Whistle Pig (episode #1442)

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

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

And I have a riddle for you.

Okay.

Yeah, yeah.

I’m thinking of a five-letter word. You take away the first letter, and the word still sounds the same. You take away the last letter, and the word still sounds the same. You can even take away the letter in the very middle, and it still sounds the same. What in the world could that word be?

Well, it’s not Q because if you take off the Q at the beginning, it doesn’t sound like Q anymore. You have U. Let’s see. Oh, I probably knew this at one time. I don’t know. The word is empty, E-M-P-T-Y. You take away the first letter, you still have empty. You take away the last letter, you still have empty. And you take away the letter in the middle, you take away the P, and you still have empty. Empty.

That’s very clever.

Well, I have some more. I’ll share them later in the show. I’ll go back to find my eight-year-old self. This show is riddled with riddles. 877-929-9673. Email words@waywordradio.org. Hit us up on Twitter @wayword. And talk to us on Facebook in our Facebook group.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi. This is Willie calling from Indianapolis.

Hey, Willie. Welcome. How are you doing?

I am doing fine. Thank you. What can we help you with today?

Well, my wife and I have a bet on if this word is a real word or not. She uses the word unthaw. So if you take chicken or hamburger out of the freezer and she’ll say, take the hamburger out so it can unthaw and we can make dinner. I say that the word is thaw. You don’t have unthaw. You thaw it out. So it’s been an ongoing debate in our family. So we decided to call you so you can tell us who’s right or who’s wrong.

Oh, my, Willie, what’s riding on this?

Dinner for a week.

Okay, and will this be frozen food?

No, I don’t think so. My question for you, Willie, is what is the price of being right with your spouse?

Yeah, exactly. It’s a high price, right? I mean, one way or the other, one of you is going to come out the loser. We got to work on this, and we’re going to figure out a 50-50 answer so you can both be right. How about that?

Okay, that sounds good. I’ve got that for you. I can line that up for you right now. So you take this to her as a peace treaty, and you both do dinner together, all right, for a week.

Okay.

That’s sweet. Here’s the thing. Unthaw is actually a word, and it’s existed as far back as the 1500s. It does mean thaw. It is a synonym for thaw. It’s this strange, strange, strange word. We have a few of these in English where it appears to be the opposite of the thing that it means. But it isn’t. It’s just like a reinforced version of thaw. That un here isn’t so much a negative as it’s emphasizing the reduction of the freezing, the absence of the cold, the unfreezing of the thing, the thawing of the thing. It is so common, actually, that it is in my copy of The Joy of Cooking. They use unthaw when they talk about cooking.

Really?

Yeah, when they talk about unthawing frozen vegetables or unthawing frozen fruit.

No kidding.

Wow. And you said there are other words like that.

I’m thinking of ravel and unravel.

That’s a great word.

Peel and unpeel. Do you unpeel an orange or do you peel an orange?

You do both.

I peel an orange. If I saw unthaw, I would be with Willie on this one. I would think. Here’s the thing. Willie’s question was, is it a word? And the answer is it is a word. It’s a word. He didn’t ask, should we avoid it? He didn’t ask, is it useful in formal writing? Or does the word make sense?

Right. It does make sense. You just can’t overanalyze it. And to pretend that its component parts are somehow the only thing that matter. What matters is how it’s used. So, Willie, it’s a word. It is definitely a word. But she probably shouldn’t use it. She shouldn’t use it in formal writing or speech. Around the house, it’s totally fine.

Okay.

Gotcha.

Yeah. That’s kind of the middle ground for you guys, which is like, thaw is the better choice. See, the problem is here we can’t reanalyze this word and decide that it only means thaw plus un. It means thaw.

Right. Willie, we’re overanalyzing things. This is the life mistake that we make. That’s why we’re here.

Okay. Well, it sounds like that it’s 50-50, so it sounds like it would still be good in my household. I would say the best thing that comes out of this is that you and your wife spend some time in the kitchen together making things that you both love to eat. There are worse things, right, Willie?

They’re much worse things, correct.

All right. Thanks for calling. Let us know how it turns out, okay?

Okay. Thank you so much.

Cheers.

All right. Thanks, Willie. Bye-bye.

Bye.

If you want to talk about language, call us, 877-929-9673, or you can send an email to words@waywordradio.org, and we’re all over Facebook and Twitter.

Not long ago, I was in Mexico for the Writers’ Conference in San Miguel de Allende, and I had an interesting conversation with my taxi driver about speed bumps. Now, he had grown up there in the middle of Mexico and used the word tope, which means speed bump. It’s onomatopoetic. It has to do with the sound of something hitting something. So, you know, you watch out for the topes. We got to talking about how, depending on the kind of Spanish you speak, there are different words for speed bumps. For example, in Argentina, the term is lomo de burro, which means the back of the burro, because it looks like the rounded back of a burro.

My taxi driver was telling me that he had this funny experience where he had a passenger from Puerto Rico, and in Puerto Rico, they say muerto, or a dead person.

Oh, a dead person. It looks like the mound of a grave.

Right, exactly. And so the taxi driver was driving along and his passenger said, oh, look out for the morto in the middle of the road. And the taxi driver was swerving to avoid this dead body in the middle of the road. And I thought that was really fascinating that there’s so many different terms for speed bump.

Yeah, where is it in the English-speaking world that they say sleeping policeman?

Right, sleeping policeman, often in Britain, and silent policeman.

Silent policeman, right.

