Use Your Noodle (episode #1673)

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.

Back when Johnny Carson was host of The Tonight Show, he had this shtick where he’d start a sentence with something like, it was so cold.

And then the audience would respond with, how cold was it?

Right. I remember that one big chant.

How cold was it?

Right. And then Carson would say goofy things like, it was so cold.

The ice cubes were wearing earmuffs.

That’s very goofy, and I get to see him mugging.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Well, I was thinking, what if we take that idea and we expand it to other areas of interest to our listeners, or at least to us?

Okay.

Like, I don’t know, that language class was so hard.

How hard was it?

It was so hard, even the silent letters complained.

Oh, how hard was it?

Even the subjunctive was in a bad mood.

Oh, how hard was it?

Are you going to make me do this again?

All the nouns were accusative.

I don’t know.

Yeah, they were accusing you of crimes.

Crimes against language.

But you can also take this idea and say this audio book I listened to was so long.

How long was it?

This audio book was so long.

It had an intermission. Yeah, but we need a drummer. But I think, Martha, that our listeners will be better at this idea than you and I.

I think you are correct. So we’re going to throw this out to you.

Take Carson’s idea of this X was so difficult or so hard or so long that something funny happened, you know, pun, a play on words, and toss it our way.

We’ll see what happens, all right.

You can send it an email, words@waywordradio.org or call or text toll free 877-929-9673 in the United States and Canada.

And if you’re somewhere else in the world, you can reach us on WhatsApp.

Find that on our website at waywordradio.org.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Lindsay. I’m calling from San Diego.

Hey, Lindsay, we’re glad to have you.

So my question is about the phrase out of pocket.

So I worked in sort of a corporate setting and we were talking to some coworkers and we were saying, oh, hey, yeah, that guy’s out of pocket.

And another coworker looked at us like we were, we’d grown two heads.

Like, what, why would you say that about him?

And we’re like, well, no, he’s just, he’s just unavailable.

And so we were like, what do you think out of pocket means?

And he’s like, oh, like it’s something that’s like acting out of sorts, like they’re inappropriate.

And we were like, oh, okay.

That’s not what we took it to mean.

And then I was talking to another friend of my husband’s and he’d also said, oh, yeah, I went to a party last week and no one was acting out of pocket.

So in context, I was like, OK, I get this now.

When did the phrase out of pocket change?

Because I feel like it’s always meant when you’re out of pocket, you’re you’re unavailable, right?

Like you’re just you’re you can’t be reached.

Oh, wow. This is so good.

So there are three, at least three major meanings of out of pocket in U.S. English.

But let me ask you, the two people who thought it meant acting out of line or being unruly, were they African-American?

No, they’re both younger.

So I was thinking maybe it’s like a younger generation thing.

Yeah.

Well, the reason I ask is that typically the act of acting out of line or being wild or disrespectful comes from Black American English.

And it occurs as early as the 1970s.

And maybe it’s being spread more through social media than it used to.

And of course, through hip hop and black entertainment culture.

And maybe it’s spread a lot more in recent years.

But it’s been around, so we’re talking 50 plus years.

The oldest meaning of it is to be paying things with your own expenses.

And this goes back to the 17th century.

So it’s the idea of that you’re paying things with your own money.

Maybe you’re going to be reimbursed by your company.

Maybe you won’t be.

So if you’re out of pocket, you’re literally paying for things with money out of your own pocket.

But out of that came a second sense, which kind of developed in journalism, also from the 1970s, which means unavailable.

And that’s the sense that you meant, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, it means that you can’t be reached.

And so it means that you’re not nearby.

And this one is kind of related to this idea of being out of, not under someone’s thumb.

And it’s related to the meaning of being in someone’s pocket, which is the idea of being under their control.

So you can see that a couple of these meanings of being out of pocket have to do with control and perhaps are related in that way.

And interestingly, when we talked about this, what was it, Martha, 2012?

A long time ago.

Yeah, we got a really nice email from a listener who talked about training horses and talked about horses who are under training, who are kind of observant of the people who are trainers, are said to be in pocket.

And there are also other uses in music and so forth that have to do with being out of pocket or in pocket when you’re improvising jazz or blues.

But this is a really great example of coworkers misunderstanding each other.

And it sounds like it was kind of fun or just confusing.

Yeah.

Who took it to mean like he’s unavailable was like this guy’s reaction was just like, why?

Why would you ever say that about somebody like in a work setting?

And we were like, well, we did.

What?

What do you mean?

He’s fine.

He’s just unavailable.

Did he know the unavailable meaning at all?

Not really.

