacher.

And my class and I had a question because we had a word come up in two different contexts

And it had two really different meanings.

And that word is vice.

In my classes, we often end up talking about characters and stories or historical figures

In terms of, like, virtue and vice.

Good and bad moral characteristics, like was this character courageous or cowardly, or was this

Ruler just or unjust? But then in history class one day, we were talking about different forms

Of government, like democracy or monarchy, and somebody mentioned something about presidents

And vice presidents. And one of my students raised his hand and asked, kind of jokingly,

Why is the vice president called that? Is it because he’s a bad person?

Not as good as the president is? And then I really didn’t have a good answer for that,

Because I was not sure where those two totally different meanings of the word came from.

Well, the thing that’s going on here is that these are actually two different words spelled the very same way.

Okay.

And the vice, like vice president, comes from a Latin word that’s spelled exactly the same way that means in place of.

So you have vice president, who’s the guy or woman, in place of the president.

And you have words like viceroy, which is a deputy of the king, you know, the French word for king there.

And the other vice is one that comes from a Latin word, vitium, V-I-T-I-U-M, or witium, as you might say in Latin class, that means fault or blemish or damage, moral fault, wickedness, something like that.

And that eventually evolved into a similarly spelled word, V-I-C-E.

And the cool thing about that, too, is that you can give your students a couple of vocabulary words that come from that same root, one of which is vitiate, V-I-T-I-A-T-E.

Like a mind vitiated by prejudice means a mind that’s been damaged or spoiled by prejudice.

And one more SAT word is vituperative.

Oh, yes, I’ve heard that one before.

Yeah, which comes from that same root and has to do with, you know, being damaging.

Wow.

Like vituperative remarks are full of anger and hate.

Huh.

Wow.

We actually teach Latin at my school.

I’m not one of the Latin teachers,

So my students will be really interested to know that they both have Latin roots,

But they are unrelated.

Oh, yay.

That’s wonderful.

Yeah, different Latin roots.

Yeah, they come from two different Latin words,

And the spellings just happen to be the same in English.

It’s not the only pair of words.

Like that either. All right. Well, thank you very much. That’s very helpful. Thank you, Karen. Yeah.

Thanks for asking. And good luck with school. Thank you for being a teacher. You’re welcome.

Good to have you all. Bye-bye. Keep up the good work. Bye-bye. Teachers, we love you. Give us a call.

877-929-9673.

The other day, looking through the dictionary, I tripped over the word famulus, F-A-M-U-L-U-S.

Do you know this term?

No. Does it have something to do with family?

It does. It’s distantly related to the idea of family.

It originates in the idea of a servant or an assistant,

And it’s been used historically to refer to a servant or an assistant to a sorcerer or a magician.

I thought that maybe it was in the Harry Potter series. I haven’t read the whole thing.

I don’t think I’ve seen it there, no.

But famulous.

Outstanding.

Somebody who helps you do things that are magical.

Talk to us on Twitter, W-A-Y-W-O-R-D.

Hi there.

You have A Way with Words.

Yes, hi there.

How are you?

Doing well.

Who’s this and where are you?

This is Rod, and I’m in La Porte, Indiana.

Well, Rod, what can we do for you?

My ancestry on my father’s side, going way back, came here from Wales.

And I’ve always been happy with that ancestry and lots of great actors, singers, writers from Wales.

Sure.

But in the course of time, I’ve heard people refer to Welshing on a debt.

And that always bothered me.

I didn’t know what it meant, but it sounded a little bit like an ethnically nasty kind of thing to say.

So I’m not sure whether it is that or not.

Yeah, it is.

It goes back to this reputation that the Welsh supposedly had for being dishonest or for cheating people.

Some of the earliest forms of it we find is a Welsher, somebody who cheats on a debt or cheats on a deal or an agreement.

These days, the Welsh people that I’ve spoken to, and I’ve known a few, all kind of laugh at it and find it a little hurtful, but they wouldn’t rank it up there with the worst ethnic slurs, you know.

Well, maybe not quite that bad, right?