Yeah. We’d love to hear your encounters with different words in different languages, 877-929-9673, or email us words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, yes, good morning. This is Barb Kehoe. I’m calling from St. Petersburg, Florida. Originally from Louisville, Kentucky, so I’m a fellow Kentucky girl with you.

A fellow Louisvillian, too, and you pronounce it correctly. Louisville.

What, what, nine pronunciations for that city?

Yeah, but the correct one is when you kind of swallow it like you just did, right?

Barb, what’s up? What can we help you with?

I want to thank you guys so much. My husband is from Wisconsin, so you’ve already helped us take care of the tump battle.

Oh, nice.

Tump is an actual word, and a toboggan is both a hat and a sled.

Yes.

You bet.

Yeah, you are enlightened. Which started many fights in our household.

You can’t ride a hat? I’m calling to ask you about a phrase that my mom always used with us. She got it from her mom and her grandmother. And the phrase was, root, little pig, or die. Now, what context would you use that in? What would she use that in?

You would use that in as in, in the afternoon, I would come home from school, and I would ask my mom, what are we going to have for dinner? And she would say, I’ve been busy all day. It’s going to be root, little pig, or die.

Does that mean fend for yourself?

Exactly. It means fend for yourself. And when I told her about this, she said, oh, you’re going to make me sound like a really great mom on the radio is what I’m hearing. But it does go back to her grandmother.

And, of course, now my kids say it, and we’ve got other people who say it that we’ve passed it on to.

But that makes independent children.

That’s how I feel about it.

I do a version of it with my son.

I’m like, yeah, you can have any fruit in the house. Have at it.

Yeah. Basically, yes.

So root, little pig, or die, that’s what she would say?

Well, the older version of this is root, hog, or die.

I’ve never heard the little pig version, but I’m 100% sure that they’re connected.

And it goes back at least as far as Davy Crockett in the 1830s.

The idea was that you didn’t have nicely fenced-in enclosures for your hogs.

You would just set them loose in the woods maybe, and they would have to find their own food.

You can fence in a small bit of woods and put the hogs in there, and they will clear out the underbrush in no time flat.

Is a really great way to get the lower levels all, like every branch, every twig, every leaf, every sprout all just completely cleaned up.

But yeah, it’s really as simple as that. You let the hogs go, and if they can’t feed themselves, then they just don’t make it.

Because you’re not going down to the feed store to get a 50-pound bag of feed for the hogs, right? There’s only so many slops from the house to go around.

They’ve got to fend for themselves in the woods.

Yeah, I’m looking at the Dictionary of American Regional English, which says that the idea is work hard or suffer the consequences, too.

Yeah. So not just for food, right?

Yeah. Yeah. Root hog or die.

Was it Mojo Nixon, the kind of, what was it called, a hillbilly, rockabilly performer who used that as one of his slogans, root hog or die?

I don’t know. I never heard it.

I have heard it in a, I heard it one time in a John Wayne movie as the root hog or die.

And it seemed like it was more in not, you know, it was more in go find your own way.

Yeah. Not necessarily a food type of thing.

That’s right. Do what it takes.

Whatever it takes to get by, you need to do that because other people aren’t going to be there to make it happen for you.

So do you use this phrase yourself?

I do use it.

And my girls use it.

One is away at college. One’s in middle school.

So they know exactly what it means.

And my older one who is away at school has used it on her roommates when they say, what are we having for dinner?

They have learned now exactly what it means.

It’s up to you.

Mm—

I like that.

Well, Barb, there you go.

Thanks so much for the call.

Thank you guys so much.

Y’all have a wonderful day.

Yeah, you too.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

We haven’t talked about the word smombie.

Smombie?

Smambi. It’s a combination of smartphone and zombie.

Oh, no.

It supposedly refers to people who run into walls or don’t focus on conversations and meals because they’re looking at their smartphone.

Now, you may not have heard of Smambi, but supposedly in Germany it was the 2015 Youth Word of the Year.

That’s according to the German publisher Langenscheid.

However, I can see you putting your skeptical hat on because…

I’m knitting my eyebrows. I’m making a big sweater.

I thought you were knitting your skeptical cap.

The selection process for the Youth Word of the Year involves asking young German speakers to submit their favorite slang online and then later vote for their favorite among the submissions.

And then a jury of media representatives, teachers, and other folks take the top 10 words and select the Youth Word of the Year.

Now, the problem is that most German youth don’t even know the word smambi.

No.

As you might have suspected, it’s sort of a…

Manufacture term.

The manufactured word.

Yeah, the runaway winner, according to the actual votes of young people, was the word merkeln, which means to do nothing, to make no decisions, to issue no statements.

Oh, after Angela Merkel.

Right, after her decision-making style.

So it sounds like the choice was actually weighted by older folks on the jury.

You know, kind of, as you said, a manufactured term.

But we know the creature of the phone zombie, even if we don’t know that word.

Oh, we sure do.

We sure do.

The smombie.

I like it as a word.

I’m going to start using it, smambi.

Although I also like one of the also-rans for this German Youth Word of the Year contest, and that’s maulpesto.

Maulpesto?

Bad pesto?

It’s M-A-U-L, which means mouth.

Maulpesto.

It’s a word for bad breath.

And it literally means mouth pesto.

Isn’t that just, that’s the perfect word for bad breath.

Maulpesto.

Like flecks of cilantro still stuck to your teeth.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Anyway, smambi, word of the year in Germany among youth.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org or hit us up on Twitter @wayword.

