Wicked Good (episode #1653)

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. And Grant, you remember that conversation we had not too long ago about towns and cities that have very, very short names, like even one or two letters.

Right. There was the town in France. It was just the letter Y, or called Y in French. Just Y.

Right. And the reason was that there were roads that intersected in a Y. And what’s really interesting about that is that several of our listeners wrote to tell us that there is a Y, Arizona, that is named for the same reason.

And it has two major highways, State Routes 85 and 86, that originally intersected in a Y.

And they weren’t allowed to just use one letter, so they called the town Y, W-H-Y.

Why Arizona? Because it has beautiful landscapes. That’s why.

That’s right. And a dry heat.

We heard from lots of other listeners who told us about towns like Ely, Iowa, and Ely, Minnesota, and Ely, Nevada.

And also Rye, New York.

We didn’t think of that one, Grant.

Oh, of course.

That makes perfect sense.

Yeah.

Right.

And Zapp, North Dakota, which I hadn’t heard of.

And Mann, West Virginia.

But, Grant, there’s one place that beats all of them.

And it’s called I, Ohio.

And that’s spelled A-I.

It has about 600 people there.

And it’s I, Ohio.

Oh, they are so well positioned with this big A-I boom.

They should have data centers.

They should be logoed.

They should be like really profiting with what’s happening in the tech world right now.

Yeah, yeah.

They’ve got a sign up already that says, hi.

Hi.

Hi, guys.

I love it.

That’s great.

Well, Martha and I love talking about language, including names, whether it’s your name or your pet’s names or your car names.

Give us a call. 877-929-9673.

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24 hours a day in the United States and Canada.

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Hey there, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Debbie Thomas. I am from Crawfordville, Florida.

I’m calling about a word that my husband uses all the time.

We’ve both grown to use it all the time.

Now all of our friends know what it means.

The word is grok.

And the first time my husband said, let’s grok on this, I reach over and, of course, turn the stereo up.

And, you know, get a look from him.

And he said he picked it up from his boss back in the 70s who had come home from Vietnam.

And ever since then, it’s just been a word in our vocabulary, but do we get the looks when people are over helping us with a project?

And we do know we’re using it correctly.

When we have to stop and grok on something, we know that we have to contemplate.

We have to think about it.

We have to get on the same page.

You know, if we come to an impasse, let’s grok on it.

And I’m just wondering what kind of information you can give me on such a weird word.

Grok on it.

And how are you spelling that in your mind?

In my mind, I’m spelling it G-R-O-C-K.

Correct.

All right.

So you learned it from your husband, and he learned it from his boss, and his boss believes he picked it up in Vietnam?

Yes.

What kind of work did your husband do at the time, and did his boss do?

Okay. At the time, he worked in like a, it was a tire company where they retread tires.

It was called Big Ten Tires. And his boss was like the manager of the shop.

Okay. Was your husband or his boss into science fiction?

Oh my gosh, yes. Yes.

You say that like—

I don’t know so much about the boss, but my husband, I mean, the cheesier, the better.

Did he go to conventions dressed up, that sort of thing?

No, no, no, no.

He’s nowhere like that.

But he, like I said, he gets interested in some of the cheesiest old, old sci-fi shows.

And, of course, it’s not my thing.

Does he read the books?

I think when he was younger, he probably did.

Yes.

Yes.

So I’m zeroing in on something important here, is that we know the origin of this word.

Unlike a lot of words, we know where this came from.

And the usual spelling is G-R-O-K, grok.

And it comes from a 1961 science fiction novel, Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein, H-E-I-N-L-E-I-N, where it appears 195 times.

Really? Oh, my gosh.

In this book, it starts out as a Martian word that means to drink.

But the characters in the book also use it figuratively so that grok means to have a profound understanding, to completely understand something, to become one with what you were observing.

That’s how we use it.

That’s how we use it.

Well, let’s just stop and grok on it.

We’re going to figure this out in a minute.

You’ve changed it a little bit, so you’ve turned it into a verb, to grok it, is to think about it.

And that’s okay.

That’s just fine.

Heinlein later talked about, because he was always asked about this word in interviews, particularly after the word took on a life of its own.

And he later said that grok meant to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed, to merge, blend, intermarry, lose identity in the group experience.

I love it.

Yeah.

And so it’s been used off and on over the years.

It’s still a little bit associated with people who like science fiction, and it kind of has a stronger life in the technology fields, with people who work in, say, programming or information technology, IT, that sort of thing, because there’s a lot of overlap between people who like science fiction and people who work in those fields.