It’s very avoidable, though.

It’s one of those words that once you realize that there might be somebody offended by it and that it goes back to this undeserved reputation,

You can easily just say they reneged or waffled or flip-flopped or whatever approximate synonym you can come up with.

I’d like to trace it to one particular Welsh crumbum who gave the rest of us a hard time.

It could be, right? One guy.

There’s always one, right?

50s at least, probably older.

It goes back to the idea of taffy, which is the stereotypical name for a Welsh person,

Taffy being dishonest and cheating a gambler out of what he’s owed.

Good grief.

Well, I’m sure Richard Burton and Dylan Thomas and myself all object to this.

All three of you.

Yeah, the Welsh have gotten a raw deal in a lot of different ways,

And I don’t want to go too much of a tangent, but in particular,

Their language has often been stomped on, trampled on, mistreated, ignored, outlawed, ruled against, and so forth over the very long history of the Welsh and the English.

Yeah, well, if you’re not born Welsh, the Welsh language is well worth avoiding.

Oh, I don’t know. Every language has got its joys, right?

Yeah, my grandfather on my mother’s side had ancestors who were Welsh, and I love to hear him count in Welsh.

Oh, that must be something to hear.

Yeah, aim, ting, tethery, feathery, something like that.

It was very musical.

I know it’s quite baffling to look at a Welsh road sign and have no clue as to how to pronounce it.

None.

Oh, a day with a grammar book, you’d have that squared away in no time, at least the pronunciation part, if not some of the meaning.

Well, I know you guys are busy looking up lots of things, but if you ever have some spare time, find that one bad Welshman.

Give the rest of us a break.

Yeah, we’ll do, Rod.

But you’re right.

It is considered offensive by some, and it’s certainly avoidable,

So people should try to avoid saying somebody Welsh.

I’m sure there are very few Greeks or Russians who find it offensive.

But as a Welshman, I do find it offensive.

All right, you take care of yourself, all right?

Nice to talk to you.

Thanks, Rod.

Bye-bye.

So long.

So that verb is to Welsh, W-E-L-S-H, or to Welch, W-E-L-C-H.

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

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Chandler from Chesapeake, Virginia.

Welcome to the show.

What can we do for you, Chandler?

Well, I have a question about a term I heard my mother and father-in-law use,

And I’d never heard it before or since.

Well, the first time I heard them use it, they were talking about their strawberries.

They had a huge patch of strawberries, and they said,

We have strawberries up the gump stump.

And I had never heard up the gump stump before.

And I have never heard anyone else use it except for them.

Up the gump stump? So they rhyme?

Yep. That’s what they said.

And that meant a lot of strawberries.

It meant a lot. Well, whatever. Yeah, a lot of anything.

About when was that? Do you remember?

Oh, probably the first time I heard it, golly, was probably in the early 60s.

Okay. Gotcha.

And my father-in-law was from North Carolina.

And my mother-in-law was from California.

But I have a feeling it probably came from his side of the family.

The oldest variant of this that I know of is up a gum tree or just plain old up a tree.

And this goes back to at least as far back as the 1820s in the U.S. And Canada and Australia.

So if someone is up a gum tree or up a tree, it’s kind of like a treed animal.

The hounds are baying at the foot of the tree and you’ve got no place to go.

And then before too long, it’s kind of elaborated upon.

And both in Australia and in the United States, you can see people saying or hear people saying possum up a gum tree.

And the possum in Australia and the United States, they’re different animals, but the expression works in both places.

And then as early as 1912, you might see possum up a gump stump, where I believe it’s the same expression.

And what’s happened is they meant the stump of a gum tree, but for the rhyming sake of it, they call it a gump stump.

Because we do that in English.

We make stuff rhyme sometimes just for the rhythm and the sound of it.

So 1912, there is a song, and I think one of the main lines is, possum up a gump stump.

But then by the 1960s, up the gump stump behaves a little differently.

It stops meaning that you’re trapped or cornered or that you’ve got no alternatives.

And it starts to mean that you’ve got a lot of something or that you’ve got an abundance beyond all control.

