Don’t Take Any Wooden Nickels

Even though you’re listening to this on podcast and not on the air, you can still call our toll-free number 877-929-9673, and you can still send us email to words@waywordradio.org, and you can still find us online at waywordradio.org.

You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. If I said to you in Spanish, me sacas canas verdes.

I’d literally be saying, you’re giving me green hairs.

Does that mean I’m…

What does that mean?

I don’t even know what that means.

Well, figuratively, to give someone green hairs in Spanish means to annoy them.

You know, a parent.

Turn them into the Hulk, right?

They get angry and big and wear purple pants.

I think it probably predates the Hulk, but…

Probably.

Because I know people whose mothers said that to them.

So where’d you find this?

I found this at a fantastic website that collects a whole bunch of these expressions about color in various languages.

Goldmine.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It was sent to us by one of our listeners, Julio Diaz, who listens to us in Tijuana, Mexico.

And the page is at StarChamber.com.

We will link to it from our website.

That sounds ominous, but okay.

But this is a wonderful list.

It is a fantastic list.

Grant, if I’m in Japan and I say that I’m one red dot, it means that I’m the only woman in a group of men.

What a useful expression, right?

I’m looking at this.

Some of these I know, but some of these I don’t.

And it’s interesting that the color chosen could be different than what we would use in English.

Oh, for sure.

For example, in Spanish, you would say un chiste verde, which means a green joke or a dirty joke.

But we might say, we might call that blue humor.

Exactly.

And whereas in German, you might say Blaumachen, to make blue, and it means to not go to school or work.

To be truant, right?

To skip.

Oh, really?

Take a blue day.

So you kind of go from language to language to language and find it changes just a little bit.

So we’ll share this list on the website.

Yeah.

And in the meantime, if you want to talk about any aspect of language, call us 877-929-9673 or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi, Grant. This is Rebecca.

Hello, Rebecca. Where are you calling from?

From San Diego.

Oh, okay.

Okay. What can we do for you?

Well, I’ve been hearing a couple of words used that I thought, I understand why people might have words morph as they become used differently, but these ones seem like they’re being morphed without purpose.

So one is for the use of service instead of serve, when you’re talking about working with customers.

So I’m servicing my customers as opposed to I’m serving my customers.

Oh, my.

Yeah, exactly.

I thought service is what you did to mares and cows.

Or in the oldest profession.

Yeah.

Right.

You’ve got to pay extra for that.

And use and utilize was another example that came to my head.

So I thought, are we running into with serve the same thing that happened with use, where it gets expanded, but there’s really not a purpose for that?

What an interesting question and how well said.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I agree.

Yep. Okay, thanks for calling.

Wait, I have another example.

You do?

I actually do.

Yesterday I heard on the news as they were talking about the transition of Mubarak, they used the word formulate to talk about making a plan as opposed to form a plan.

And that seemed like another example of let’s expand the word.

It makes it sound more important.

So we’ve got three sets of words where there’s a simple form that seems like it might be more appropriate than the complex form, and yet people tend to gravitate to the complex form.

That’s exactly right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

What do you think?

So let’s deal with these one at a time.

Serve and service.

There’s a difference, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, I think so.

I mean, service is the male animal’s function in breeding.

Wouldn’t you say?

Well, I mean, even outside of that, you service an automobile or a piece of broken machinery.

And you serve a customer.

And you can also serve food, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I’m sure that plenty of people say servicing customers.

But I’m sorry.

I’m just, I’m not going to go there.

It’s weird, isn’t it?

Yeah.

It is weird, Rebecca.

I mean, we understand what they mean, and it’s only funny because we prefer to misunderstand just to have the joke in our pockets, right?

Oh, okay.

I’ll grant you that.

But, Rebecca, don’t you think it comes to mind anyway?

I don’t know how many folks are as familiar with the terminology of husbandry as you and I are.

Well, that may be true.

Oh, it’s the farming life for me.

But, yeah, I’m with you.

I think that’s just overdoing it a little bit.