But you will find it, for example, in the writing of Tom Wolfe, the famous writer Tom Wolfe.

So it’s not that common.

So I’m not surprised that your friends don’t know it.

But if they watch Rachel Maddow on MSNBC, she sometimes uses it.

I will have to tell them.

I’m making notes so I can tell everybody.

I had no idea.

Well, Debbie, I’m so glad you called because we don’t usually get a chance to talk about etymologies that involve the Martian language.

So this is really exciting for us.

This is really going to excite my husband when I tell him this.

It really is.

Because he may be wrong where he thought he got it from.

Well, it’s possible that his boss was a secret science fiction reader as well.

You never know.

That’s true.

That’s true.

Just told us, no, I got it there, so it sounds a little more official.

I don’t know.

But thank you so much.

That was really, really interesting.

Well, it’s our pleasure.

Thank you for talking to us, Debbie.

Take care of yourself.

Y’all have a good weekend.

Bye-bye.

You too.

Bye-bye.

Well, we don’t have a phone number for Martians to reach us, but you can find all kinds of ways to contact us.

Just go to our website, waywordradio.org, slash contact.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, Grant.

This is Rod Knowles in Alexandria, Louisiana.

And hello, Mark, also.

Hi, Rod.

Hey, Rod. Welcome to the program.

I’m in the commercial real estate business in central Louisiana.

And a strange exchange of words took place twice in the same week.

So I thought I’d call you folks on it.

Working with a Dallas developer who was a seller, and the buyer said the property’s not quite worth that much.

And the seller says, well, let’s cut to the chase.

All right.

Let’s leave that scene and go to my second and last thing.

I’m in a small town in Marksville, Louisiana, and the buyer says, the seller’s asking too much, let’s cut to the chase.

Well, I know what that means, and I assume, you know, when we use language for our business, we assume other people know what it means also.

I know that means let’s get to the best price.

But it occurred to me, where did this come from?

Do you have any guesses at all, Rod?

I think there’s two guesses.

It’s either the horse race industry, and, you know, we’re going to cut to the chase, the horses chasing each other.

Or it goes back to, you know, European days for the fox hunt, for the chase of the fox.

But that’s just a guess.

That’s just a guess.

Well, those are both really good guesses, Rod, but it doesn’t come from either of those.

It comes from movie making.

If you want to keep a viewer’s interest in a movie, you worry that the dialogue is dragging, the scene’s getting a little boring.

What you do is you cut to the car chase.

You cut to the really exciting part of the movie.

And they were using this back as early as the 1920s in making movies.

Writers would actually say, now we cut to the chase.

And then by the 1940s or so, that expression joined pop culture, you know, just talking about cutting to the chase, exactly like you were describing.

You know, let’s get down to business.

Let’s get on with it, as you would do in a real estate sale.

So it comes from the world of moviemaking.

And that verb to cut, Martha, is specifically about cutting film, literally cutting pieces of film and splicing them together.

So drop it on the floor, cut to the chase, let’s get to the action.

Right.

Well, I’ve been in some deals that felt like a car chase.

So that makes all the sense in the world.

I hope not a car crash.

No, no.

I’m so much better informed.

I can’t wait to tell people I’ve got it all figured out.

Well, you ought to be in pictures, Rod.

Take care of yourself and be well out there.

Thank you very much.

All right.

Bye-bye.

All right.

Take care.

Sometimes you’re just doing everyday business.

You think it’s just another day, and something pops out of your mouth,

And it’s not an M&M that you couldn’t swallow.

It’s a weird phrase or idiom, and you’re like, wait a second.

Why do I say that?

Should I be saying that?

What does that mean?

Did I just offend someone?

877-929-9673, 24 hours a day.

Well, you’ll get our voicemail in Canada and the United States.

A friend in Phoenix just taught me about the term 455 air conditioning. Do you know this term?

455 air conditioning? Yeah, 4-55 air conditioning. 4-5, I don’t know what that is. What is that?

That’s when you don’t have air conditioning in your car, so you have four open windows at 55 miles an hour.

I think that was my family through most of the 70s.

Right.

Or 55 air conditioning.

We would go for a drive and like, where are we going?

We’re not going anywhere.

We’re just going to get some air.

We’re just cooling off.

And then the gas shortages hit.

You’re like, oh, we’re not doing that either.

Yep.

We’re just going to sweat.

877-929-9673 is a magical number that’s toll-free in the United States and Canada.

Stay put. We’ll be right back to untangle the web of English.

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.