And so it was just it’s such an interesting context base that you have to really then apply because like, I mean, yeah, it’s like being out of pocket, meaning that someone’s acting inappropriately or something like that.

It’s completely contextual based.

But when you’re just saying like, oh, yeah, he’s just out of pocket.

He’s out of pocket.

Without any other context.

Yeah, it could be taken several different ways.

Yeah, it really could be.

I’m not surprised that when you have these normal frictions in an office, it’s an argument for avoiding jargon and idioms.

But you’re just never going to do that.

It’s impossible to free your language of jargon and idioms.

It just can’t be done.

I also work with other co-workers who English is not their first language.

And so sometimes they’ll stop me and say, like, well, what did you mean by that?

Like, I don’t understand that phrase.

And I was like, oh, well, happy to explain it because, yeah, in English we use a lot of them.

Yeah.

And that kind of back and forth is normal for every language where person A says something and person B says, can you repeat that in different words?

Asking for explanation is just a normal course of any language.

Well, Lindsay, if something like that comes up again, give us a call.

We’d love to hear about it.

Will do. Awesome. Thank you so much. Appreciate it.

Yeah. Take care of yourself.

Take care. Bye-bye.

Bye.

Bye.

Well, Grant and I are never out of pocket.

We always behave, but we’re also always available, at least by voicemail.

So call us, 877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Jackie, and I’m calling from Wausau, Wisconsin.

Hi, Jackie. Welcome to the program. What’s up?

Yeah, so I have a word that’s kind of been used in my family ever since I was a little kid.

My grandmother always used to say this word, and the word is for schluck.

And you would say that when you, like, swallow water, and it kind of, like, goes down the wrong tube.

My mom’s side of the family are German and Polish, and I kind of looked this up a little bit, and I think my cousin would always say that it means the literal German translation is like to choke or to choke on oneself.

But I just kind of wanted to get your thoughts on that.

Oh, goodness. Give us that word again.

Verschluck.

Verschluck. How would you spell that if you could?

Maybe F-U-R-S-C-H-L-U-K. Verschluck.

All right. All right. Close, Martha, right?

Yeah, close. Yeah, it would start with a V, because the German word schlucken means to swallow.

Ver in this, V-E-R, is sort of an intensifier, and it also suggests that something’s going wrong.

So you’re swallowing and something’s going wrong.

Like you said, you know, it’s going down your Sunday pipe, or it’s going down the wrong pipe.

And it’s sort of onomatopoetic, isn’t it?

Schlucken?

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

So it fits perfectly.

I mean, it comes directly from German.

So Schlucken means to swallow and Ver means an unintended result.

So together, Ver Schlucken means to choke.

Wow.

Is that right, Martha?

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, that’s right.

And it’s just, I think it’s the perfect word for that.

I think we should adopt it officially into English because, you know, I’m for Schluck.

I have an eight-year-old daughter and she even uses it now.

Now Ursula will hear me do it and say, Mom, did you first look?

Yeah, it’s so funny.

You will occasionally hear that in parts of the United States where Pennsylvania German is still heard,

Because there’s the German layer there.

And sometimes you’ll hear, which is a little more elaborate.

And it basically means I misswallowed or I swallowed myself.

And you will hear sometimes in English in parts of the Great Plains where people have German heritage, they’ll say in English, I swallowed myself.

And it’s a direct borrowing from the German, sich verschmücken, meaning I choked, I swallowed myself.

Things went down the wrong pipe.

So Jackie, you were on the right track, even if the water wasn’t.

Okay, fantastic. I figured as much. It’s the water’s fault.

All right.

All right.

Don’t swallow yourself, Jackie.

Yeah, be careful out there.

Bye-bye.

I’ll try not to.

Thank you, guys.

All right.

Take care now.

Okay.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Okay.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673 is this magical number that you can call or text anytime, day or night, and

You will reach us.

My maternal grandparents lived in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, and I recently found a copy

Of a letter that my grandfather sent to his local police chief back in 1938. It seems that some

Young hoodlums had broken into my grandparents’ house and stolen a few things. And my grandfather

Wrote that he was pretty sure he knew who the culprits were and that one in particular might

Tattle on the others because he probably had a distaste for eating off the mantle.

Do you know what that means? No, a distaste for eating. Oh, I think I get it. Do you? Yeah,

I think because he gets a hiding on his rear end, he can’t sit down. So he has to eat his

Meal standing up. That is exactly right, Grant. The birch stick, the old birch stick. Yes, yes. I read

That in my grandfather’s letter and I thought, eating off the mantle, what is this? Somebody

Taking a big bite out of the wooden shelf over a fireplace? No, no, this is the old style of

Taking care of the business when it comes to punishing your kids. I think it’s best that it

Be gone to the old ways, but it was a different time. You are absolutely right. And speaking of

That different time, of course, I did some digging in newspaper databases and you can see a cartoon

Of a guy eating off a mantle after he had an embarrassing fall while skiing. And I also found

Another article about two Canadians who rode their motorcycles from Montreal to Los Angeles.