And you particularly see it among people in the military and in politics.

It’s kind of like up the wazoo in that both gump stump and wazoo are really indirect or oblique euphemisms for the butt or the rear end.

The idea being that you’ve got so much of something that it’s showing up in unexpected places.

So it’s up the gump stump or out the wazoo, right?

Oh, well, he was in the Navy.

Oh, there you go.

So maybe that’s where he got it.

I don’t know.

I was thinking it was something from North Carolina because I know they had some weird sayings down there.

It’s possible.

But maybe it was just from the Navy.

The earliest use that I know of in print for certain, and there are probably others, was Ken Kesey in his jail journal.

He was the acid guy, the drug experimenting guy.

The one flew over the cuckoo’s nest guy.

Yeah.

Really?

So you’ve got time up the gump stump.

So he’s talking about being in jail and having all the time in the world.

-huh.

But no doubt it’s older than 1967.

That’s just the first use that I know of.

Well, I certainly appreciate the information.

Chandler, thanks for sharing your story with us.

You’re certainly welcome.

Take care now.

Bye-bye.

You too.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

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

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

From time to time on the show, we share books that we’re reading,

Whether they have to do with language or not.

As it happens, the one that I’m reading is called Dictionary Stories, Short Fictions and Other Findings.

It’s by Jez Burroughs.

And this grew out of an experience that Jez Burroughs had when he opened the new Oxford American Dictionary,

And he was looking up the word study, but his eyes were drawn to the example sentence that accompanied the definition.

And the sentence went, he perched on the edge of the bed, a study in confusion and misery.

And that sentence just tickled his mind, and he started thinking, wow, who was perched on the edge of the bed?

Why was he upset? Why did he feel miserable?

And then he started looking at other sample sentences in the dictionary and started wondering, gosh, could I put some of these intriguing sentences together and form stories?

And he started doing that with sentences like the horses were lame and the men were tired, which was an illustration sentence for the word lame or for double the double life of a secret agent.

And he put some of these together in short stories that he published online and they were so popular that he got a book contract.

And now there’s this whole book of very, very short stories, some of which are wry or funny or dramatic or kind of noir.

And it’s very intriguing.

You’ll never look at sample sentences in the dictionary the same way.

There’s another layer to this, which is one of the first jobs that I had as a lexicographer was to come up with example sentences for the new Oxford American Dictionary.

So he may be using sentences that I chose.

Oh, that’s wild.

Yeah, he takes them from about 12 different dictionaries.

So a few of them anyway.

And Oxford had for a long time this project where they hired a bunch of freelancers, including me and my wife and a bunch of other people,

To go through this database of programmatically selected passages to shorten them up a little bit, to edit them down to be that concise, picky thing that you need.

Because most of the example sentences in most dictionaries are based on real writing.

Because one of the things you know as a dictionary editor is if you create a sample sentence or examples inside of whole cloth,

It’s almost always flat and a little affected, if that makes sense.

Like it doesn’t have the ring of something genuine.

Yeah.

Well, I think you would enjoy this book then.

Yeah.

Dictionary Stories by Jez Burroughs.

I’ve got a book for you.

And this is a book that my son and I read.

He read it first and loved it so much that he insisted that I read it too.

And it’s The Leveler by Julia Durango.

So this is young adult fiction.

And the whole premise is that there’s a girl, Nixie Bauer, who is paid by parents to drag their children out of a digital paradise known as the Meep.

She’s basically a bounty hunter or a skip tracer, but she’s a teenager.

And so this Meep is an immersive thing that you can only get out of under certain circumstances.

You can’t just take off the headset and go back to your regular life.

So she gets money doing this.

And the whole story centers around Nixie having to rescue the son of the man who invented the meep, who owns the meep, to get him back.

And, of course, there are lots of complications.

My son loved this because he’s a big video game player or fancies himself as one and knows a lot about video games.

And I liked it because even though the, oh, no, I’m stuck in a video game genre is kind of played out,

I thought it was original enough that I could ignore the fact that this has been done before.