And gliding across the ice on his trusty Zamboni that he takes everywhere is our quiz guide, John Chaneski.

Hey, John.

Hey, guys.

Hi, John.

I enjoy the Zamboni so much.

You know, Mr. Zamboni is one of the few non-hockey players or ice skaters who is in the Hockey Hall of Fame, by the way.

Is that right?

Yes, he is in the Ice Hockey Hall of Fame.

Where’s that?

Someplace cold, I imagine.

I forget where it is.

North Pole, South Pole.

It’s not in Miami?

No, not in Miami, no.

So today we’re going to do something we’ve done before.

Takeoffs, again.

Alphabetically, we’re working our way through.

You like takeoffs.

That’s where we take the first letter of a word to get another word.

And this time we’re going to make two words by taking the letter R from the start of a word.

Only R now.

For example, if I said, he’s a star pitcher, but he really can’t run that fast,

The answer would be race for run and ace for star pitcher.

Oh, so he’s an ace pitcher.

I see.

Right.

He’s a star pitcher, so he’s an ace.

Or a really good pitcher, he’s an ace.

Now, so the word with the R, and it could be clued first or second.

It could be either way.

Here we go.

Okay.

Let’s race to the quiz.

You’re going to ace.

We made a surprise attack upon the castle with the knight’s help.

Okay, so you got aid from the knight in order to make a raid.

Yes, very good.

Those are the things.

Surprise attack and help are basically the only three words you needed, really.

Speaking of skating, you can skate here, but you’ll have to sign your waivers first.

Oh, you’ll have to ink the forms to use the rink.

Yes, you’ll have to ink to rink, to be on the rink.

The park employee could not control his rage.

The ranger couldn’t control his anger.

Yes, ranger and anger.

I only wish I’d seen a heron while we were out birdwatching.

Regret and egret.

Nice.

Regret and egret.

When I found out that James and I were cousins,

We were both overjoyed.

Let me say it this way instead, by the way.

When we found out that James and I were cousins,

We were both overjoyed.

Were you two elated?

We were elated, you know why?

Because you were related.

Because we were related.

Yes, we related the first time and then we were related again.

When you put that much feeling into your acting, I promise you’ll go far.

When you emote, you’ll be remote.

Yes, wow, they’ll send you away.

Yes, you’ll be very far.

While I was arguing with the man taking me to my seat, the defensive end blitzed the quarterback.

Rusher. Oh, rusher and usher. Yes, that’s it, rusher and usher. Shout out to Usher, wherever he is.

Those are our takeoffs for today. You guys did very, very well. Congratulations. Oh, that was great.

John, thank you.

Thank you, yeah, we appreciate it. Say hello to the family for us and we’ll see you next time.

Right back at you. See you next time. 877-929-9673 is available to everyone, no matter how you listen.

And you can talk to us online. Find all of our handles and nicknames on our website at waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, yes. My name is Penny Grebe.

I’m calling from Pawleys Island, South Carolina.

Hi, Penny.

Hi. I was wondering about the word wicked that we use in New England, where I grew up, pretty much to describe everything.

We’re either wicked cold or wicked sick or, you know, that’s wicked far to go.

And when I moved, when I was in eighth grade to New Jersey, I realized that that’s not a word that everyone else uses.

And I’m just wondering how it started, where it came from.

Wicked far, huh? New Jersey’s wicked far. Where in New England were you?

Well, I grew up in New Hampshire, southern New Hampshire, a little town called New Boston.

And the rest of my family lived in Maine. So I started in Maine and then we moved to southern New Hampshire.

Yeah. And you’re using it as an adverb to modify adjectives, which is not how a whole lot of other people use it.

Because, you know, wicked as an adjective, of course, describes something bad or evil.

And that’s been around since, gosh, the 13th century.

But yeah, what about this use of wicked meaning exceedingly?

It evolves sort of the same way that we say that something’s terribly cold.

And we see in print scattered examples of use of wicked being used as an adverb as well.

You see that off and on for a few hundred years, but it really seemed to take off in the 20th century,

Particularly in Maine, and then it sort of seeped down into Massachusetts, and it’s not really clear why it lodged in the language in the northeastern U.S., but certainly by the 70s,

It was part of pop culture in Massachusetts, and it became sort of a point of pride among people in Boston and Massachusetts and larger New England as well.

You remember the film Good Will Hunting back in the 90s, you know, when the guy says, my boy is wicked smart.

Yeah, we say that all the time.

Yeah, he’s wicked smart.

Wicked smart, yeah.