And this Canadian newspaper quoted one of them as saying,

It was a great trip and we’re glad to be here, even if we have to eat off the mantelpiece for a while.

Yeah, when your derriere is giving off those cartoon symbols for pain.

Yes, those grolixes, right?

Grolixes, yeah, the stars and the swirls and so forth.

Yeah, those poor guys were saddle sore but happy.

You know, we talk about a lot of language things on this show, and you can go to waywordradio.org and use the search to find out what we’ve already talked about.

And if you don’t find it, you can call or text toll-free, 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 rumbling in the top of Zamboni, it’s our quiz guy, John Chaneski.

Hi, John.

Hi, guys.

Rumbling, rumbling, rumbling slowly, but surely and determinedly to get the job done. Now, I hope

You like this one. This is the second in a series of three quizzes I constructed focusing on double

Letters. We already made new words by splitting an O into two O’s in words like cop that became

Coop. And now our letter mitosis looks at E. I’ll give you a clue to a word that contains an E,

Which, if it splits into two E’s, will make a new word, which is also clued.

For example, to fix the pig’s die, I used the ball-shaped side of my hammer’s head,

Would clue both pen, as in a pig’s die, and peen, as in the head of a hammer.

Ball, peen, hammer. Got it.

Pen and peen, yes. Pen and peen.

So we’re looking at vowel mitosis. I love that expression, or letter mitosis.

Yes, I do too, yeah.

Singly to double E. I think we can do this, Martha.

That’s right.

I know you can.

I think we can.

Now, there are no etymologically related words here.

I’m not going to do fed and feed.

That’s cheating.

And no invite and invitee.

Not good enough.

Yeah, we’d have to talk about ablouts and all that.

Let’s not do that.

Let’s not do that.

Here we go.

The right to exist has been granted to a special breed of honey-making insects in Peru.

B and B.

B and B is a pretty simple one to start off with, yeah.

Oh, so B-E and B-E-E.

Right, yeah.

Here’s the next one.

A decade ago, my daughter was three.

Now she’s a very young adult.

Oh.

So that was 10 years ago?

Right.

And now she’s a teen?

That’s right.

Now she’s 13.

So 10 and teen.

10 and teen.

My friend Scarlett plays the saxophone.

Your friend Scarlett plays the saxophone.

Oh.

Okay.

Red and Reed.

Red and Reed, yeah.

Yes, very good.

I love a nice concise clue.

I have so few of them.

Anyway.

The official ended the race as our boat was stuck on a ridge of coral.

Oh, the official meaning a person?

Yes.

Like a ref?

A ref and a reef?

Yes, the ref ended the race as our boat was stuck on a reef.

Did they have refs in boat races?

Yeah, sure.

Okay, yeah.

We all agree they do.

They have officials.

I don’t know if they call them refs, but they definitely have officials.

For the purposes of this one little universe you’ve just created, they do.

Tiny little mini weavers, this weavers right here.

I’ll wager you’ve never tried borscht as good as mine.

I’ll bet you’ve never tried beets as good as mine.

That’s right. This beet soup is something you never had as good as.

It’s not good English.

I could do with some forest right now.

Cool. Now that’s the quiz.

And I want to give a special shout out to Ben, Ken, and Fred.

I don’t think it would have been so keen if I’d freed myself by using proper names.

So I’m sorry they got left out.

Oh, that’s nice that you had help though, John.

Thanks. We really appreciate it.

Yeah, thanks, John. That was not easy.

But we really enjoyed it.

I’m taking my Zamboni out of here.

Bye, guys.

All right.

And we’d enjoy talking with you, too.

So you can call us, 877-929-9673, to talk about any aspect of language whatsoever.

Or send us an email.

That address is words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Andrea.

I’m calling from West Palm Beach, Florida.

Welcome to the program. What can we do for you?

Well, I have a little ditty that my father used to say to me when I delayed in getting out of bed,

And I never ask him where it came from or how he learned it.

So I’ll just say it to you guys, and maybe you’ll know its source.

It goes like this.

When in the morning you throw moments away, you can’t make them up in the course of the day.

Or you can hurry and scurry and flurry and worry,

But you’ve lost them forever and ever a day.

Oh, that’s nice.

And this was about getting the lead out, hurrying up.

Yes, it was like, I’ve asked you to get out of bed

And now you’re not doing it.