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 here’s that handsome man, John Chaneski, our quiz guy.

Hi, John.

Oh, thank you.

Hi, Grant.

Hi, Martha.

What is up?

What is going on?

You know, I’ve been thinking that I’ve been in radio for over 10 years now, I think.

Really?

Yeah, mostly thanks to you guys here on A Way with Words, so thank you very much.

Thank you.

Nevertheless, there is one distinct issue that has always been my bugaboo.

To this day, audio engineers sometimes tell me that I pop my P’s.

Oh, yeah.

I’m a serial offender, it seems.

So I’ve decided to challenge myself with a quiz that’s all about P’s.

Okay.

Every answer to the following clues is a two-word phrase in which each word begins with P.

Two-word phrase where each word begins with P.

Got it.

For example.

Like pepper pot or something like that.

Very good.

Okay. That would be a good one.

Okay.

For example, this J.M. Barrie character is friends with Wendy, Michael, John, and Tinkerbell.

That would be?

Peter Pan.

Peter Pan.

That’s correct.

Very good.

Now, I will try, try not to pop my Ps, so keep on me about this.

Okay.

Okay.

One of the other stimuli for this quiz is a cartoon character who made his debut in the 1935 short, I Haven’t Got a Hat.

Cartoon character, 1935 short, I Haven’t Got a Hat.

Pecker?

No, not Woody Woodpecker.

That’s W’s.

Porky Pig.

Yes, exactly.

Very good.

I didn’t know that.

He’s the oldest, oldest continuing Looney Tunes character.

I did not know that.

Wow.

That’s really terrible.

It was good.

Props to the pig.

Very good.

Props to the pig.

What would you call an individual who seems to want to ruin everybody else’s good time?

He can be called a wet blanket or this alliterative term.

A party pooper.

Yes, exactly.

This fictional character was obviously a farmer who one day harvested a quarter bushel of green veggies.

How they ended up fermented in brine while on the vine, I’ll never know.

Peter Piper.

Peter Piper picked a pack of pickled peppers.

Very good.

These rather dated words refer to a way of ease and sensual enjoyment.

Some puppy paradise?

Puppy pile.

Puppy pile.

Now we know what you enjoy.

First, you get puppies, and then you make a pile, and the puppies play.

It’s nice.

That is nice.

It’s what?

Sometimes folks will say, oh, that will lead you down the—

Primrose Path.

That’s right.

Very good.

This is the highest summit of the front range of the Rocky Mountains in North America.

It’s in Colorado.

Pikes Peak.

Pikes Peak.

Yes, good, good.

According to one source, among towns the same size, Lyndhurst, New Jersey has more of these eating establishments than any other.

Good for me.

Pizza parlors.

That’s right.

Pizza parlors.

Yeah, I’m going to go there.

The easiest way to describe this would be an instrument songs musician.

An instrument without a musician.

A player piano.

Yes, very good, Martha.

Nice.

Some of the most famous wearers of this kind of hat are Buster Keaton, Art Carney as Ed Norton, and Bryan Cranston’s character Walter White on Breaking Bad as Heisenberg.

Pork pie?

Yes, nicely done.

I was going to say Panama.

Does Porky Pig wear a pork pie hat?

I think so.

Maybe he used to.

With the little ribbon dangling.

Yeah.

Looks like a Soul Boys hat.

Now, mine used to be the auditorium of the school where I went to kindergarten.

Now it’s the gymnasium where my son Max goes to middle school.

Primary school?

No.

Priest?

No.

Recess?

That was too cryptic.

Sorry.

Playground?

It’s where I vote.

Oh, polling place.

Yes, it’s my polling place.

Yeah.

Polling place.

Nice.

Thank you.

All right.

Very good.

Well, I think I got through all of those questions with a minimum of popping any Ps.

And that’s because I put a minimum of P’s in the questions.

Thanks, John.

I really appreciate it.

This is John Chaneski, our quiz guy.

We’ll talk to you next week.

Bye, John.

Next week, guys.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

This is the show about words and how we use them.

Call us about it, 877-929-9673, or send your questions an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name’s Jennifer, and I just had a question about if there’s a word for, or I think there should be a word for when you try to do something quickly, you take a shortcut instead of doing it the right way, and it ends up taking longer than it would have if you’d just done it correctly the first time.

You sound like my mother.

That was my life.

What do you call it?

Yeah, and Jennifer, where are you from, by the way?

Oh, I’m sorry.

I’m from San Antonio, Texas.

Okay.

Okay, great.

And in San Antonio, Texas, what do they call it?

Do they have a word for it?

You’d think they would.

We’ve got all kinds of words here, like mosey, stuff like that.

But I was thinking something like waylaid, but then like speedlaid, but then that has a totally different connotation.

So I didn’t want to go that route.

You know, I’ve always called those long cuts.

Yeah, that’s the one I’ve heard, too.

As opposed to shortcuts.

But Jennifer, this happens to you a lot.

Does it happen to you in the grocery line, too?

Like you always choose the longest line or the slowest moving line?

It does happen to me a lot.

And it actually, the reason I thought of this, because I was trying to drive somewhere and I made that mistake.

And I ended up having to completely turn around and go back the opposite direction and get back on the road I was originally on.

And it ended up taking a lot longer.

Sometimes it works.

So I don’t know.

Maybe the times it works kind of compensate for the times it doesn’t.

-huh.

Yeah.

But what if they all worked?