But, yeah, it’s odd the way that it seems to have slipped down from Maine and stuck a little bit farther south.

Yeah, it used to exclusively be talked about as a Maine thing.

If you go back to the early days of wicked being used as an adverb.

People didn’t associate it very much with Boston.

They talked about it as a main item, so in these small informal dictionaries and little glossaries that people would put together.

And then it just kind of slowly moved to Boston, but part of that might have to do with the kind of contraction of the larger speech dialect of the Northeast slowly being concentrated on Boston.

The map of the Northeast is slowly, slowly shrinking to be about Boston as the dialect regions change up there. Martha, you mentioned terribly and awfully these other adverbs.

All three of these are negative words that lost their negative value. They underwent semantic bleaching, and what was left behind was their emphatic force. So we don’t mean them in a negative way anymore. There’s nothing pejorative left. All that’s left is kind of the punch and the wow, right?

Yeah, I can see that. This was a wicked good call, Penny. We really appreciate you talking to us.

Well, I appreciate, you know, a little bit of history on it. And I like that it started in Maine because that’s where I’m originally from.

Well, at least it was more prominent there in the beginning. I don’t know about started. It’s murky origins. How about we just say New England.

New England. Okay. You can claim that. Take care of yourself. Call us again sometime.

All right. Thank you so much. I had a good time. Bye.

We’re still hearing from listeners all over about their terms for the strip of land that lies between the sidewalk and the road.

And we heard from Lydia Gold, who is a gardener in Portland, Maine, and she said that in their gardening community there, they call it the hell strip.

And she assumes that that’s because it’s always getting battered by salt and sand from the road. And then it gets really hot and dry because it’s sandwiched between two pieces of asphalt.

And the gardening community there is trying to transform those hell strips into an oasis for pollinators and other wildlife, you know, planting drought tolerant plants and that kind of thing in those areas, which is interesting because we also heard from another gardener in Washington State, Pamela Burton, who said that there they’re trying to change the term parking strip to gardening strip because they’re trying to encourage homeowners to make use of these ignored patches of land for more productive use, you know, plant flowers or something.

Right. And it changes your outlook from car brain to nature brain.

Yeah. Yeah. Which we all need more of, right?

Yeah. Use your word brain, your language brain, to call us, 877-929-9673.

Hello. You have A Way with Words.

Hi. This is Jane. I’m calling from Denver, Colorado.

And my question is about a slang that I’ve been using for many years now.

I’ve heard it on the Internet, and I’ve been asking around, and recently I can’t find anybody else who knows what I’m talking about.

Basically, the way it works is when you’re trying to describe a specific thing that doesn’t matter, you would say, and thing.

You would describe it as a thing, but with an N in front of a consonant instead of a vowel, just to, I don’t know, to disrespect the grammar, I guess, in order to show that the thing didn’t matter.

Like, oh, I was out of town when my car broke down, so I just went to Ann Mechanic and went to my adorable guy when I got back.

Something like that.

And I’ve been asking around. I can’t find anybody else who knows what it is.

And I don’t even know what to call this type of slang.

Is there any precedent for it?

Is it really just in my own head?

I have no idea.

That’s interesting.

Ordinarily, a word like recipe or mechanic would have A in front of it, the article A, because there’s a consonant sound.

So that’s how English works.

It’s not that it’s a consonant. It’s that it’s a consonant sound.

If those words began with a vowel sound, then we use the article A in, like an apple or an orange.

And so what you’re hearing sounds like people are violating that rule of grammar and saying an mechanic or an recipe in order to be specific about not being specific.

In other words, to say, I just went to any old recipe for this particular pie, or I just went to any old mechanic rather than my preferred mechanic.

I chose any old recipe rather than my favorite recipe from my grandma.

Yes, exactly. Something like that.

Something like that.

Yeah. I guess it’s not a thing that hasn’t yet been chosen.

Sometimes it’s future, but most of the time when we say it, it’s like a thing that has already been decided upon.

But just to signify that which one didn’t matter.

In the original Wayne’s World movie, there’s a scene where he’s approached by his ex-girlfriend Stacy, and she is just kind of not getting the fact that they’ve broken up, and she gives him a gift, an unexpected gift, and it’s a gun rack.

And Wayne is kind of befuddled. He’s not expecting a gift, and he’s not expecting a gun rack.

And he’s like, a gun rack. Gun wreck. I don’t even own a gun.

And so what he does is he nasalizes the a before a gun. Instead of saying a gun and like kind of really stressing that a, he nasalizes it and stretches it out to emphasize it.

