What Kids Know and Want to Find Out

Welcome to a special edition of A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. Today we’re listening back to some of our favorite discussions about language, discussions that happen with some of our youngest listeners.

We always get a kick out of hearing from families who listen to the show together. You always wonder, was it the parents or the kids who finally said, hey, let’s call A Way with Words?

Yeah, like how about this one? A mother and a daughter were puzzling over the origin of not exactly a word, but something you see in text messages all the time.

Hi, this is Andrea Warfel and I live in Hazlitt, Michigan in the Greater Lansing area.

Gotcha. Welcome to the show. What’s up?

Well, I’m here with my six-year-old daughter, Neve. I’m raising up a couple of word nerds here and she asked me a very good question the other day that I did not know the answer to, but I said we should call Grant and Martha because I bet they can tell us. Oh, boy. All right, so I will pass you over to Nevi. Here she is. Okay.

Why does XOXO stand for hugs and kisses? Excellent.

Why does XOXO stand for hugs and kisses?

Nevi, what a good question. What made you think about that?

We were texting back and forth with Daddy, who was off working in Detroit, and he wrote back XOXO, and we got to wondering… If the O was for hugs, like the arms around the body, but then why the X for kisses? Because when you go to kiss someone, what shape does your mouth make? Oh!

Yeah. You’re right.

Well, we don’t 100% know for sure why we use X for kisses and O’s for hugs. But the best theory that people who study these things have come up with is that the X used to be a way to sign important documents to show that you were being faithful and honest and true. And you would actually kiss the spot, which kind of confers a blessing upon the document or shows your sincerity. And that X has to do with the cross, the Christian cross that Jesus died on. And in fact, in many cases, you will find people talk about that text not as an X, but as a bunch of crosses, even though they’re on their side. And that’s the best theory that we’ve found so far. So it was a way to sign documents and then you might kiss it to show, kind of make it formal, to formalize it. Kissing is always involved in rituals and things, even now, right?

So the O’s are the hugs.

The O’s are the hugs. Many people just think it was a way to indicate the physical arms and circling something.

Okay, and that’s what we thought, but we just couldn’t figure out where that X came from.

Yeah, so the X is the kiss, though, and the O is the hug.

We’re glad you’re talking about that and raising new word nerds.

Yeah, we try. Her name is even a portmanteau. She goes by Neavey for short. Nice.

My name is Neva Lita, and we were six people together to bring Neva.

Oh, you’re so sweet.

Well, thank you guys for your time.

Thank you, Andrea. Thank you, Neve.

All right. Neve, will you call us again sometime? Yes.

All right. Excellent. Bye-bye. Take care now.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

I love that Nibi already knows that her name is a portmanteau. You know, it’s a combination of more than one name. How cute is that?

So cute. And remember the call from the woman and her son who were playing a word game and they needed a referee? And they got an answer that was surprising.

Hi, this is April Worcester, and I have my son here, Charlie Worcester, and we have a question. Hi, April. Where are you calling from? We’re calling from San Diego, California.

Great. Outstanding. And how old is Charlie?

Seven.

Seven.

Seven years old.

Well, Charlie, it’s nice to talk to you. What is the question?

What’s the community woman? What does canoodle mean?

Canoodle? Where did you hear the word canoodle?

When we were saying letters that start with K.

Hi.

Letters that start with K. Where were you doing this? At home or in school?

Home. Home. Yeah, we were playing the alphabet game where you have to say words that start with a particular letter.

Interesting. And you want to know what canoodle means.

Yes, I said nice. So Charlie gave the word nice. Oh, that’s a good one, starting with a silent K, huh? Yeah. So who said canoodle? Mom. Mom said canoodle. And did she tell you what it means, Charlie? No. She didn’t. I don’t know.

All right. Well, we have an answer, I think.

Yeah. Yeah. So who decided to call the show? Me. You did. No. So you’re a listener to A Way with Words.

Yeah.

Excellent. All right. Well, you know what? Canoodle starts with a C.

So you’re the winner, Charlie.

Yay, Charlie. Way to go, Charlie. Okay. Yeah, canoodle starts with C, like cat. And so you want to know what canoodle means, huh? Well, canoodle means to sort of kiss and cuddle and hug.

Be lovey-dovey.

Yeah, be all lovey-dovey. Yeah, like you might see characters in a movie and they have little cartoon characters and they have little hearts, you know, flashing over their heads or something. If they’re really in love.