It sounds sort of puffed up, and to me, it telegraphs a little bit of insecurity and insensitivity to the fact that people like Rebecca and me are going to think of servicing in a totally different way.

Different picture in our heads.

Different picture in our heads.

Sorry, it just pops up.

Just to clarify here, you service machinery.

You might service something that’s broken or service something that is mechanical, right?

But you generally serve people.

I’m hearing a pattern here.

Yeah, you don’t really service people.

I agree.

Right?

Yeah.

Okay.

And so we get to use and utilize, and that’s more complex.

And we’ve talked about this in the program before.

What’s the neat way of wrapping that up?

Well, we’ve talked before about how utilize can actually mean something more specific than use.

Like if you utilize a screwdriver to open a can or something, you’re applying a different use to it from the use that you usually use it for.

So if I used a screwdriver to undo a screw, to loosen a screw, I’m actually using it because that’s what it was intended for.

But if I utilize a screwdriver to open a paint can, it’s because I’ve used it for a different purpose, right?

And it goes back to the root of utilize, which comes from a word having to do with tool.

So you’re making it into a tool for something else.

Okay.

And so that’s a great way to think about utilize.

In most cases, use is going to be the word of choice.

Exactly.

Utilize is a little pompous, a little.

People go to it because it seems important.

It’s kind of a resume word or a cover letter word.

Yeah.

And you feel like that’s the one you should use.

Cover letter word.

I like that.

Use is almost always going to be a better choice.

I like that.

Just think carefully about it.

So, Rebecca, I hope we’ve serviced you today.

No.

Maybe.

Perish the thought.

Is this what I’m hearing?

We pay a great deal of attention to our listeners.

We are very attentive hosts.

We’re here to serve.

Yes, you guys are.

And I very much appreciate it.

Hey, thanks a lot for calling.

Thanks, bye.

You’re welcome.

All right.

All right.

Bye-bye.

And then the third thing that she came up with, the third set of words was…

Formulate and form.

And I think those don’t fit the pattern.

I think they do have different purposes, right?

Formulate means to come up with a formula.

And to form means to bring something into shape.

Right.

And so I don’t think that the formulate is the more exaggerated form of form.

No, I think it’s two different things.

It’s not the inkhorn version of form.

Yeah, I would say it’s two different things.

Have a question about language?

Call us.

877-929-9673.

Or you can always drop us a line in email.

That address is words@waywordradio.org.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Garrett from San Diego.

Hi, Garrett.

I grew up calling the N2 slices of a loaf of bread a cronka.

A cronka?

A cronka.

Isn’t it like a Willy Wonka character?

And what’s the plural?

I would just assume cronka, maybe.

Cronka?

Nice.

But, yeah, I would always use that with my family, and I thought nothing of it.

But as soon as I started getting to college and calling it that around my friends, I would just get weird looks and the question, what’s a Kronka?

I was just kind of curious if I’ve been using it right this whole time and what the origin of that word might be.

Kronka? How do you spell Kronka?

I have no idea, but I would assume maybe C-R-U-N-K-A.

Kronka. Where is your family from, Hungary?

We would usually use it on my mom’s side of the family, and they’re from Pennsylvania.

So I’m thinking it might have something to do with German heritage.

Oh, so the Pennsylvania Dutch.

I was joking about Hungary, by the way.

I also think our country to the north is Canada.

Canada, yeah.

So I’m sorry.

I was joking about Hungary because it just seems like, for some reason, it just reminds me of the few words that have come into English from Hungary.

But the Pennsylvania Dutch, actually, that’s a strong connection.

What part of Pennsylvania were they from?

Oil City, Pennsylvania.

Where is that? Southeast?

That’s more towards the west.

The west, okay.

Oil City.

I’ve never heard Kronka for the end pieces of a loaf of bread.

Never. I’m thinking Kronk in German is sick.

It’s been Kronk.

Do you like them?

I do. I love Kronka.

You prefer to take the end pieces off a loaf of bread.