And my proposition to you, Jane, is that that’s what’s happening here.

That instead of saying A-N mechanic or A-N recipe and using the wrong article, what they’re doing is stressing it and emphasizing it by nasalizing it and drawing it out, elongating the word.

And that’s what you’re hearing, just like Wayne did it, or Mike Myers, in this movie.

And that is a function of a certain form of informal speech.

Fascinating. Oh, that’s cool.

It’s interesting that there’s a precedent for it.

Yeah, yeah.

So it’s a kind of a contrastive stress.

Yeah, I think most of the time when I’ve heard it, the people I’m speaking to, I know their accent pretty well.

And so I would hear the difference between A and an, or like, you know, or like, or I don’t know, nasalize with an or a.

I’m not even sure how to recreate what you just did.

Yeah. So if you were talking about an orange and you were you were talking about it in the same way, would you say a orange?

You know, I I’ve been thinking back and I don’t think I’ve ever used it before.

A vowel is always been before a consonant. Very interesting.

It hasn’t come up before before a vowel. More data is needed, Jane. More data is needed.

Yeah, more data is needed. Hopefully maybe your callers know what the hell I’m talking about.

Jane, thank you so much. This is very intriguing. I am interested to find out more.

And we have a whole host of intelligent, earful listeners who are surely come to us with more information.

Very cool.

Take care of yourself. It was a pleasure to talk to you.

Bye-bye.

If you know something about this use of the A-N article in front of nouns beginning with a consonant sound, which is a violation of English grammar, then let us know, 877-929-9673, or email words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, I’m Maya, and I’m a high school student in Pennsylvania.

I have a question for you about the word concertina.

Concertina.

I’ve been, yeah, I’ve been watching a lot of the Great British Baking Show at the moment.

And one of the judges like frequently uses the word concertina as a verb.

They’ll say things like your cake has concertina down and things like that.

So my question is, what’s the origin of concertina as a verb?

And what’s it mean?

Which judge is it?

It’s Paul Hollywood, I think is his name.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Paul loves that word.

Paul, the big guy with the beard, right, that they always look to.

Yeah.

That they’re afraid of, yeah.

He’s nice, but yeah, he’s intimidating.

Yeah, he’s very intimidating.

And Maya, I’m a fellow fan of that show.

But you were talking about the word concertina as a verb.

Do you know the word concertina as a noun?

I feel like it’s some kind of classical composition.

I don’t know.

Well, it does have to do with music.

A concertina, this will make perfect sense once I tell you, a concertina is like a little bitty accordion without the piano keys.

You know, it’s used in traditional Irish music and English folk music.

You know, it’s just, you know, your hands go back and forth.

And it expands and contracts and expands and contracts.

The concertina was invented in 1829 by a British inventor named Charles Wheatstone.

By the late 19th century, people were using the word concertina as a verb.

You know, like you could concertina your hat if you smashed it, or you could concertina the front of a car.

Or in the case of the baking show, you could concertina the layers of your showstopper hanging cake.

It just kind of all smashes up like an accordion or like that little instrument called a concertina.

So let’s talk about the concertina instrument again.

So it’s got this bellows in the middle between these two handholds.

And the handholds have keys or buttons on each end or something like that.

Buttons, yeah.

Yeah.

And you just kind of squeeze them back and forth to kind of push air across some reeds, right?

Right.

Yeah, yeah.

That’s, you know, some people call it a squeeze box.

A squeeze box. Gotcha.

Yeah, and you might also have heard the expression concertina wire.

That’s that sort of barbed wire that’s in coils that goes around the tops of fences like at prisons and stuff.

But if you take it off, it collapses in the same way that a concertina does.

So that’s the term that he’s using.

I’ve learned several terms from the baking show.

Have you learned some others?

Not that I can remember.

I just remember hearing that one over and over again.

Yeah, yeah.

It just really stuck with me.

Yeah, yeah.

Paul gets on a roll, and he keeps saying stodgy or claggy or, you know, soggy bottom.

And concertina is another one.

Thank you so much.

Our pleasure.

Sure thing.

We’re glad you called.

Bye.

877-929-9673.

You can find all of our handles and nicknames at waywordradio.org,

Where you can also find all of our past episodes at no cost.

We heard from a fellow named Dooley in Los Angeles,

And he sent us a haiku that I really liked.

It goes,

A quick fox jumps high,

Vexing birds zigzag winds fly,

Haikus trap words, why?

And Grant, you know what’s significant about that haiku.

It has all the letters of the alphabet.

Yes, yes.