Heart eyes and heart beeping out of their teeth chest. Yeah, then you might say that they’re canoodling, and it’s a funny word. We don’t know the origin of it. Because noodle is funny, right? Noodle is funny, right? Yeah. Noodle is funny, and so is canoodle. But it starts with a C. So I lost the round. I think you lost that round. You’re going to have to do all the dishes for a week now, Mom. Well, yeah. So Charlie, congratulations and thank you for your call. We really appreciate it, you two. Take care all.

Yeah.

Right. Thank you. All right. Bye-bye. Bye-bye, Charlie. Bye. That little voice. I know, so cute, right? Yes. Well, now’s the time to make your little voice heard or your big one when it comes to the kind of podcast you like to listen to to.

Go online to wewordradio.org. Click on the donate link and give what you can. If you like what you hear, then help us keep bringing you more episodes. You’re listening to a special edition of A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Martha Barnette. And I’m Grant Barrett. On today’s special edition of A Way with Words, we’re featuring calls from our youngest listeners. Earlier, we mentioned conversations parents and their kids have about language.

And it’s a treat when they start wondering about a word or phrase that they’ve heard a grandparent use.

Hi, my name is Katie. I’m from Tallahassee, Florida.

Hello, Katie. Welcome to the show.

Hi, Katie.

What’s up?

Well, I have a question about a word that my grandfather used to use a lot, al-swanee. And I just found out lately that another close friend of mine’s parents used to say it, too, and I was just wondering what the origin of that word is and what it means.

And you said it was a grandparent of yours? Yeah, my grandfather used to use it.

He used to live up in the mountains of Virginia, and our family friend’s parents lived in Alabama, so I don’t know where this region is a regional thing.

Okay.

So it’s I, Swanee?

Mm-hmm. And what kind of context, Katie, would you hear your grandfather say it in?

He’d say it all the time. You know, if he got frustrated with my grandmother or me, he’d go, I, Swanee, I’m just going to go to my room. Or, you know, everything like that. Was he a particularly conservative person? Yes, he was a gospel singer. He used to be in quartets and he’d sing in gospel and stuff. So he was kind of conservative. He didn’t talk a lot.

Okay. All right. So he’s conservative with his language, too, then.

I see where you’re going with this.

You do see where I’m going. Yes, yes, because swanny is a kind of mild oath. It’s a way of exclaiming without saying anything naughty, without taking the Lord’s name in vain or anything like that. It may actually go back to a Northern English dialect expression, I shall warrant, meaning basically I swear. But I don’t know about your grandfather, but my mother wouldn’t swear. She was a Southern Baptist.

No, my grandfather would never swear. My grandfather, he would never swear.

There you go.

So the Northern English dialect version of it was, I shall warrant. So W-A-R-R-A-N-T. So this is just a consolidation slash corruption slash condensation of those words.

Yeah, I shall warrant, meaning I shall warrant. Swear, but without saying swear. But yeah, my mom was a Southern Baptist from the Blue Ridge, and so she wasn’t about to swear. And it sounds like your grandfather was sort of the same. Yeah, that’s really interesting. Isn’t that cool?

Do you say it yourself now, Katie? Yeah, I say it sometimes.

Do you say it just unconsciously or kind of ironically?

Sometimes I’ll say it unconsciously because he used to say it a lot. And then, you know, I picked it up because I was around him a lot. Oh, I love that.

Carry it on. And he, by the time it got to him, he had hundreds of years of history anyway. And if you carry it on, it’ll just keep going.

Right. That’s great. And thank you, guys. I was just really curious what it was, the origin and what it meant.

Yeah. Yeah, that’s it. It’s a way of swearing without swearing. And it’s what we call a linguistic heirloom in that you’re going to be carrying on your grandfather’s expression.

Oh, that’s really cool. Thanks, guys.

How great is that? Right? I loved what she said about using her grandfather’s phrase without even thinking about it because she’d spent so much of her childhood around him. What a nice reminder that nobody can ever take away from her.

And let’s not forget the times when kids end up teaching the older folks about a word they thought they knew.

Hi, this is Sophia Agostro calling from Omaha, Nebraska.

Hi, Sophia. Welcome to the show. What can we do for you?

So, I have a question about the two words opaque and translucent. In the car one day when me and my parents were driving, I don’t know how we got on the subject, but… we started talking about the two words, opaque and translucent. And I said, well, in, I remember in fourth grade, our teacher told us, we were studying these minerals in these rocks, and there’s some translucent ones. And we didn’t know what the word to describe them was. And our teacher told us it was translucent, so that light could come through, but you couldn’t entirely see a clear picture through. And then, again, in the fifth grade last year, we learned how light traveled and we learned the word opaque. And that meant like a wooden door that was solid. No light could come through. You couldn’t see anything through. And then translucent meant that it was kind of like a lampshade. You know, light came through, but you couldn’t fully see a picture. Then I told that to my dad and he was like, “No.” I thought opaque meant that a little bit of light could come through, but you couldn’t see a full picture. Right. I was like, “No, that’s translucent.” So I didn’t really know and I decided to call you guys.