Oh, I do. That’s all the flavor.

Really?

Because in our house, they were the heel, which I think is the standard or the more common word for it.

And it was the last piece eaten if it was ever eaten at all.

Usually it would be so stale by the time the loaf was finished that you would just give it to the birds.

Right.

And it’s the first piece you dig past.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It’s the part of the bread that spawned French toast.

You know, that’s how you use the heel of a loaf of bread.

You make it in French toast and you can’t taste that it’s stale anymore.

You know, we posted a question about this on our Facebook page.

And we got lots of responses.

And it was really kind of interesting, Martha, the way the answers broke down, wasn’t it?

Yeah.

A lot of people called them heels.

A lot of people called them bread butts.

The bread butt.

So the heel of the loaf of bread is the bread butt.

Very good.

Yeah.

I know in Spanish the word is codo, which means elbow, which sort of makes more sense if you’re talking about a baguette.

And I’m wondering, cronca.

In one of these old folk speech of South Cheshire dictionaries, they’re called the kissin’ crust.

But mainly this would be in a bakery where loaves of bread were cooked next to each other.

So the two ends would kiss when they cooked.

They expanded just a little bit.

They would kiss.

I like that.

The kissin’ crust.

So, Garrett, in your house it was a delicacy then.

Well, I think just for me.

I think I was the only one that really preferred it.

Well, no.

There were a number of people on Facebook, on our Facebook page at the username Wayword Radio, who also said that they prized the heel.

For them, it was a treat.

And I’ve heard other stories about this.

And people, that’s the piece that they want because they prefer the crust.

They like the flavor there.

It’s the texture that they want.

The inside is just a mushy mass.

And they wanted something with a little character.

Oh, exactly.

That’s the best part.

Yeah, I was going to say, especially if it’s not rainbow bread or wonder bread, you know, where you do have to toss those ends.

But maybe some people really like them.

I don’t know.

If you’re talking about some artisanal loaf from the local bakery, right?

That’s a different story.

But nobody, as far as we know, has used the word cronka.

I don’t know anything about the word cronka.

Cronka.

Well, so we have to put the call out.

If you’re listening to this program and you use the word cronka for the heel of a loaf of bread, give us a call, 877-929-9673, or send us an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Cronka.

Interesting.

Garrett, you’ve stumped us with your cronka.

Well, it looks like that’s unique, then.

I guess.

We’ll find out.

Yeah, we will find out for sure.

Wait till the masses respond.

We’ll know for sure.

Thank you for calling, Garrett.

Thank you.

All right, bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

You know, I’m remembering now that in Paul Dixon’s book of family words, there are a lot of other family words for this, including bunce, B-U-N-C-E.

Oh, good, good.

But somebody else on our Facebook page used the word skirk, S-K-I-R-K.

Skirk for the heel of a loaf of bread.

Here, have a skirk.

Well, we’ll link to all this stuff from our website at waywordradio.org.

And if you’ve got more to say about what to call the heel of a loaf of bread, give us a call, 877-929-9673.

Or send email to words@waywordradio.org.

Grant, I have another couple of color idioms for you.

In Spanish, if I say, it literally means I spent the night in white.

It means I had a sleepless night.

Oh, the French have something similar as well.

A nuit blanche is the night that you don’t go to bed.

And they have a music festival every year in Paris where people tend to have a nuit blanche.

Oh, really?

Yeah, just 24 hours of music.

It’s so interesting the way they’re different in different languages because in Sweden, if you have a white week, it means you didn’t drink alcohol all week.

Oh, that’s pretty rare in Sweden.

And probably at that French festival you were talking about, too.

Very rare, indeed.

Call us with your idioms, 877-929-9673, and send us any question at all about language to words@waywordradio.org.

Weekly word quiz coming up.

Stay tuned for more of A Way with Words.

You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett. And we’re joined now by our quiz guy, John Chaneski. Hello, John.

Hi, Grant. Hi, Martha. You know, I’m a big TV fan. I’m a big TV watcher. I’m unapologetic about it.