And I think it’s none the worse for wear.

Julia Durango, the author of The Leveler, doesn’t preen at her own writing,

Which is something I often find really irritating, particularly in young adult fiction.

The plot is fast moving.

And I think she does a pretty good job of talking about our societal worries about video games in general,

I get obliquely or indirectly referencing them without being preachy or pedagogical or didactic.

In any case, that’s The Leveler by Julia Durango.

It’s young adult fiction.

Cool.

Easy read.

We’d love for you to share what you’re reading.

You can send it to us in email.

That address is words@waywordradio.org.

Or give us a call, 877-929-9673.

Or hit us up on Twitter at Wayword.

An eponym is a word that derives from the name of a person, right?

And an acronym is a word that derives from the first letter of a whole bunch of words, right?

Right, and usually you can say it as a word itself.

Right.

Right.

And there’s a word that is both.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

Apgar.

Oh, Apgar, like the Apgar test.

Yes.

From the woman who invented the test they do for newborns to test their development, I guess.

Yes, yes.

Virginia Apgar, Dr. Virginia Apgar, developed this test that’s called the Apgar Test,

And it measures appearance, pulse, grimace, activity, and respiration.

So it carries her name, but it’s also an acronym.

Oh, I love that.

Isn’t that cool?

It’s kind of a bacronym, though, right?

Kind of, yeah, yeah.

Eponymous bacronym?

I like that expression, yeah.

That’s my new album.

Yeah, isn’t that cool?

APGAR. Well, she did something well, right?

She did a thing, and the world still uses it, and it’s important.

But it’s funny how simple it is, right?

I know, right? But it did make a big contribution to neonatal health.

Absolutely. 877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hey, Martha. Hey, Grant. How are you guys today?

My name is Shawn, and I’m calling from Washington State.

Welcome. What can we do for you?

So I was wondering about the phrase, right up your alley, to describe something that somebody in particular that you have in mind would be fond of.

I was just watching a YouTube channel, a vlogger specifically who does reviews for clothing, websites, things like that.

And she’s a British vlogger, and she said, right up your street.

And I’ve never heard it said that way.

And I’ve heard the phrase my whole life just as right up your alley.

So I was kind of wondering about the difference there.

Not much, really.

They’re both used on both sides of the Atlantic or throughout the English-speaking world.

And they have about the same history, both right up or down one’s alley or one’s street.

Or sometimes it’s to be in one’s street.

That’s more old-fashioned.

Date to the early 1900s.

And before that, people might have said something else, like, it’s not my cup of tea or it is my cup of tea.

Or like right up my alley would be like in my wheelhouse, like something I know how to do really well.

Yeah, something I know how to do, yeah.

And they both come from this idea that if something is in your neighborhood, literally in real life, you’re probably familiar with it.

Like, you know the neighbors, you know the park, you know the shop on the corner, that sort of thing.

So if it’s in your street or in your – think of an alley, not like this ugly, dark place that’s scary and filled with trash.

Think of the alley as maybe your back door lets out on an alley and you have a porch out there and it’s where you store your bicycles, that sort of alley, like an active, lively place that people pass through.

Right. Well, and I even found it interesting just because I think of an alley as more of a narrow pathway where as a street is more broad.

So I thought maybe there was something there as far as it being specific to a particular person that you have in mind.

But it sounds like it’s kind of just right in line with all those other things you guys mentioned, cup of tea, things like that.

Yeah, the alley is interesting because in American uses, in some cities, it is very restricted to that space between buildings that has the trash cans in it and you otherwise wouldn’t go.

But in the original sense, an alley was a wide street that was lined with trees, and it comes from the French Alley, and they still use it in French in that way.

And so there are still in parts of this country and throughout the English-speaking world alleys that are nothing like the trash can little crevice that you might have in an urban city.

Well, thanks so much, you guys.

Thank you, Sean.

I listen to you all the time here at my office at work.

So we love your show and you guys are great.

Our show is right up your alley is what you’re saying, right?

You have an affinity for it.