I gotta say, you sound like a very bright young woman, Sophia, and you’ve got the definitions exactly right, as most of the world understands them. Opaque means that… you can’t see through it. No light passes through. And translucent means that some light passes through, but you can’t make out what’s on the other side, really.

Okay.

And then transparent, the third one that you didn’t mention, means you can see through it completely and make out a clear picture of what’s on the other side.

Yeah. The trans in translucent is a cross, like transfer.

And lucent means it comes from light. It’s a light running across or passing across.

Yeah.

Oh, okay. But the thing that I think we need to say here is that sometimes we all have these misunderstandings about language that don’t get cleared up until really late in life. Yeah. I was telling Martha earlier that I have a friend who thought asymmetrical, meaning not symmetrical, meant symmetrical, like for a long time, well into her 20s. She would say, oh, that’s very asymmetrical. I’m like, no, it isn’t. That’s perfectly balanced.

Sophia, I think you live up to your name. Do you know what your name means in ancient Greek? I think, does it mean wisdom? It does mean wisdom. And therefore, philosophy is the love of wisdom. And Anna, yeah, yeah, I love that name Sophia, so you’re definitely living up to your name. Thank you very much. You’re welcome and thank you so much for calling.

We really appreciate it.

Yeah.

Take care.

Yeah, thank you.

Bye bye.

Alrighty, bye bye. Well, never too old to learn, right? Right. In fact, I won’t even tell you how old I was before I realized that the staph infection is not an infection that’s going around at work.

Did you think that when doctors on TV shows were shouting staph, they wanted the numbers really fast?

No, by then I was already learning Latin, so I knew. Oh, look at you. Fancy.

Well, you know, it’s never too late to show your support for programs that help you keep learning. We’ll be right back with more favorite calls from young listeners.

In the meantime, please take a moment to go online to waywordradio.org. Click on that big donate button and give what you can to help us keep this podcast going strong.

Welcome back to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. On today’s special edition of the show, we’re listening back to calls from younger listeners. And they ask some pretty sophisticated questions, like this one from a teenager with a passion for fashion.

Hi, this is Lily Whitney calling from San Diego, California. Welcome, Lily. What can we do for you? My question is about the word vintage. So I am a collector of vintage clothing, and I was wondering when that word shifted from wineries and vineyards over to just meaning old things. Good.

Yeah, tell us about your passion for vintage clothing.

I have for a long time admired the fashions of the 20th century, and I have attended lots of vintage fashion expositions and hunted through many thrift stores, and I’ve been I am just a connoisseur of old clothing.

So when you talk about the fashions of the 20th century, do you mean the clothes that Martha and I used to wear?

I was going to say, you might have bought some of mine. Well, I’ve recently acquired a pair of go-go boots, which I am proud of.

Oh, nice. Yeah, those aren’t mine.

Yeah. I never had go-go boots. I wanted them.

And so how old are you? I am 14. 14. Okay. Solid question, by the way. Very solid. The nice thing about that is that you understood the two parts of it. One, that it used to come from exclusively mean wineries and wines, and now that it’s moved on to something else. But I would hesitate to say that vintage now only means old. Because what you’ve described to us is having taste and discretion. And you are going through the styles of the past and you’re finding things that still have flair and character and sophistication. Yeah. There’s some residue left behind of an era of… where things were made differently, but they were still beautiful and they could be transformed into something new. So it’s not just old, right? Right. Yeah. Okay. And so does your family drink a lot of wine? Is that how you knew the wine connection?

No, my mother and I were discussing it, and she did tell me about that it originally was… the year that a wine was made. Yeah, and even further back, the vintage was just simply the volume and the type of wine that was made. It was just like the wine that had been vented, that is the vintage, with no particular judgment as to quality. And then later, of course, when they started to talk about a particular vintage, because wine can keep for a while, and particular years or vineyards or terroirs start to have a particular cachet, then the term really started to acquire this notion that we have still with wine, where a good vintage indicates a wine that is special, sophisticated, and people with taste. People with culture are going to recognize that. And then by the early 1900s, we start to see it being branched out and vintage being used for other things that are judged in a similar way where it’s known to have style or quality. And the first use that I can find of vintage being used outside of wine at any great frequency is with automobiles.

Yeah, and it’s interesting too. I mean, we should mention that the word vintage itself goes back to the old Latin word for wine. You know, it’s like vino in Spanish and vineyard in English. It has to do with wine originally, but like a lot of things that happen in English, words are transformed. They’re moved from one domain to another.