What if every time you took a shortcut actually was a real shortcut?

That would be maximum.

That would be amazing.

Yeah.

Yeah, I’d be like the most efficient person on the planet.

We would all bow down to you.

That’s right.

And not only that, I mean, there are a lot of benefits sometimes, right?

You get to listen to a lot more great public radio, for example.

Right?

Yes.

I was listening to your show when that happened, and I thought, I will go to work for this.

Martha’s call.

Now, that happens to a lot of people.

They get all caught up in the nouns and adjectives, and they go.

Long cut’s the one I know for sure.

Probably our listeners will call an email with other words for when you take a shortcut that turns out to be the longer way.

Yeah.

Another version I’ve heard is long-paced.

Long-paced?

Like the direct opposite of shortcut is long-paced.

Oh, that’s clever.

But I’ll give you one more word, Jennifer, that goes all the way back to the 17th century.

There is the word circumbendibus.

Circumbendibus.

Oh, wow.

Circumbendibus.

So that’s around the bend?

Well, yeah, it’s sort of a joking Latinized word.

Oh, fake Latin?

Yeah, yeah, fake Latin.

It’s sort of a glorified way of talking about, you know, going the long way around.

Taking a circumbendibus.

So you could say that?

I’m going to try to say that, like circumvendibus.

Yeah, that should kill some time while you’re lost.

Yeah.

Jennifer, thank you so much for your call.

Well, thanks, guys. You have a great day.

All right, cheers. Bye.

Okay, thanks. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

What do you call a shortcut that ends up going all the way around Robin Hood’s barn?

Call us 877-929-9673 or send it to us an email.

That address is words@waywordradio.org.

Grant, this is really great.

I have a homemade riddle for you.

Okay.

This one comes from Amanda Burican of Oconomowoc, Wisconsin.

Oconomowoc.

And she made up this riddle.

I love it.

Here it goes.

I begin at the end.

I am constant but never the same.

I am frequently captured but never possessed.

What am I?

I begin at the end.

I begin at the end.

I begin at the end.

I’m constant but never the same.

I’m frequently captured but never possessed.

Whoa, I don’t know.

I’m thinking time, a river, breath, air.

This is pretty good.

Life, photos.

Oh, gosh.

You’re so close.

You always say that and I’m usually very far.

Well, it kind of depends.

I open at the end.

It’s a snitch, a golden snitch.

No.

I don’t know.

What is it?

A sunset.

I begin at the end.

I’m constant but never the same.

I’m frequently captured but never possessed.

And judging by my Facebook feed, I mean, everybody’s posting sunset photos all the time.

That’s the thing in San Diego, right?

Right?

But I really like that.

That’s a homemade riddle.

It should be on Etsy.

It feels like it’s been around for a thousand years.

That’s how good it is.

I know.

Way to go, Amanda.

Well done, Amanda.

We’ll take your riddles.

Try to stump us.

You don’t even have to send us the answer until a little bit later.

877-929-9673.

Or put in an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Katie calling from East Thetford.

Is this Grant and Martha?

It is, yeah.

It is indeed.

Where are you calling from, Katie?

Sorry, East Thetford, Vermont.

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

Well, I was talking to a friend of mine.

We were talking about the upcoming election, and I referred to a particular candidate as being a little bit too jingoistic for my taste.

Then my friend looked at me quizzically, and I had to explain what it meant.

So I was thinking, well, maybe it’s just a word that I use, but then talking to my brother, and he used the word, too, so I didn’t know if it was just my family likes to use words that nobody else uses or if it’s a word that’s considered archaic or if it’s still really in use.

And Katie, what do you mean by jingoistic?

I think of it as being overly patriotic, kind of the whole my country, love it or leave it sort of thing.

And if you don’t agree with me, you’re just not a real patriot.

Right, which is a hard charge to defend yourself from.

So jingoism has a particular edge to it.

Yeah, because I sort of believe that if you really love your country, you don’t miss the flaws also.

Yeah, I think of it as being a parent to a child, which is you criticize your child quite a bit, but you still love them with all your heart.

Right. You want to make them better.

You want to make them better, yeah.

Make good adults out of them, right?

Yeah.

So your curiosity is, what is jingoistic? What is jingoism? Where does it come from? Is it a rare word? Is it just something that the two of you use?

Yeah, is it still in use, or is it something that just only a handful of people know?

It’s something that journalists love.

Definitely newspaper columnists love. You do find it in people who are heavily into politics. It’s never been all that common, but it’s never been completely unused either. It’s definitely not archaic. Just do a Google News search, for example. You’ll find several hits every week somewhere in the country or somewhere in the English-speaking world. And it’s got a curious history. It comes from the United Kingdom, from, I guess you’d call it a drinking hall song.

Oh, yeah.

There was a particular war.

I believe it was the Russo-Turkish War.

And Britain was involved.

And there was a song that came out that had a verse that something like, we don’t want to fight, but by jingo if we do, we’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, and got the money too.

And this song was a huge hit.

And that particular word, so this is 1800s, 1878-ish, something around there.

Yeah, you can find recordings of this song.

You have to have a mug in your hand and swing your hand.

I mean, it compels you to do that.

And it’s by somebody called Gilbert McDermott.

So just look for the By Jingo song by McDermott, and you’re bound to find it on YouTube or somewhere else on the Internet.

But that particular line, By Jingo If We Do, caught the fancy of people.

And not much later, not even a year later, people who were jingos were people who had this strong national pride that we were going to fight and win,

Or the British were going to fight and win and come out on top in that battle.