So he’d sit at the end of the bed and say this to me.

I mean, it would please me.

And so I used it also with my children.

But I neglected to ever ask him, you know, if he made that up, if he learned it from his mother or, you know, how he memorized that, because he wasn’t a person of many words.

That’s a sweet memory, nonetheless.

Yes.

Yeah, and you’re going to love this story, Andrea, because this is a little ditty or a form of a ditty that appeared in the book Black Beauty.

This was the book that was published in 1877 by Anna Sewell.

And you may know about it.

It’s the autobiography of a horse, basically.

Yes, I have heard of it.

It talks about the idyllic beginnings, you know, in the meadow with his mom.

And then he is sold and he has this very harsh, terrible life hauling handsome cabs in London.

And then afterward, it talks about his retirement from that and how much better that was.

And Anna Sewell wrote this book specifically, she said, to induce kindness and sympathy and understanding of horses.

And this book turned out to be very, very influential.

It turned out to be one of the best-selling children’s books of all time.

It was published five months before her death.

And so she never really got to know what a tremendous success this book was because it changed the way that people thought about horses and animal rights and cruelty to horses.

And there’s a wonderful passage in this book where she talks about a fellow named Jerry Barker, who was the horse’s owner for a while.

And he was probably the kindest owner that the horse ever had.

And Jerry Barker couldn’t bear for other cab drivers, you know, drivers of horse-drawn cabs, he couldn’t bear for them to just loiter around and then waste time and then be trying to make up time and driving the horse really hard to make up for their idleness.

And so he would sing these little songs to himself, and one of them went, if you in the morning throw minutes away, you can’t pick them up in the course of the day.

You may hurry and scurry and flurry and worry.

You’ve lost them forever, forever in A, which is very, very close to what your dad said.

Well, my father was raised in northern Nebraska on a cattle ranch.

And I guess he was born in about 36, and he was there until probably 1950 when he married my mom.

Joined the Air Force, and finished becoming a doctor.

And then he moved down here to Florida.

So maybe he had that book then on the farm?

I bet he did have that book on the farm.

Yeah, it was such a massively popular book for kids that I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he read that and was impressed by the kindness of this guy who owned the horse for a while.

It sold something like 50 million copies, if not more.

Oh my, I will definitely have to go get it.

I’ll definitely have to get the book.

It holds up remarkably well, and it’s such a snapshot of time and of language, of course.

I recognize that.

But just a really still a remarkable book.

Well, I’m so happy that you could lead me to where that Diddy was from.

And I really appreciate that because I’d neglected to ask him when he was alive.

And so I’m very pleased to learn that it’s from that book.

Well, I’m so glad that you’re carrying on the memory of it.

Thank you so much, Andrea, for your call.

And you take care now, all right?

Yes, you too.

Thank you so much.

Best wishes.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Here’s a term that’s getting more use these days, zebra striping.

This is when you alternate drinking beverages containing alcohol with water, you know, throughout an evening.

You drink something that has alcohol, and then to stay healthier, you drink water.

Oh, interesting.

That’s very cool.

For some reason, what came to mind was when my little sister, who’s five years younger than me, was a little bitty.

She had what we called her KFC, her Kentucky Fried Chicken bathing suit.

It had red and white stripes.

And unfortunately, she would get red and white suntans underneath it.

What?

Yeah, because the sunlight would penetrate the white differently than the red.

And so she would have these ridiculous suntans.

She would look like a chicken bucket.

I just never know where our conversations are going to go, Grant.

Call us with the words you’ve noticed, 877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha and Grant.

This is Hyra from Southern California.

Hey, Hyra, welcome to the show.

What can we do for you today?

Thank you.

I’m calling about my husband’s grandmother, who was born in 1896 in Brewster, New York, lived her whole life in the Mid-Hudson Valley, primarily Gardner-New Paltz area.

And she used the expression, if you weren’t feeling well, she used the expression feeling poosily.

She’d say, oh, you look like you’re not feeling, it looks like you’re feeling a little poosily today.

Maybe you should stay home from school.

And I was just wondering if you can share any insight on the history of that expression.

Oh, wow.

Poozley.

In 1896?

1896, yeah.

And lived her whole life, right?

It’s, you know, near Poughkeepsie, Kingston, 90 miles north of New York City.

And you know it because he knows it.

Yes.

All the cousins, all the grandkids all remember her saying it.

And do they still say it, too?

Like, did she spread this as a family word throughout the generations?

Oh, yes.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

It’s carried on, yep.

I love when that happens.

Do you have any idea how they would write that?

My guess is it would be P-O-O-S-L-E-Y or P-O-O-S-L-Y.