Well, you’re our cup of tea too, Sean.

Thanks for calling.

Thanks, guys.

Have a good day.

Bye, Sean.

We know there’s a word or phrase you’ve been kicking around in your workplace.

We’d love to talk with you about it, so call us, 877-929-9673, or send it to us in email.

That address is words@waywordradio.org.

So this seems to be the season for Uplit.

Uplit.

So something is uplit.

It’s lit from beneath?

It’s literature that is uplifting.

Oh, I see.

Apparently this is now a thing.

You know, you’ve got your chick lit and things like that.

But publishers are now looking for and publishing what they call up lit.

Oh, that’s also the season for up dog.

What is up dog?

Not much.

What’s up with you?

I walked right into that.

Did I not?

I thought you were setting me up with up lit.

877-929-9673.

Hello, welcome to A Way with Words.

Hello.

Hi, who’s this?

This is Adam Singleton. I’m from Abilene, Texas.

Hey, Adam. Welcome to the show.

Hi, Adam.

I was thinking about the phrase, having your work cut out for you.

And I always imagine that means that your work is going to be easier because it’s cut out for you.

It sounds like part of that task is already done.

But one of the things that I’ve heard is that your task is actually going to be harder.

So I’m confused about whether it means your task is going to be easier or harder and kind of really what it means and where it comes from.

This expression goes all the way back to the early 1600s in an earlier version, which is to have all one’s work cut out.

And the idea is if you’re a tailor and you’re making a suit or something, you have all of your work, all of your material cut out for you before you start to sew things together.

So there’s an assistant who is stacking up this work that you have to turn into garments.

And the whole idea is that they get ahead of you.

Yeah.

And that you’ve got everything all planned out and you start out organized.

And then somebody is cutting the material out for you, for you to sew together.

It’s interesting that it has those two senses that you’re talking about, that work is sort of piling up on you,

Which would happen if you’re a tailor and the assistant is cutting out all this material for you.

Like literally cutting stuff out for you.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

So it’s like you’ve got the work ahead of you, but they’re also cutting it for you.

Yeah.

So that’s helping, too.

So I can see where you get the two different senses of it.

So somehow you don’t have control.

That’s kind of a mix.

Yeah.

You don’t have control over the work that’s coming, basically, right?

Right.

Yeah.

It’s coming at you.

Coming at you.

Sort of like Lucy and Ethel in the chocolate factory.

Yeah, yeah.

With the conveyor belt.

All right.

That makes sense.

Yeah.

That explains why I heard, you know, it sounds like from context it would be an easier job or a harder job.

Someone’s doing work for you, but it also means you have more work ahead.

Thanks, Adam. We appreciate your call.

Yes, thank you. I love the show.

Thank you. Take care.

Thanks. Bye-bye.

Bye.

Language English has got some stuff from some strange places.

877-929-9673.

I have a pair of earrings that I only recently figured out how to describe.

They’re cabochons.

Do you know this term?

No.

Cabochon.

It comes from a Middle French dialectal term that means head.

You know, it’s like cabbage and capital and all those words.

But it’s a gem or a bead cut in convex form and highly polished but not faceted.

Okay.

Cabochon.

C-A-B-I-C-H-O-N?

C-A-B-O-C-H-O-N, cabochon, borrowed into English.

Has a word caught your eye or ear?

We’d love to hear about it.

Call us, 877-929-9673, or send us an email.

The address is words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hey, this is Scott Ferret calling from Copper Canyon, Texas.

How are you today?

Hi, Scott.

Welcome to the show.

What’s up?

Hey, I’ve got a question for you.

When I was a young person growing up in the Deep South,

I heard an expression some of the older people used, neat but not gaudy.

And most of the people who use that kind of expression have now died off,

And I’ve never heard it ever spoken since.

And I was just curious if that’s something that’s unique to the South

Or if it’s something that’s common throughout the English-speaking world

And if it’s maybe something dated.

Some yes, some no.

That’s a lot of questions all at once.

Yeah.

What did they mean when they said that?

Neat but not gaudy?