And before you know it, it converted into other forms of speech, and we use it even today.

So you’re part of a long tradition, 100 plus years.

Yeah, my father was a very newspaper type person.

I mean, I still get the newspaper.

I think my brothers and sisters will read it online.

But my father used to get several newspapers.

You think that’s who you got it from?

Probably.

Bi-jingo or high-jingo was a phrase for a long time.

It’s kind of a, that is an older form of, what should we call this, a minced oath,

Kind of a really super polite way of saying by God or by Jesus.

Right, yeah.

So bi-jingo itself goes back even older.

People say bi-jingo, but that’s usually I feel like they’re saying,

Bi-jingo, let’s put on a show!

Yeah, exactly.

But they’re connected.

And by Jingu in the song comes from that expression, which is much older,

And is one of probably 50 to 100 different ways we have to say by God or by Jesus in English

Without actually using those words.

Cool. Thank you for your call, Katie. Glad to help.

You’re very welcome.

Take care now.

Thanks for talking to me.

Take care. Bye-bye.

If you’ve got a question about words and language, give us a call, 877-929-9673.

Email us, words@waywordradio.org.

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Where we have a huge online community of people just like you talking about language.

I came across a British expression that was new to me that I thought was worth sharing.

It comes from rugby and soccer, or football in the UK,

And this is to kick something into touch.

Do you know this one?

No.

If you kick it into touch, you take something you were going to do and you postpone it or decide to deal with it later.

So you’ll often find it used figuratively outside of the sport,

But it comes from this whole idea of kicking a ball where you can actually pick it up and then toss it back in later.

We’re going to kick this into touch for now, and we’ll talk about renovating the basement next year.

Okay, yeah.

Kicking it into touch.

Yeah, it makes sense off the field.

I’m trying to picture what that looks like on the field.

Kicking it into touch.

Well, unfortunately, I don’t know rugby or soccer all that well, but that’s how I understand it.

It’s where you kick it to where it can be picked up by the hand and then tossed back in.

Oh, okay.

So like kicking the can down the road then.

Yes.

The equivalent.

Equivalent of kicking the can down the road.

Okay.

877-929-9673.

Hi.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi.

This is Lexi Kirby.

I’m calling from Denver, Colorado.

Hi, Lexi.

Welcome to the show.

What’s up?

What can we do for you?

So I actually had a question about something I saw on Twitter the other day.

I was reading the tweets between Wiz Khalifa and Kanye West,

And one of them said something about talking out the side of their neck at someone.

And I used to be a substitute teacher in Waco, Texas,

And I heard my kids say this a lot, but I never knew what it meant.

I knew it wasn’t a good thing, but I wasn’t entirely sure what it meant.

So this beef between Wiz Khalifa and Kanye West is pretty rancorous, if I remember right?

Yes. Yeah, they weren’t happy.

Yeah, for those of us who aren’t following their feud, what was up with that?

I guess one had accused the other of not being totally true to the music they said they were making,

And then it just got very personal and ugly very quickly.

Oh, okay. Okay. And so one of them accused the other of talking out of the side of their neck?

Yes, talking out the side of your neck.

When your kids used it in class, first, what age were they? And second, what do you think they meant?

They were usually in high school. And it usually was when they were fighting with each other.

One of them would say, like, quit talking out the side of your neck at me or something like that.

And kind of like, you know, say it to my face.

I don’t know if that’s what they meant.

It sounded similar to that.

Any chance that they were African-American kids?

Yes, a lot of them in Waco are.

Okay. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

This is a historically African-American term.

It goes back at least to the 1970s, probably much older.

And it’s a variation on talking out the side of your mouth,

Which is to say something that you can’t back up,

Almost to kind of gossip in the face of someone,

To say a little like gaslighting,

Where you’re telling lies and trying to act as if a certain kind of thing are true

And there’s no evidence that it’s true at all.

But it’s generally about talking trash about another person.

But at the side of your neck.

Yeah, it’s just a variation on mouth.

Right, it’s like it got moved down.

Yeah, it’s an odd phrasing for sure, but it’s basically the same.

We’ve got quotes from 1975.

One slang dictionary glosses it as to speak foolishly, but that’s really broad.

Usually there’s a great deal of distrust there of what is said.

It’s a lie, maybe a lie that can’t be proven or a lie that is difficult to refute, which is the worst kind of lie.

Right. That makes sense.

Well, that’s a new one on me.

Yeah. Yeah. So at least 40 years of history on this, but probably much more than that.

Lexi, thanks a bunch for calling.

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me on.

Take care now.

Take care. Bye-bye.

Bye.

If you’ve got a call about language, 877-929-9673,

Email words@waywordradio.org,

Or ask your questions on Twitter or make your comments @wayword.

You know, Grant, there have been times on this show

When you and I have both said the same word at the same time,

And you say…

Jinx, you owe me a coat.

Exactly.

But I found another version of this from many years ago in Ozark country.

I found this in a journal of folklore.

When two children happen to say the same word simultaneously, they stop in their tracks and they hook the little fingers of their hands together, their left hands.

And they very solemnly recite the following, speaking alternate lines.

Needles, pins, triplets, twins.

When a man marries, his trouble begins.

When a man dies, his troubles end.

What goes up the chimney? Smoke.

And then they loosen their hands and go on with play as if nothing ever happened.

Oh, interesting.

Yeah, the pinky hook is a really common feature of children’s folklore.