I should add that both sides of her family go back to the 1600s, early 1600s, in that area.

So she’s a descendant of the Dutch Huguenots that settled that area.

So it goes way back.

Perfect.

100% perfect.

You were hitting all the right notes.

Usually when we see it written, it’s often spelled that way.

P-O-O-S-L-Y or L-E-Y.

You know, we talked about this, Martha, on the show in 2009.

And if you remember, at the time, I did not look in H.L. Mencken’s American Language.

Now, this book is well known for having multiple editions.

And only in the fourth edition is there a footnote where he quotes a list of words he received from a fellow by the name of Carl von Schleder of Hackensack, New Jersey.

And every word on the list is obviously Dutch.

And Poozley is in there.

And it’s glossed as whining, W-H-I-N-I-N-G, whining.

Even though it’s not so obviously Dutch as the rest of the list.

All right.

So hang on to that.

And that book came out in 1936.

Then, in 2009, the expert Dutch linguist Nicolena van der Seys, she released a book about the history of Dutch words in English.

And she referenced that passage in H.L. Mencken’s book.

And in her book, which is called Cookies, Coleslaw, and Stoops, the Influence of Dutch on the North American Languages, she didn’t use any of the words from the Macan list because she didn’t find them kind of spread enough in the American languages, including Pusley.

In other words, she didn’t see them as being wholly borrowed into English.

And they’re not really.

Pusley isn’t that common.

You can find it occasionally online.

And I think Martha backed me up here in the history of doing this show.

What have we had?

Maybe a half dozen people ever ask about Pusley?

Yeah, and I don’t know if they were all members of your family.

But so here we have that list from Carl von Schleder mentioned in the Micken book.

But then there’s another list that came out.

I think it was from 1945 that also has Puselik.

And, like the Von Schlitter list, mentions that it’s Dutch and connects it to the word poezelig, which is Dutch.

P-O-E-Z-E-L-I-G.

Now, the problem with this Dutch connection is that word means chubby or plump.

And you’re saying to yourself, how do we get from chubby or plump to feeling poezely?

Now, how would you define the way that your fellow’s family uses Pusley?

What do they mean by Pusley, Hira?

Just feeling poorly.

And that’s actually one thought I had as far as the origin of the word.

But just feeling off, like you’re about to get a cold or you’re just a little nauseous or you’re just feeling icky.

All right.

That’s how she used it.

Now, we’re going to take a little path here on how meanings change.

And this is called semantic shift in linguistics.

So it starts with the Dutch meaning of plump or chubby, which then in the U.S. becomes poosly, meaning soft or oversensitive, which then shifts to whiny or complaining, which then shifts to feeling sick or run down.

And over time, it makes a lot of sense.

It’s just when you jump from meaning plump to feeling sick that it doesn’t make a lot of sense.

It’s the boiling frog idea.

Does that make sense to you here?

Yes, I know.

And especially because you have that breadth of time.

Yeah, the breadth of time, exactly.

Where they all settled in one region.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But my confidence level on this explanation is still not 100%.

But because we have it in written form over about 100 years, I’m feeling really good about this.

That’s wonderful.

And most of the written uses we have historically are from areas historically settled by Dutch people.

I love it.

So if you’re feeling poosley, then you have something to whine about, right?

Yeah.

Exactly.

I treasure both of you and what you and your team do.

So thank you so much.

And thank you for this time.

I really appreciate it.

The family’s just going to love hearing this.

Oh, it’s our pleasure.

Definitely.

Stay in touch, and best wishes to you.

Thank you so much.

All right, take care now.

Thank you, Harvey.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

Call us to talk about language, 877-929-9673.

Hi there, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Allison.

Hey, Allison, where are you calling us from?

Kalamazoo, Michigan.

So my brother recently asked me where my family got the word to noodle, and I’ve used it for as long as I can remember, though I remember there was a website a long time ago called Noodle Bib.

And maybe that’s where I got it from.

But we use it to mean to think on, to ponder, that kind of thing.

Like, let me noodle on that for a while.

And I really don’t know if that’s been a word used for that, you know, other outside of my family or not.

A lot of people are under the impression that to use your noodle refers to the appearance of brains looking like a pile of noodles.

Oh, okay.

I never thought that. I thought cauliflower.

But it doesn’t come from that. It doesn’t have anything to do with its appearance.

It comes from an older word, noddle, N-O-D-D-L-E, which is more in line with the idea of a node, N-O-D-E.

Or a knot, K-N-O-T.

Not quite that.

So it’s not related to noodle as in the culinary item at all.

Nothing to do with pasta.

And you have older forms of the expression to use your noddle, N-O-D-D-L-E, from the 1850s.