It’s a haiku pangram.

Oh, lovely.

How cool is that?

Nice.

It’s assonant.

It’s, ooh, it’s good.

It’s assonant.

It’s vivid.

It’s euphonious.

Yes.

Ooh.

Read it again, Martha, one more time.

It’s so short.

All right.

Now that we know that it has all the letters of the alphabet.

A quick fox jumps high.

Vexing birds.

Zigzag winds fly.

Haikus trap words.

Why?

I’m the author again.

The author is Dooley.

Thank you, Dooley.

How lovely.

Send your little bits of poetry to us, words@waywordradio.org.

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.

There’s a new novel that’s been haunting me ever since I read it.

It’s by Welsh writer Carys Davies, who now lives in Scotland, and her book is called Clear, and it takes place amid the Scottish clearances of the 19th century.

Now these clearances were a relentless program of forced eviction that drove whole communities of tenant farmers off the land.

Wealthy landowners were evicting the rural poor to make room to farm sheep because that was much more profitable.

And some of this took place on the Orkney and Shetland Islands off the northern coast of Scotland where the residents spoke the Germanic language of Norn.

Now the last speaker of Norn is believed to have died around 1850 and the novel takes place a few years earlier on one of those tiny islands.

A well-meaning Scottish minister named John Ferguson agrees to take the job of going to a tiny island halfway to Norway to inform the last remaining inhabitant, a man named Ivor, that he’s going to have to leave.

And he arrives on the island by himself.

But before he’s found Ivor, he takes a terrible fall and he’s badly injured.

And Ivor finds him and takes him home and nurses him back to health.

But the thing is that neither of them speaks the other’s language.

And so over the next several weeks, as Davies puts it, there’s a lot of pointing at things and a lot of, as she writes, repetition and pantomime and charades and back and forth between them, lots of trial and error and head shaking.

Now Davies has made a study of Norn herself, so we learn a lot of words from Norn the way that Ferguson learns them from Ivor.

So the names of plants and animals, the word lira for the short, unreliable quiet between storms, and threatening weather there is gruggy and skump is a fog bank.

And so we watch these two men slowly begin to learn to communicate with each other.

And John eagerly learns Ivor’s language.

And Ivor, who’s lived in isolation for years, finally begins to see himself in another person’s eyes again.

So, Grant, it’s this quiet novel.

It’s marvelously descriptive.

And there’s a helpful glossary of Norn at the end of the book.

Now, I have to say that I wasn’t totally sold on the ending, but the journey to get there is absolutely worth it.

I really think you’d dig this book.

Sounds delightful.

Martha, give us that title and author again, please.

Yeah, the name of the novel is Clear.

It’s by Carys Davies, C-A-R-Y-S Davies.

And I just think the title itself is brilliant because it refers to the Scottish clearances,

Which I knew nothing about before reading this book,

And also the struggle to make oneself clear, you know, reaching for words,

Trying to find words to make your meaning clear to someone else.

Martha and I love your book recommendations as well.

We’ll put this book on our website, but you put your books and emails to us, words@waywordradio.org.

If you want to talk about language with your stories, your thoughts, your ideas, you can call us.

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Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Oh, hi. This is Stephen from San Antonio.

Hi, Steven. How are you doing?

Well, it was a couple of months back, me and my wife, we were talking about the whole experience in quarantine and how, you know, the whole world experienced the trauma at that time.

And we were like, the world needs something opposite of a trauma.

And then we’re like, what’s opposite of a trauma?

You know, we’re trying to think of words like, oh, it’s a celebration, but it didn’t really seem to fit.

So we were figuring, you know, why not just call, you know, Grant Martha with the answers.

They know everything about words.

So we thought we’d give you a holler.

In terms of the opposite of trauma, I don’t know.

So let’s define trauma first, Martha.

How would you define trauma?

Well, of course, I go back to the Greek origins and the idea of injury.

It’s like injury or damage.

And the way that you described it is really good, Stephen.

During the pandemic, we were all, you know, as a world community, we were all damaged and injured in some way.

But I’m trying to think of the opposite of that.

So I just want to extend that, though, that damage leaves an imprint on our mind, our body, our emotions.

Scars.

Yeah, and there’s a disruption to our personal sense of safety and stability and identity.

And it’s not necessarily about one event.

It could be a series of events.

But I think the scarlessness, you know, the scarlessness of the opposite of trauma.

Maybe healing is what we’re looking for.

Can we just say like good trauma, bad trauma?

Or do we have to qualify it in that way?