Indeed, yeah.

But the rhyme I haven’t heard before.

Yeah, I know.

And then that little ending with what goes up the chimney? Smoke.

By the way, you owe me a million cokes.

You owe me so many cokes.

You have a lot of caffeinated evenings in your future, it sounds like.

Give us a call, 877-929-9673.

More conversation about what we say and why we say it. Stay tuned.

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, you remember that call we got from Joel, who is part of the cast and crew of The Lion King on Broadway.

Yes, yes. Auntie.

Yes, yes. He was asking about auntie and auntie because a lot of the cast and crew sit around talking about whether auntie can be used for someone who’s not necessarily a blood relative.

Right. Remember that? And he was wondering if it was a particularly African-American usage.

And we asked people to chime in on this, and boy, howdy, did we get a ton of emails and phone calls about this.

And we heard from people from all over the world who were talking about how, yes, indeed, the use of the term aunt or auntie or aunt or auntie is used in many cases, in many cultures, as a term of respect for an older woman who’s not necessarily the sibling of your mother or your father.

We heard from people talking about its use in Uganda, Kenya, Cameroon, South Africa, India, the Philippines, Bangladesh.

We also asked if this were a generational thing, if maybe younger people weren’t saying this.

And we heard from Bill Robertson in Washington State who said that his in-laws are Japanese and Hawaiian and they use that all the time.

We also heard from Barbara Gunther in Wyoming who is a teacher next to the Wind River Reservation there.

And she said all of the Native American children in her classes say auntie to refer to an older woman, whether they’re a biological relative or not.

And it’s, as I said, it’s a gesture of respect.

And it’s not somebody who’s a stranger, but somebody who’s a close friend of the family.

And I wanted to share this email from Kareth Flash.

She writes, I’m originally from Kingston, Jamaica.

And in my family, it was never OK to call an adult by their first name.

Close family friends were called aunt or uncle, and other adults not as close were just mister and missus.

This is still true today, as the children of my close friends now in their 20s still call me aunt, and I still call my mother’s friends aunt and uncle.

And then she goes on, my daughter, who was born in the USA and lived here all her life, was at first a little confused.

When we visited Jamaica, she heard so many adults being called aunt and uncle.

She didn’t understand how come she had so many relatives when she thought I had just two siblings.

That’s good. That’s awesome.

So it actually sounds like people who don’t use aunt or auntie or aunt or auntie, it sounds like we’re in the minority.

Well, maybe, yeah.

Certainly in the Anglo culture, it’s far less common to use auntie or auntie as a term of respect, right?

Yeah, for somebody who’s not related to you.

I find that fascinating.

You can see this, by the way, in the television show Hawaii Five-O, the new version.

They do actually call the older Asian relatives or older Asian friends uncle or auntie as a term of respect.

Oh, do they?

It’s funny, yeah.

So you can see it pop up here and there authentically in pop culture as well.

By the way, we haven’t talked at all about aunt and aunt as pronunciations.

And it turns out that aunt is common throughout most of the country, but aunt is far more common in the Northeast.

But there are pockets here and there where aunt is, and usually in the larger metropolitan areas where aunt is going to be heard.

But aunt is by far and away the main pronunciation.

I changed mine, by the way.

You changed what?

I grew up as an aunt-sayer, but I started saying aunt when I lived in New York City for a long time.

Yeah.

Oh, no kidding.

And I’m conscious of it now.

It feels a little, now I’m kind of defaulting back to aunt now that I’m in California.

Is that right?

Okay, but you don’t use aunt as a gesture of respect to a woman you’re not related to, right?

No, I don’t.

Yeah, I didn’t grow up that way either, but I’m just—

Being a white American, for the most part, that’s typical for a white American not to do that.

Right, and I’m just fascinated.

Once again, it underscores the paucity of kinship terms.

If you have more comments about auntie and auntie, by all means give us a call, 877-929-9673, or send everything an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Beth. I’m calling from Las Vegas, Nevada.

Hey, Beth.

And I was just wondering about the term supper versus dinner and maybe the origin of it.

You’re from Las Vegas?

I’m actually from Wyoming, but I’m going to school in Vegas right now.

What do they do in Wyoming? What’s dinner and what’s supper?

Well, why I’m asking, actually, is because my mom always refers to supper as the last meal of the day and dinner as whatever the largest meal of the day is.

She’s actually from South Dakota.

But we miscommunicate all the time because she’ll invite me over for dinner when she actually needs lunch.

Oh, really?

Oh, interesting.

And so you show up at the house?

Really late.

Well, she’ll send me a text saying dinner is in a half an hour and it’ll be 11 in the morning.

Oh!

Yeah, but that’s interesting that you are culturally different than your mother on these words.

Well, yeah, I mean, so she and her whole side of the family say it that way, but, I mean, everyone else I’ve ever met doesn’t use it that way, so.

There was a bunch of data gathered by Bert Vox.

He’s a dialect guy and great linguist, good fellow, years ago, in the 90s, was it?

And it was recently remapped by Joshua Katz at North Carolina State University.

One of the dialect questions was, what’s the difference between dinner and supper?

And so if you look at this map, on the West Coast, this whole big region is, they don’t use the term supper.

And it kind of graduates to the east, you know.

The further east you get, the less sure they are about whether or not they use the word supper.

Wyoming is kind of a mishmash.

It does say there’s no distinction and they have the same meaning, at least with this map.

And then there’s this whole big red part of the country where there’s no distinction and they mean the same thing.