Okay.

Is that like noggin?

No, that’s a different word altogether still.

Oh, okay.

But obviously people always knew that if your head was injured that you became ditzy.

And so people always knew that the head was somehow connected to being intelligent.

So many, many sayings have come about over the years telling you to use your head in some form or another.

But one interesting facet of noddle is that it also developed the secondary meaning of being a fool.

But eventually, once noodles became more common in English-speaking cultures, the spelling of the food item kind of collided with the spelling of noddle, meaning your head.

Sure.

And the food item spelling took over the head meaning.

Yep, I can understand that, yeah.

So not unique to your family at all.

Yep.

All right, to noodle.

Well, I love your show.

Thank you so much.

All right, take care, Allison.

Be well.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

If you’re wondering if a word is unique to your family, you can give us a call to talk about it, 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.

George L. O’Lyon is an author and a teacher who’s written in several genres, from children’s books to adult fiction.

But she’s first and foremost a poet, and in fact once served as Kentucky’s Poet Laureate.

And I wanted to share one of her poems from her collection called Back to the Light.

It’s from University Press of Kentucky.

And the poem is called Receiving.

I had no idea how to hold a baby.

Forget instinct.

It doesn’t feel like it looks.

And you were a squirmer and wouldn’t stay swaddled.

Receiving blankets, we called those cloths you threw off, as though we’d held them stretched beneath stars while you fell from heaven.

In the yellow one, with rabbits stamped on, I wrapped you for our first trip out.

You wriggled and stretched and fought with fists when I held you in the crook of my arm.

Laid on my shoulder, you bellied around like a snake.

It was September. Hot, hot.

And you smothered in a drawstring gown and that blanket.

I didn’t have a grip. That much was clear.

And you were on your journey in search of something firmer or freer.

I still do not know which.

Grant, I just love that on so many levels. It’s so vivid.

It is really vivid.

As a papa myself, that poem speaks to me on lots of levels.

It’s so perfect.

It’s such a perfect poem.

It really is.

We’ll put that on our website and link to the book.

Give us the author and title again, please, Martha.

The title is Receiving and is by George L. Allion.

Lovely.

Outstanding.

We’d love to hear about your favorite poets and poetry.

You can email them to words@waywordradio.org or call or text toll-free 877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Marissa Kestel.

I’m calling from Greensboro, North Carolina, station WFDD.

FDD, awesome.

Yes.

What can we do for you?

Well, I had a question for you all about the way that the S is left off when describing change.

Like down here in North Carolina, I’m originally from Pennsylvania, and I moved down here to become an elementary school teacher and did teach money. This was 20 years back.

But I have noticed throughout the years that no matter what the socioeconomic status is of an individual down here that they always seem to leave the S off of the word sense, C-E-N-T, when it comes to describing change and coins and money.

And I wasn’t sure if there was a way to figure out why and where that came from.

So tell me how that transaction goes.

So you’re in the store, you’re buying something and a little bit of some coins come back your way.

What do they say where you hear that?

Well, typically speaking, it would be, they would be readdressing the change that would be given and they would say something like 15 cents instead of 15 cents.

So I always felt like I was like a little snake in my head going, adding the S sound.

Yes. It’s hard to hear on the radio, but it’s the letter before T.

Well, you know, what’s interesting is that you’ve zeroed on a really fascinating element of dialect in that area, particularly in Appalachian English or parts of the South.

It’s a well-established feature of that dialect that when preceded by a numeral, a word that indicates quantity, whether it’s cent or mile or pound or year, you know, he’s 10 years older than his brother.

That S doesn’t play a part there.

And what I find super interesting about this is that it reflects a very old structure in the English language, which is called the partitive genitive.

Now, this goes back to a time when English nouns had different endings to indicate their function.

And the genitive case, the genitive ending, indicated possession.

And so in Old English, to say four miles, you would say feor mila, like four units of the quantity that is a mile.

And then over time, English began losing those case endings.

And by the late 1300s, that partitive genitive had mostly disappeared, but it was preserved among some English speakers.

And it was preserved in Irish and Scottish Gaelic.

And the people who settled in the area where you are tend to use that.

And there’s another element here, which is that you’ll also hear African-American speakers of English.

Many of them use that same construction.

But what’s also interesting there is that that may derive from a lot of the English-based creoles and some of the West African languages that were brought in along with enslaved people.

So there’s a whole lot of history behind this usage.

And I don’t know, I think it’s a cool thing to think about whenever you hear it there.

I agree because there’s a couple of things you said that were on point that I know that on the coastal stretch of parts of southern North Carolina is a very big Irish and Scottish ancestry. That the way that they still speak their diction and their language is often mistaking for people who are directly over because their families came over.