I like that show Californication on Showtime.

With David Duchovny.

That’s right. I wonder that the setting and the subject fit together so perfectly in the title.

I mean, California and fornication share five consecutive letters. And that’s pretty good.

Well, I started wondering about other shows set in other U.S. States.

For example, I recently pitched a show, not really, to the Discovery Channel about a guy who runs a giant storage facility in Wilmington.

Can you guess the title?

Delaware House?

Delaware House.

Yeah.

Very good.

But now you get the concept of today’s puzzle.

Nice.

I call it Portmanteau Say Can You See.

Okay.

Very good.

Thank you.

Portmanteau Pica.

Okay, here’s the first one.

Okay.

Here’s a show about people in Mobile who do various activities, not because it’s their job, but just for the love of them.

Alabamatures.

Alabamatures.

Very nice.

That show I would watch.

How about the next one, which is a touching coming-of-age series about a teen boy who lives in Boulder?

Coloradolescence.

Yes, Coloradolescence.

In some of these, the pronunciation of the words is massaged a bit.

Colorado lessons.

Very good.

How about this one?

This one is right up my alley.

Here’s a show about a Fort Wayne puzzle fanatic who compulsively transposes the letters of every word he sees.

Indianagrams.

Indianagrams.

Yeah.

Very good.

I’d watch that show.

Now, I know you guys know I was born in Hoboken, New Jersey, so this one also is a show I would watch.

A show about a Milwaukee man who is obsessed with old blue eyes.

Wisconsinatra.

Wisconsinatra.

Martha, you’re on fire.

You’re doing great.

A sequel to Breaking Bad.

This new series is about a geometry professor in Albuquerque who makes 20-sided dice.

New Mexico-hedron or something?

New Mexico-sahedron.

On the Mexico Sea Hadron.

Yes.

Wow.

You got that one, sure.

This show is about a family in Chicago who for years have made rattles, gongs, horns, and bells for use on New Year’s Eve.

Illinois Makers?

Illinois Makers, yes.

Here’s the next one.

A charming series about a baker in Detroit who is admired for his chocolate and cream pastry filling.

A baker in Detroit admired for his filling.

Chocolate and cream pastry filling.

Michigan-nosh?

Michigan-nosh.

Oh, no.

And he was a heck of a guy.

Enough of this Michigan-nosh.

A quirky look at a woman who organizes meet and greet events for singles in Cheyenne.

Wyoming-le?

Wyoming-le or myo-mingling.

I’ll take either one of those.

It’s good.

Here’s our next TV series.

It’s a fish-out-of-water tale about a family that moves from French Polynesia to Salt Lake City.

Utahiti?

Utahitians.

Utahitians.

Utahitians.

It’s just fine.

Yeah, very good.

Again, I’d probably watch that.

Here’s the last one.

It’s a really simple one.

It’s a show about playground architects in Memphis.

Tennessee Saurs.

Tennessee Saurs.

Tennessee Saurs.

Very good.

Oh, that’s great.

I’m going to get to work on some show pitches, and I’ll see you guys later.

Yeah, there are about 30 more states to go.

Thanks, John. It was great fun.

Bye, John.

Questions about word, language, grammar, pronunciation, slang, you name it, this is the place, 877-929-9673, or send everything you ever wanted to know an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Betsy Forn-Owens from Stanford, Connecticut.

Hi, Betsy. Welcome to the program.

Hello.

How are you?

Super duper. What can we do you for?

Well, we were having a conversation at dinner the other night, and the expression, making money hand over fist, came up.

And we didn’t know where it came from, what’s the origin of it.

So my two daughters came up with their own theories.

One was using the old baseball tradition of putting your hands on a bat, and the person who wins puts his hand or his fist on the top.

And then my other daughter said, no, no, no, it goes back to rock, paper, scissors, where you’ve got your fist as a rock and then your hand as the paper and the person with the paper wins.

So we thought we would go to you and see what’s the truth.