Well, you’re on to something there because there is such a thing as the opposite of good stress.

So we have stress and we have eustress, E-U-S-T-R-E-S-S.

And this is a positive form of stress that instead of overwhelming us, energizes us, it motivates us, and it challenges us so that we grow and we achieve and we develop resilience.

And so eustress, that E-U prefix, is a prefix that means good or well or normal.

And you can hear that prefix in words like euphony, which means good sound.

So eutrauma?

Maybe, but I was suggesting eustress is possibly an almost antonym to trauma.

Yeah, I feel like eutrauma, it still has the trauma in there.

It’s sort of like a scar, you know.

You know, you mentioned healing, Grant, and I’m thinking that if you’re healing, it’s going to leave a mark somehow.

And if you’re talking about the opposite of trauma, you don’t even want the mark there.

And that’s where I kind of think that eustress might, I don’t know, might work.

And what about harmonization?

Harmonization.

Yeah.

So like bringing different parts of yourself in sync with each other and with the world around you and the relationships you have with other people.

That does sound pretty good because if it is like a big, like an event or something that is, it is positive, it is a harmonizing moment.

Yeah, that one seems like pretty good as well.

And it’s kind of poetic too, right?

Yeah, I think it is.

I think it’s like the opposite is sort of like placid.

You know, it’s like an undisturbed lake or something, an undisturbed body of water.

And then, you know, I really think our listeners could help us out with this one, Grant.

So we’re going to ask if you have a word that you feel is the opposite of trauma.

And do put that care and time into it when you send it to us.

Tell us why you think you have the right word for the opposite of trauma, and particularly in the way that Stephen described it, that the trauma that we all had in the pandemic, this kind of group trauma that we shared.

So Stephen, I want to thank you for posing this question.

This is a really fantastic thought provoker.

Yeah, to be continued.

Yeah, to be continued.

Well, I look forward to hearing what everybody has to say and be curious to see if maybe different cultures or different languages have a word for that, and we just kind of don’t.

Absolutely.

Thank you so much.

Thanks, Stephen.

All right.

Y’all be cool.

Cheers.

You too.

I’m very curious to hear what our listeners come up with.

877-929-9673 is the place to leave a voicemail or send your thoughts to us in email words@waywordradio.org.

We got an email from Skip Dahlgren, who spent several years learning the Tigrinya language of northern Ethiopia and highland Eritrea.

And he was noting that there are several cool proverbs in that language.

A couple of them involve chickens.

And one of them translates as a silly daydream, but literally it means a chicken’s dream.

So if I say, you know, Martha, I think I’m going to quit all this and go live on a mountaintop and give advice to people who scale the heights, you’re going to say, Grant, that’s just a silly chicken’s dream.

Yeah, that’s just a silly chicken’s dream.

And the other one that I really like translates as, in its own good time, an egg will walk on its own legs.

In its own time, an egg will walk on its own legs.

Yeah.

So just give stuff a chance and it will get there.

Yeah, you know, breathe, count to 10.

Let stuff progress.

You don’t need to interfere.

Yeah, yeah, I love that.

In its own good time, an egg will walk on its own legs.

Yeah, maybe that’s good advice for helicopter parents, right?

Yes, yes.

The child will grow with or without you.

The child will learn with or without you.

Yep, better accept it now.

You know, you can find all of our episodes on our website at no cost to you at waywordradio.org.

Hi there.

You have A Way with Words.

Good morning.

This is Jerry calling.

Hello, Jerry.

Where are you calling us from?

Paris, California.

Well, we’re glad to have you.

What’s on your mind?

Corny.

How did that word come about?

The old term back in the days when radio was king, some of the programs were called corny.

And I believe that still some of the programs are corny.

Yeah, corny is often defined as something that is unsophisticated or the kind of thing that is naive or it’s un-urbane.

And urbane is a word that means appropriate for people who live in complex cities or who live a high-paced life in an urban area.

Yeah, I tend to associate it with humor.

Yeah.

Corny humor.

Yeah, corny humor.

And so it’s interesting that you’re thinking about it in terms of old radio shows.

But absolutely, it’s still being used.

And corny goes back to at least the 1920s.

And it was used within the jazz community as well in vaudeville and described early movies.

It described, obviously, film and radio.

But here’s what’s interesting, Jerry.

There were these seed catalogs.

So you would get these catalogs from these companies that would try to sell you seeds so that you could plant new varieties that supposedly had better yield.

They would grow.

Yeah, I’ve seen those, yeah.