And they locally they call it when they get high tide, they would call it hoi toid.

Yeah, like over there on the Outer Banks.

Yeah.

Yeah, that’s correct.

That’s fascinating.

So a couple more things.

So not having that S is called a zero plural.

So if you Google zero plurals, you’ll come up with a lot more information.

And so what’s happening here, that preservation was made a lot easier because having the number there already tells you that it’s a plural.

So you don’t really need to have the S because the S is redundant.

If I say $5 or he’s 10 foot away, the 10 already tells me it’s plural.

I don’t need to pluralize foot as feet.

True.

It’s redundant.

That is true, however.

And then you talk about something that’s 10 foot tall.

Yeah, we do it differently.

Yeah, it’s a different structure.

And we do that in passing without even really thinking about it.

We appreciate your call today.

Absolutely.

Thank you so much.

I appreciate the information that you provided.

It really did explain an awful lot.

So thank you.

All right.

Take care.

You too.

Bye-bye.

Bye, Marissa.

Bye-bye.

It’s a $0 call.

That’s right.

It’s toll-free to call or text 1-877-929-9673 in the United States and Canada.

Grant, I have one more.

How cold was it?

Okay.

Yeah.

Okay. Grant, that folk etymology was so preposterous.

How preposterous was it?

Even Proto-Indo-European denied paternity.

Oh, that’s terrible, Martha.

This is why we need everybody else to chime in. I’m just, I’m at the bottom of the barrel, y’all.

Help us out here. 877-929-9673.

Hello. You have A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha. How are you? My name is Andy. I’m calling from Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

I’m a big fan of the show. I’ve been listening for a couple of years now.

And I finally had a question for you, but it isn’t really about words.

It’s actually more about punctuation that seems to be functioning as a figure of speech.

So the punctuation in question is quotation marks.

So punctuation or quotation marks, I mean, obviously they’re, you know, used to denote the literal words of someone who’s talking.

But of course, they can be used to indicate sarcasm or somebody not being literal.

And I could give you a few examples if you’d like.

Sure.

So somebody might say your quote unquote friend is going behind your back about that job promotion, kind of a way of being sarcastic or you might say in place of that so-called or supposed.

And of course, you know, when you’re talking to somebody in person, you know, they might do the hand gesture and not even say the quotation marks.

Right, the air quotes.

Yeah, exactly, air quotes.

And so my question, well, I guess a few questions. I mean, I think I understand the concept well, and I think a lot of people understand the concept, but I’m wondering, where did this come from? How long has this been a part of our language? Does it exist in other languages? Kind of anything and everything about this phenomenon.

That’s more than we have time for.

Pull up a chair.

But let me just summarize by saying using some kind of annotation to mark text as doubtful, irregular, uncertain, or to call attention to it goes back as old as text itself, basically.

And the term scare quotes dates only to the 1950s, but that doesn’t mean anything.

We always have to separate the history of a term from the history of the idea because often, as is in the case here, an idea is older than the term for it.

So, for example, scare quotes, as we call them, mark a term is not quite accepted by the writer, but the reasons for it not being accepted can vary widely.

You might see an academic text where something is put in scare quotes simply because it’s a nonstandard term or it’s an archaic term for a concept.

And not because they doubt it, but because it’s the best term that they have at the moment.

Or you might see a term being put in scare quotes because they’re using archaic equipment and they can’t use italics.

You know, there are lots of different reasons for it.

And it’s, you know, I years ago wrote a blog post about the quotes used for emphasis because there’s often what I consider to be a smirking laughter around quotation marks used to emphasize.

Right.

And often because you’ll see these used, say, on roadside fruit stands or hand-lettered signs in rural situations or, you know, something that somebody’s put, improvised to put at a counter to indicate, you know, for your convenience.

And convenience is put in quotes and people will mock the sign because they intentionally misread those quotes as being sarcastic.

But that isn’t the only use of quotes.

Quotation marks have a thousand different uses.

And if you intentionally misread them, that’s on you, not on what the writer intended.

And so anyway, my point is that these kinds of offsetting of information by indicating goes back to the ancient Greeks.

We can see the scribal culture had many, many ways when they were, so they would take old writing and they would rewrite it onto new parchment or onto new lambskin or whatever, papyrus or whatever the material was in order to preserve it or to pass it on to somebody else.

And they would put new notations sometimes because the original was hard to read or because they felt that it had been transcribed incorrectly in the first place.

And so they put notations.

Very similar to what we use today.

And so this kind of thing has been done, again, as long as there’s been writing culture.