Hand over fist.

Both those explanations are really clever, but wrong.

Oh, wow.

They’re very picturesque.

Very intelligent daughters, but they’re not right.

And so this was a celebration at dinner.

Did somebody get a big raise or something, win the lottery?

And so you’re talking about what you’re going to do with your windfall, and you’re talking about money, getting money hand over fist?

Grant, I can’t even tell you anymore.

I think that we were just talking about just the economy and other things, and maybe it might have gotten into the lottery.

It certainly was a big win that week.

It does have a fairly strong known history, which, as you know, when you listen to the show, a lot of times we were like, oh, I don’t know.

But this one, this has got a pretty solid origin story, doesn’t it, Mark?

Yeah.

It’s just basically the motion of one hand over a fist, like you’re pulling in a rope or something.

You know, one hand is going over with your hand open and the fist is pulling it back.

Right, because you’re just pulling the rope in.

Just do the gesture.

We’re both doing it in this studio.

We’re pulling the rope in.

And so there are these certain maneuvers that you have to do when you’re on a sailing ship where you have got to pull a rope in super fast to get the sails where you want them, right?

Or else, like, terrible things are going to happen.

So you’re pulling that rope as fast as you can.

The sail will fall down on your head.

And so the image of pulling money in at the same speed, you know, it’s very much like in pulling a rope.

Like somebody’s handing your money so fast you can barely take it, right?

Yeah.

You are pulling in money hand over fist as if it were a rope on a sailor ship.

So it’s more the idea of pulling the money in hand over fist than just making the money.

Yes.

It was originally hand over hand.

And then somewhere along the way, the idiom became hand over fist.

And it’s been with us for a good long time.

What, 150 years or more, Martha?

Yeah.

I’d say, yeah, early 19th century.

Yeah, mm—

Yeah.

So a sailing term, more or less, that made its way into money.

We’re all about money.

It’s funny, there’s all these…

I’m just saying, as a people, Americans have a lot of idioms that have to do with money.

And the thing is, even though sailing isn’t really a part of our culture much for most of us anymore, it’s left some residue behind in the language, like horses have too, right?

Or like card playing or gold mining.

Yeah, well, and if you’re pulling in a horse, you’re making the same gesture, right?

That’s true.

If you broke them, yeah.

I could just see the horse splayed on all four legs, resisting with all its might.

So that’s the idea.

That was actually the answer you were going to give them, right?

Yeah, right.

Exactly.

Right.

You just wanted to make sure.

So, Betsy, thanks for listening.

Thanks for calling.

Thank you so much.

You’ve really clarified and ended a discussion at the table.

So thank you.

All right.

Our pleasure.

Call us again sometime, will you?

Take care, Betsy.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

If a word or phrase has caught your ear, drop us a line, words@waywordradio.org.

Or you can call us, 877-929-9673.

Grant, I’m just loving this website that has all the idioms involving color in different languages.

They even have some in Serbo-Croatian.

There’s one that literally translates as, I can’t see a white cat.

It means I’m really tired.

I’m so tired I can’t even see a white cat.

I love that.

And then the other Serbo-Croatian one that I just love, it’s an idiom that means to stare at something with surprise and wonder.

And it’s to stare like a calf at a colorful door.

That’s fantastic, right?

I love that.

Waiting for it to do something.

I spend, or just thinking, wow.

I love it.

I love that.

I spend a lot of time staring like a calf at a colorful door.

Share your favorite things about language, any language, with us, 877-929-9673, or send it an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Tim.

Hi, Tim.

Where are you calling from?

Calling from Dallas, Texas.

Welcome to the program, Tim.

How can we help you?

You bet.

I listened to your program a little while ago with my son, and he wanted me to call in with something.

And the one thing we thought of was my father served in Vietnam, and he was unfortunately killed in Vietnam.

And my mother saved all his letters that he wrote home from the field.

And in those letters, he would frequently sign off with a phrase that said, and don’t take any wooden nickels.