Yeah, and so in order to make them a little more entertaining, perhaps something that you would read in the outhouse, they would put jokes in them.

Maybe they would fill out the bottom of a column where there was a little bit of extra space.

And these jokes were pretty broad humor.

So when people talked about corny humor, this is what they were talking about, corn being in those seed catalogs.

But there was another aspect to it as well.

There were terms like corn-fed and corn-pwn, which were also used in the entertainment industry to describe this type of humor.

So we had corn-fed, corn-pwn, corny, corn-ball.

All of these terms related to corn referred to rural lifestyle.

And the simplicity of the humor of the people who had that rural lifestyle was basically put down to people in a rustic area, calling them provincial or rubes or unsophisticated.

And it wasn’t necessarily true.

It was just what the fancy people in the cities considered to be true.

As is always the case.

It’s always that conflict between rural and urban anywhere in the world.

So corn kind of stood in as this metaphor for the kind of humor that the people in the agrarian eras had.

Well, give us a corny joke, Grant.

So this is from the J.R. Ratkin and Sons Illustrated Catalog of Seed Corn from 1901.

And so this is how it starts.

And he stole the possum from you, said the judge.

Yes, sir.

And worse than that, he not only cooked it and ate it, but he picked his teeth right in front of me, too.

Oh, my God.

That is corny.

But I’m bummed.

But there you go.

That’s the story of corny.

So it’s really about, it’s really kind of a put-down of the rural lifestyle and the rural sense of humor.

Jerry, we appreciate your calling and inciting some corny jokes.

And take care out there, all right?

Bye-bye.

Okay, thank you.

Thank you so much.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673

Hey there, you have A Way with Words.

Thanks, so do you.

Thank you.

You’ve never heard that one before.

Never ever.

Not once.

And you don’t sound smug about it at all.

All right, who are you and what are you up to?

Hello, this is Michelle Smith and I am from Williamsburg, Virginia.

And I have a question about the phrase alley-oop.

Alley-oop?

My daughter, yeah, alley-oop.

My daughter is two and a half, and she’s got all these really fun language explosions.

And we do a lot of call and response in my house in general, which is, that’s something my husband and I have done even before she was around.

I like hoisting her up or, you know, putting a shirt on or, you know, probably pulling up pants or throwing her in the car, whatever it is.

I’ll say Allie and then she’ll say, yup.

It’s not the right version of the phrase, but it’s really cute.

Of course.

No, it comes from the French.

I mean, it’s used exactly the same way in French.

That allé part is spelled in French, A-L-L-E-Z, and it means go.

And they use it exactly like that in French.

You go, allé, allé, allé.

And at soccer matches or football matches in French, they’ll go, allé, allé, allé, allé, allé.

They’ll sing a song.

It means go, go, go to their team.

Yeah.

And then the oop part is spelled H-O-P or H-O-U-P.

But it looks like hop, but it’s onomatopoeic.

It’s the noise that you might make.

You know, it’s like when you lift something and there’s a little bit of force required to get up or jump up or hop up to just another level.

So it’s a-le-oop.

Sure.

A-le-oop.

And it’s not the English word up, but it sounds like it.

So sometimes in English, people will spell it as U-P, but it’s not the English word U-P.

So a-le-oop.

And we just borrowed it and spell it as O-O-P in English.

A-le-oop.

So it was a direct word from French.

But there’s another complicated layer here, which you might love.

In French, they also say,

So, the L-A at the end of that.

So, it’s,

And then the word,

And there’s a grave accent on the A.

And it means,

There you go.

Something like that.

But that H-O-P-L-A became hoopla in English.

Oh cool yeah so how about that opla became hoopla meaning chaos or noise or confusion.

Yeah because because just imagine a bunch of people going on just like kind of like all

Trying together to like move a piano something like think of an old black and white film where

Like these silly people are all together trying to make something happen and there’s a lot of

Hoopla and they’re all kind of like opla opla each one telling the other to do it this way or that

Way. Michelle, good for you for starting your child on a bilingual path there. There you go,

Right? Now, I want you to tell us her name, and so we know when she calls us in a few years with

The word question herself. Listen, I almost planned it so she could be somewhere nearby,

So you could hear how cute it is. Her name is Hazel. Hazel. Okay, we expect to hear from Hazel

In a few years. Yes, we’ll make it happen. Give her a squeeze for us, all right? Okay,

I sure will.

Thanks so much.

Thanks, Michelle.

Take care of yourself.

Bye-bye.

Martha and I love to hear those stories about passing language along the family chain.

877-929-9673.

Email 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.

Thank you.