It’s interesting that the phenomenon goes back, I mean, at least 2,000 years, it sounds like.

Yeah, yeah.

Longer than that, even, still.

So, Indy, does that help?

Does that answer your question?

Yeah.

No, I mean, it’s definitely interesting.

And I thought especially interesting was the quotation marks to indicate emphasis.

I’ve seen that.

You know, you might see, you know, fresh fruit on the side of the road and fresh will be in quotation.

Right.

Point well taken.

I mean, quotation marks can have a lot of different uses and, you know, you can understand what’s intended.

Yeah.

And I get kind of shirty about it because I just don’t like the sneering.

I figure the sneering for me is a cheap laugh to no end.

Oh, yeah.

This is all very fascinating.

I really appreciate you doing the work and looking into that.

I really appreciate it.

All right.

Take care, Andy.

Keep listening, Andy.

I hope we’ll do.

Bye-bye.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Thank you, Martha.

Thank you, Rand.

Call or text 877-929-9673.

Hey there, you have A Way with Words.

Hi.

This is Tom Price calling from Troy, Alabama.

Hey, Tom.

We’re glad to have you.

What’s on your mind?

I was brought up in the Detroit, Michigan area.

So all through 18 years, I lived up there.

And then I met a woman while I was in the Navy.

And she’s a native of Troy, Alabama.

And one of the expressions that she used, I’m sure she got it from her father, was fat lighter.

And this term referred to, for example, an old house that was made of pine wood.

Like two-by-fours and such, probably southern yellow pine.

But as the wood got old, they would say it turned to fat lighter, which means that it pretty much dried out a lot and became highly flammable, maybe due to the extent of the pine resins in the wood.

But I had never heard that fat lighter before.

Yeah, that’s definitely exactly where I’d expect to see that. So Troy, Alabama is in northern Alabama, right?

No, it’s south. It’s between Montgomery and Dothan.

Oh, it’s in the south. Gotcha.

Southeast, yeah.

So two words, fat, F-A-T, lighter, L-I-G-H-T-E-R.

And there are a couple interesting things about this, three interesting things.

One is there are a ton of phrases or terms for this.

So you might see it as fat lighter or fat wood or light wood.

Sometimes it’s called fat pine and fat lightered.

So it’s lighter with a D at the end.

Yes, I’ve heard that one mentioned also.

Yeah, variance on that.

And you’ll find that definitely in Georgia, South Atlantic and Gulf states, up to Virginia, coastal plain, southern coastal plain into the lower Vermont, Florida, Georgia.

And all of these places share kind of this history of providing resin for tar for a variety of purposes.

I mean, this region was incredibly common to provide tar for shipping and for a variety of other purposes, just historically.

Maybe turpentine?

Yes, exactly. The turpentine belt is what it was known as for a long time.

But the other thing that’s really interesting to me about this is that now we think of that lighter part about using that resin-rich wood.

Because that’s really what we’re talking about.

All of these pine words are just soaked in resin,

And they burn very freely.

And we think about using them as to start a fire,

But the lighter part originally was because they gave a lot of light.

That’s why the light is in there.

It wasn’t about lighting a fire.

It was about giving light.

So it’s a different origin for that L-I-G-H-T that’s in the word.

Yeah.

It goes back quite a way, but it’s really particular just to that part of the country, you know, those Gulf states and the South Atlantic states.

All right.

It makes sense, doesn’t it, Tom?

Yeah, you’ll occasionally find it maybe in Tennessee and Arkansas, maybe, but it just doesn’t really get much further than that.

Probably why I never heard it in the Detroit area.

Yeah, not much call for it there.

Well, Tom, thank you so much for calling and asking that question.

If any more come up, let us know.

I’d be happy to.

Thank you.

All right.

Take care now.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Okay.

Bye.

If you want to talk about language that’s resonant enough to call us, 877-929-9673,

Or email us, words@waywordradio.org.

A Way with Words senior producer is Stefanie Levine.

Tim Felten is our engineer and editor, and John Chaneski is our quiz master.

Go to waywordradio.org for all of our past episodes, podcast links, and ways to reach us.

If you have a language thought or question, the toll-free line is always open in the U.S. and Canada.

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A Wayword Words is an independent nonprofit production of Wayword, Inc.

It’s supported by listeners and organizations who are changing the way the world talks about language.

Although we’re not a part of NPR, we thank NPR stations throughout the United States that carry the show.

And special thanks to our nonprofit’s volunteer board.

Michael Breslauer, Josh Eckels, Clare Grotting, Merrill Perlman, Bruce Rogow, Rick Seidenwurm, and Betty Willis.

Thanks for listening. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. Until next time, goodbye.

So long.

Bye.