And in this case, by the early 19-teens, you can see it pop up where it’s both wine and cars. The particular quote I saw in one journal in 1919, it was about a man who made a business out of selling used automobiles. And it says, to begin with, he and his chauffeur knew a vintage car as a bon vivant knows wines. And I think that we really still see very much with vintage. It’s this idea that you’re only going to appreciate a good vintage automobile or good vintage wine if you’ve got class and style and flair.

Lily, is that your sense of the word or do you have more of a sense of just used clothing, secondhand clothing?

Well, I do know there is a connotation of flair and flair. Some je ne sais quoi about vintage clothing that you wouldn’t say, oh, that’s old. You’d say, ah, this is a vintage item. And that would make it special.

So more of a sense of craft and artistry and… Right.

Because you could go plunder a closet that hadn’t been opened since the 1960s, and not everything in there is going to meet your definition of vintage, right?

Right.

Yeah, some of it is just going to immediately leap out and go, this is gorgeous. This has got something. If you want to know more about vintage clothing and its history, there’s a really great multi-volume work called the Encyclopedia of Clothing and Fashion from 2005. You might be able to find extracts of it online.

I’ll check it out then. Alright, well Lily, thank you so much for calling. Thank you.

Thank you, take care now.

You know what, I bet Lily does check it out.

I think you’re right.

We also heard from a youngster who noticed a certain difference in the text that she and her friend were sending each other.

Hi, this is Eleanor, and I’m calling from San Antonio, Texas.

Welcome, Eleanor. How can we help you?

So, I was wondering if there is a difference between OK, spelled O-K-A-Y, and O.K.

p Period. Oh, good question. What a good question. What got you to wondering about that? Well,

some of my friends, whenever they text me, they say O period K period. But whenever I text them back, I will say O K A Y instead. Does one feel more right to you personally?

It sounds like O K A Y, the longer form feels better. The longer one feels much better to me. Why is that? Does it feel like more like a real word? I guess.

O period K period feels like an abbreviation for something, while O-K-A-Y feels like a real word.

It’s weird, but I think all of these things are true, even though they sound a little contradictory. Let’s break this down. First, if you’re a journalist or a writer, you’re probably going to use a style guide, and your style guide may have advice on which one they prefer. For example, the Associated Press prefers OK, spelled out capital O, capital K, with no periods.

Oh, that’s interesting.

I think the New York Times style guide may also prefer that, and that’s because, in their reasoning… It’s closer to the original form of OK. That’s how it entered the language as an abbreviation for an intentional misspelling of all correct spelled O-L-L-K-O-R-R-E-C-T.

Wow.

Right? Yeah.

Wow.

Yeah. There was this whole trend in the 1830s in Boston where the newspapers were just like intentional. You misspell words and come up with these like ridiculous abbreviations. And that’s the only one that made it all the way to present day is OK.

That is really, really interesting.

I think, yeah, yeah, right?

Yeah, isn’t that wild? It started out as a joke.

There is a really great and very readable book. How old are you, Eleanor? I’m 11. I think you could totally read this and have fun with it by Alan Metcalf. That’s M-E-T-C-A-L-F. It’s the story of OK, I believe it’s called. Just look for Alan Metcalf OK. You can find it on Amazon or any online bookstore. And it’s a really wonderful exploration of how this word entered not only our language, but dozens of languages around the world also use our OK to mean yes or an affirmation.

OK, I will look for that.

How are you spelling that? OK, well, of course, it’s Eleanor. Well, thank you so much for your call. We really appreciate it.

it Thank you for taking my call. That book again is what, Grant? The book is OK, the Story of America’s Greatest Word by Alan Metcalfe. Great book, and it really reads like a story. You know, we didn’t mention one more factor that helped OK succeed in the language. And that was the 1840 presidential election. If you remember, Martin Van Buren was the Democratic candidate for president, and he was from Kinderhook in upstate New York, and his supporters called him Old Kinderhook, which of course has the initials OK, and it was a nice convergence of the OK that already existed, the initials for the sky, and of course the publicity around.

Right. Well, we’ll be back in a moment with more serious questions from young voices.

But first, we’d love to fill your podcast feed with lots more episodes of the show. But to do that, we need your help.

Please take a moment to go online to waywordradio.org. Click on that big donate button and give what a year of this show is worth. 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. We’re continuing today’s special edition of our show featuring some of our favorite calls from younger listeners. It’s really nice to hear when youngsters have a conversation with playmates or siblings about language, and then they get so curious about something that they call us.