And then there’s these little pockets of like yellow where supper is an evening meal and dinner is eaten earlier.

And that sounds like what your mother uses.

Yeah. Is South Dakota one of those places?

Yes, it is.

South Dakota, North Dakota, and Nebraska.

Oh, okay.

That’s where she’s from?

Yep.

There we go. We’ve explained it.

Yeah.

And it’s really, it’s like, one interesting thing is like, you’ll get pockets of interesting things happen like around Northern Virginia, Maryland, D.C., Delaware, in that region, they don’t use the term supper.

But all around them, people think that there’s no distinction between supper and dinner.

In my vocabulary from Missouri, I’m firmly in that there’s no distinction.

Dinner and supper are interchangeable.

In my experience, dinner is always something more formal.

It’s an evening meal, but it’s more formal.

Supper is something you have around the table with your family.

Dinner is maybe you invite friends over to dinner.

You go out to dinner.

I know that.

But I would never, never say dinner for lunch.

I know that dinner.

Yeah.

But I also know the lunch dinner.

I know both dinners.

You know the lunch dinner?

I have them both, yeah.

But they’re both very clear to me from context only.

But standing alone as individual words, it’s impossible to say which one is met.

Well, exactly.

Do you go out to supper?

Yeah, that’s a good question.

I’ve never heard that, but maybe.

Or do you go out to dinner?

You go out to dinner, Beth?

Yeah.

Well, you know what, Beth?

I am sure that we’re going to hear from fellow listeners about this with lots of opinions about what is dinner and what is supper.

And I just want to say to all of you who are about to email and tweet and call, just know that there’s a lot of varied experience in this country.

Just accept it.

Beth, thanks for calling.

The email box is about to explode.

Thank you for having me.

Yes.

All right.

Take care.

All right.

Bye-bye.

If you’ve got an opinion on the difference between dinner and supper, what time of day, what kind of meal, formal or informal, whether or not they’re the same or different, give us a call.

877-929-9673.

Email us the long, long opinion to words@waywordradio.org or hit us up on Twitter @wayword.

Let’s do it.

I have another riddle for you.

Okay.

How do you make the number one disappear?

How do you put the L in front of it?

It becomes alone.

Oh, that’s pretty good.

I was thinking of another letter.

What?

N for none.

Oh, that’s good, too.

That wasn’t even the letter I was thinking of.

This is good.

Okay, you get one more.

This is almost a hat trick.

One more letter to make one go away.

The past tense.

Gone.

Put a G.

It’s gone.

Well done, Grant.

One is gone.

One is gone.

Very nice.

I’m impressed.

That was very good.

I wonder if there are any other tone.

No.

Well, I just have to run through the alphabet.

Yeah.

Phone.

Phone us.

P-H-O-N-E.

Phone us.

877-929-9673.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi.

My name is John Zirinia, and I’m calling from central Tennessee, your big Southport National Rec area.

Oh, yeah.

I’ve been there.

I love that place.

Hi, John.

What’s up?

Well, I had a question about language, and this time it’s about an unofficial map of how we call animals different things in the United States.

Specifically, I grew up in Wisconsin. I went to the University of Wisconsin at Madison. And up there we call woodchucks woodchucks. They’re marmots. Marmots are woodchucks. And I discovered when I moved to the south, somewhere around Tennessee, and it’s not in Kentucky, but somewhere in Tennessee when you go south, people start calling woodchucks whistle pigs. And I’d never heard of a whistle pig. So how did that happen? And is there an unofficial map? Is there a whistle pig line, just like there’s a Mason-Dixon line?

You know what, John? There is. There is a map. There’s a whistle pig line. Yes. There is a map in the Dictionary of American Regional English, which has a whole long entry for whistle pig, meaning that kind of animal, a groundhog or marmot, woodchuck.

Doesn’t marmot sound like a meet-up word, though?

Marmot?

Yeah, marmot, rather than like the official name of an animal.

Marmot. You know, it goes back to Latin, I think, all the way back to Latin for mountain mouse.

So this map is—

Yeah, this map is astonishing. So am I reading this correctly? It looks like it’s all along the Appalachian Mountains.

Totally, totally.

So eastern Tennessee then, eastern Kentucky.

Yeah, it is in eastern Kentucky for sure. And yeah, it just maps out perfectly on the Appalachians. A little bit of Pennsylvania though.

Yep.

And what’s this Idaho thing, right?

Idaho?

It looks like it’s a different animal. Prairie dogs or ground squirrels.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

These animals go by lots of different names. But I love the name whistle pig. Have you ever heard one of these, John?

I’ve seen them. I’ve never heard them whistle.

Do they whistle?

I’ve never heard them wink like a pig. I don’t know what it comes from.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

They do whistle. In fact, they sound like birds. They actually sound like birds tweeting.

Yep.

I’m sure you can go on YouTube and listen to whistle pigs.

Yeah, yeah.

And play it on your phone. Go out into the woods. There you go. Play it on your phone and see what happens.

Yeah.

But whistle pig, which is such an odd name for, it’s a tiny rodent, right?

Well, right. Pig may be not always about the porker, right?

Right.

Well, yeah, it falls into that line of animals that are named for what they look like. Like the word porpoise comes from Latin porcus piscis, which means pig fish.

Pig fish. You know, whistle pig. Ground hog. I mean, it’s not really a hog, right?

Yeah, so.

John, thank you so much for your call, sir. Thank you very much for your time. I appreciate you answering my question.