Well, when you’re five years old,

You do the best you can to understand, but I always got the impression it meant something along the lines of it was appropriate for the use, but not over the top.

I think that’s a fair definition of that.

Yeah, that sounds right.

Neat, but not gaudy.

And the neat in this sense really means not so much orderly, but something that’s high quality or fine, good looking.

And it’s an expression that goes way, way back to the 17th century.

And there have been different versions of it that are kind of odd.

The longer version is sometimes neat but not gaudy, said the devil when he painted his tail pea green.

And tied up his tail with red ribbons.

Yeah.

Whatever that means.

Was that a literary reference or is that just a full expression?

Yeah, it’s been used off and on over the centuries since the 1600s.

And some people have had these elaborated forms.

And sometimes it’s a monkey and not the devil, which is really interesting.

And one of the earliest uses goes back to a poet by the name of Samuel Wesley, who is the father of John Wesley, who was one of the founders of Methodism, you know, as in the Methodist Church.

And so we actually have both father and son using variants of this expression in their writing.

So it appears it originated in the British Isles and transferred to different places where English people moved.

That’s right.

Is there any instance of it being used in other English-speaking countries like Australia or Canada?

Yes, yes. It has existed. It’s fallen out of fashion, I’m afraid. You’ll find it mainly in historical text and in people writing historical fiction. But it’s always had a little either very literary feel to it or kind of the commoner versions. Some people would just abbreviate it and say, as the monkey said, or like happened to the monkey, something like that, which refers to the whole expression without saying the whole expression.

It’s just a way to abbreviate it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And there’s also a Jimmy Stewart movie where he jokingly orders a drink neat but not gaudy.

Oh, nice.

Neat but not gaudy.

I want to say Zekefield.

Is that the name of it?

That’s the other meaning of neat, though, right?

Yeah, it’s a bad pun.

Play on words.

Yeah.

As the monkey said when he painted his bottom pink and tied up his tail with pea green ribbons.

That’s gaudy.

That’s gaudy, yeah.

All right.

Well, thank you all very much.

I really appreciate the enlightenment.

Sure.

It’s our pleasure.

Thank you very much.

Glad to have you.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Well, is there a word or phrase that’s been rattling around in your head?

We want to talk with you about it.

Call us, 877-929-9673.

I loved this tweet from someone whose handle is CrookedRoads770.

He wrote, I generally think of myself as an okay father,

But somehow I forgot to teach my two-year-old son what an owl was,

And he thought it was called a wood penguin.

Oh, that’s adorable.

Isn’t that so cute?

A wood penguin.

Of course, it makes sense, right?

That’s very adorable.

And, of course, the thread that followed it resulted in a lot of other examples like that.

Somebody named Terry Cloth said, one of my nephews thought that bats were called space kittens.

Oh, that’s nice.

This is great.

But it’s really cool, isn’t it?

I mean, that’s the way our brains work.

I mean, think about the word porpoise, which comes from Latin words porcus and piscis, meaning pig fish.

Because that’s kind of what they look like.

You see those for the first time, you apply a different name to them.

Pig fish.

Share your pigfish stories with us, 877-929-9673, or email words@waywordradio.org.

Want more A Way with Words?

Listen to years of past episodes at waywordradio.org, or find the show in any podcast app or on iTunes.

Our toll-free line is always open, so leave us a message at 877-929-9673, and we’ll take a listen.

We’d love to get your messages at words@waywordradio.org or hit us up on Twitter @wayword and look for us on Facebook.

This program would not be possible without you.

Grant and I are out to change the way we listen and think about language, and you’re making it happen.

Thanks also to senior producer Stefanie Levine, director and editor Tim Felten, director Colin Tedeschi, and production assistant Emma Kelman in San Diego.

In New York, we thank quiz guide John Chaneski and that master of keeping it real, Paul Ruist at Argo Studios.

A Way with Words is an independent production of Wayword, Inc.

From the Recording Arts Center at Studio West in San Diego, I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

So long.

Bye-bye.

Music by Ben Thede.