I’m Sophia from San Diego, California.

What can we help with?

I had a question about horrific and terrific, because horrific and horrible are both negative and have the same prefix, but terrific and terrible have the same prefix, and one is good and one is bad, and I was just curious about that.

Well, excellent question. What made you think of that?

In the car, me and my sister were talking, and it just confused us.

You really come across something there that’s super interesting about the way words change over time. Do you have any theories?

Not really, no.

Can you think of any other words that are like terrific, that are connected to a negative meaning, but somehow are positive? Awfully. If I said that was an awfully good report that you wrote.

Huh.

That’s a good one, right?

I never thought about it that way.

Yeah, there’s a few of them. And what’s happened to all of these is they’ve done this magical thing in linguistics that we call amelioration. Awfully. A-M-E-L-I-O-R-A-T-I-O-N. Amelioration just means getting better. And what happened was the word terrific back in the day, hundreds of years ago, started to be used to emphasize. You might talk about a terrific war or a terrific person. That’s an even better example because there might be some kind of gentle way of saying they were amazing and they were great, but they were also terrific and that they inspired terror in you.

And very soon after terrific first appears in English, about 100 years, which is soon in linguistic and lexicographic terms, it started to be used to emphasize and intensify other words. And pretty much ever since, there was a period there where it was both meanings pretty much. By about 150, 200 years after it was created in, say, early 1600s, it has almost always been mostly positive or at least neutral in the way that it’s describing other words or situations of things.

Wow, I never thought about it that way. Thank you so much.

Yes.

Yes, Sophia, another example of that is tremendous.

That was one I was going to bring up, too.

Oh, okay. Yeah. You know, which if you wrote a tremendous report, then you should be very proud of it, right? Yeah. But it goes back to the same Latin root that gives us tremble. You know, it has to do with being fearful.

All right. Thank you so much.

So that word is amelioration.

Right. From the Latin word melior, which means better, which is also the root of the Spanish word mejor.

Oh, that makes a lot of sense to me. You know, we get a lot of calls from a lot of kids on a lot of topics, but they really call us about their favorite thing.

So I thought maybe another country made pizza, but Italy made it better. So where did pizza originate?

So you’re saying when you go to, what, a Chinese restaurant, you don’t see pizza?

Yes.

Or when you go to a barbecue restaurant, no pizza?

No.

Okay.

Yeah, Gabriel, you’ve asked a wonderful question that has a whole lot of history behind it. All the way back at least a thousand years in Italy, there was a kind of flatbread that had a name that sounded sort of like pizza. But you know what pizzas we know it didn’t come about in Italy until the 15th century because they didn’t have tomatoes in Italy at all. Tomatoes are native to this part of the world and so when the explorers started bringing back tomatoes in the 15th century then people started using them in different dishes and they weren’t that popular at first. A lot of people thought oh that’s just a gross foreign food let’s not use it but especially in southern Italy they started spreading this sauce on the flat bread and calling it pizza and adding things that they already had which is a good other vegetables.

Yeah. Gabriel, what do you like on your pizza? I like pepperoni and sausage. Sure. Okay. You’re a meat man. Classic. And did you know that they just created the world’s largest pizza here in California? What? Really? Where? I didn’t know that. Is there any left? Are there leftovers? No, this was really cool. This was just a few weeks ago in… In Fontana, California, they made this pizza that made it into the Guinness Book of World Records, Gabriel. And it was about a foot and a half wide, but it was really, really, really long. It wasn’t round. It was like this really long one, longer than a mile.

Wow.

Oh, wow. That’s crazy. How crazy is that?

That’s a lot of tomatoes.

Yeah, yeah. That’s crazy. Yeah, and it weighed more than an elephant. And it was just kind of this crazy thing that all these people did, but then they boxed it up and took it to food banks and gave it away to people.

Well, Gabriel, you asked something I think is also important. Like, why is this such an American tradition? It’s a question for a food expert, right? Why did Americans take so… wonderfully to this foreign dish? Why does it feel so much like ours now? I don’t really know.

Yeah, but it didn’t come over here until the late 19th century in Italian immigrants in the Northeast. Yeah, but it’s a good comfort food, right? Don’t you feel better after you eat it? Yes, I do.

Martha.

Yes, yes, we’re thinking the same thing, right? This always happens with food calls. I’m thinking maybe a nice thin crust veggie pizza with black olives?

Maybe, but what about deep dish Chicago with Italian sausage, spinach, mushrooms, and five cheeses?

Well, maybe this is happening to you, too. But before you order that pizza, please take a moment to go online to waywordradio.org. Click on that big donate button and give what you think a year of this show is worth.