Yeah, sure.

Bye-bye.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

We talk about it all the time on the show, but the DARE Dictionary, the Dictionary of American Regional English, has a bunch of maps like these. It’s at daredictionary.com. Your library may have it. This is a great work of lexicography.

It is. This is American history in language form. It’s nightstand reading for me, actually. I love it.

Nerd!

Whistlepig.

Call us about your animal questions, 877-929-9673, email words@waywordradio.org, or tell us on Twitter at WayWord.

Did you see on our Facebook page that Michelle Harris Abramson posted a photo of something that she saw at the grocery store? And it’s a sign at her local market that says, we now offer boxes to bag your groceries.

We now offer, yeah, it’s funny.

Isn’t that nice?

So you don’t have to bag your grocery with bags?

Right.

You bag your groceries with boxes.

Or you box your grocery.

Yeah, whatever.

Yeah, you box your groceries.

So is this one of those localities where they’ve banned the plastic bags, maybe?

Good question. She’s in Burlington, Massachusetts. I don’t know. But isn’t that funny? I mean, I kept looking at that photo thinking to myself, what’s wrong with this sign?

I like it, though. You offer boxes to bag your groceries. So you can bag something without using a bag.

Exactly.

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

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi.

Hi, who’s this?

This is Peggy from Katy, Texas.

Well, Peggy, what is going on?

Yeah, what’s up?

Not much. I’m sitting here actually in a beauty parlor getting my hair done.

In a beauty parlor.

Nice. What’s the linguistic gossip in the beauty parlor today?

Oh, it’s a secret. We can’t tell.

Oh.

Sorry, I’ll close my ears. You can tell Martha.

Yeah, tell me.

What’s up?

The word I had wanted to ask you guys about, though, I’m from New Orleans originally.

Okay.

And when we were young, my mother used to say to quit piruting through her purse or piruting through a china closet that my grandmother had. And, you know, I thought that made perfect sense, and we used it all the time. And then when I got married and had children, I was telling my kids one day to quit piruting through my purse, and my husband stopped and said, what are you telling them? And I told them, and he said, there’s no such word as piruting. What does that mean? It means rifling through things and taking out stuff that doesn’t belong to you. And he was not from the South, so he said he had never heard of it before. So when I went back to New Orleans, I asked all my cousins, and they were like, well, of course there’s a word. You know, piruting, it means being like a pirate.

Sure.

And Peggy, how are you spelling it?

Well, I spell it P-I-R-O-U-T-E, but I don’t really know. You know, maybe it’s P-I-R-O-O-T, like a pig rooting.

Yes. Like a pig rooting, did you say?

Like a pig rooting in something, you know. A pig roots for mushrooms or whatever they do.

-huh. -huh. Would you believe that it’s probably a variation of pirouette?

A pirouette?

Yeah. Yeah. The original definition of pirouette was to whirl around or to wander aimlessly or gad about, that kind of thing. And you can see how that would transition over time into sort of snooping around, rooting around. And it’s also probably influenced by the word root.

Okay.

Like to root around.

What’s that?

In New Orleans, we’re having pirates. You know, we’re in love with pirates in New Orleans, especially Jean Lafitte. So we just thought it had to do with what a pirate does.

Oh, that’s funny.

Taking things that he shouldn’t and that things don’t belong to him. So that’s, you know, our connotation of the word.

Yeah, interesting.

No, you’re right. The people I’ve talked to who use that word are almost all from New Orleans, but apparently it’s all over the South.

Oh, that’s funny.

Yeah, yeah. I think Anne Rice used it in one of her novels back in the day.

Oh, that would make sense.

Yeah. Pirute.

Pirute.

To look around.

Yeah, exactly.

Well, cool. Thanks for your call, Peggy.

Well, thank you. I love the show.

Oh, thank you very much.

Thank you.

I’m looking forward to listening to you.

Great. Happy Pirutin’.

Thanks.

It’s Dr. Giller.

Bye.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

A related word, well, similar in meaning is roodle, which I love.

R-O-O-T-L-E.

Yes.

To rub around, to nose around like an animal after food in the underbrush or something.

Roodle.

Roodle around.

Can you roodle around in the fridge then?

Poke about.

Yeah, poke about in the fridge looking for the leftovers that aren’t expired.

That’s what I do. I stand in front of the fridge with a spoon, and that’s dinner.

877-929-9673.

Mark Henslick of Ketchikan, Alaska, sent us a term he came up with, which I really like.

It’s house gravity.

House gravity, your tendency to stay at home.

Yes, yes.

It’s the force that stops you from leaving. You know, I was planning to go to the event, but house gravity was too powerful.

Escape! Gravity!

Right. It’s a variation of bed gravity.

Four-five, Scotty! I can’t leave the house!

I like that, house gravity.

I also like the term escape velocity, you know, which is what a rocket needs to leave the atmosphere.

I often talk about not having the escape velocity to leave the house.

I totally get that. I waver between the two, like desperately wanting to leave the house and never wanting to leave the house.

877-929-9673.

Hit us up on Twitter @wayword.

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The toll-free line is always open, so leave a message for us at 877-929-9673.

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This program would not be possible without you.

Grant and I are out to change the way we listen to each other and the way we think about language.

And you’re making it happen.

Thanks also to senior producer Stefanie Levine and director and editor Tim Felten in San Diego.

In New York, we thank production wizard James Ramsey, quiz guy 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 Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

Bye-bye.

So long.