I’ve always wondered really what that meant, what the origin was, and whether he was meaning it in a humorous way or what.

So I was curious if you had any insight into that.

Did you know him when you were a boy?

No, he passed away when I was about nine months old.

Okay.

I just wonder if through your mother, if you learned if he was a funny guy, did he often say jokes and have laughs and just kind of goof around a little bit?

Yeah, he had a wry sense of humor that way.

He did.

Oh.

I would expect somebody who used that phrase as the sign-off to letters home from a war, I would expect him to be a funny guy.

Yeah.

Yeah, if you read his letters, you clearly see that he was protecting my mother from the bad parts and the nasty parts, so he was certainly trying to keep them lighter for her.

Oh, wow.

And at the same time, telling someone not to take a wooden nickel is kind of a joking way just to basically say, you know, be aware of yourself, right?

To make sure that you know what you’re doing and don’t let somebody pull one over on you.

Yeah, it goes back to a long tradition of joking advice.

In the late 19th century, early 20th century, when sort of country bumpkins were moving to the city and people were giving them advice to not be taken in by the city slickers.

And so people might say, don’t take any wooden nickels or don’t take any wooden hams or don’t take any wooden cucumber seeds.

And the idea was that you shouldn’t be snookered or hornswoggled, you know, that you shouldn’t let the more sophisticated people take advantage of you.

And so it was a joke, right?

Yeah, it was just a joke.

But there were such things as fake nickels.

I don’t know if they were made out of wood, but there were such things that make them out of cheaper metals than the ones in the real coins.

And there’s even a long history of wooden nutmegs.

Nutmegs were expensive per the pound, and so it was cheaper just to spend some time carving fake ones out of wood and sell those.

Or even better, to salt a real load of nutmegs with fake ones.

So there were some genuine ones in the bag, but there were some fake ones too.

These injunctions against taking wooden fakes go back to the 1820s, maybe even earlier.

So it’s a long history.

But Tim, I’m so interested that your dad used that expression because it’s kind of a brave kind of joking, isn’t it?

To just kind of allay people’s fears and be tough and humorous?

Yeah, I think so.

It’s interesting you mentioned wooden nutmegs, too, because that’s a phrase that my grandfather, his dad, used.

I didn’t know there was a connection at all.

But when you mentioned that, that rang a bell.

So it sounds like it’s something he picked up from his father that he kind of carried over.

That’s interesting.

Wow.

So there you go.

It’s got a long history.

It generally means don’t trust anyone or be careful about your business.

Thanks for sharing your story, Tim.

I hope it was worth a plug to Nickel.

Thanks for sharing those memories.

We appreciate it.

Bye-bye.

You bet.

Thank you very much.

Bye-bye.

Share your stories with us about language.

What did your father say?

Or your grandfather?

877-929-9673.

Or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Grant another color idiom for you.

In Mandarin, if I were to say that you were big red and big purple, any idea what that is?

I would just say, shu shu.

Thank you.

I don’t know.

Yeah, you would.

Would I?

You would, because to be big red and big purple in Mandarin is to be famous and popular.

Which, of course, you are.

I am?

Yes.

Only in China.

We wish, don’t we?

Call us if you want to talk about language, 877-929-9673, or send emails to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, I’m Jerry Ryan from Oceanside, California.

Hello, Jerry. Welcome to the program.

Hi.

I’m glad to be on because you seem to have all the answers.

Oh, we have lots of books at our disposal.

Let me ask you, Jerry, you don’t sound like you’re originally from California, are you?

No.

Well, born in southern Illinois, lived in North Dakota, and finally made it to California.

Yeah, I think it’s mostly North Dakota, I hear. You probably lived there for a while, right?

Yes, it’s a ya, you heard the ya.

Well, welcome to the program. How can we help you, Jerry?

Well, the other day, I was at a plane, Mexican domino with my little group, and someone sneezed, and I said, scat, Tom, get your tail out of the gravy.

And they all looked at me and said, what did you say?

They thought you were a witch.

That’s what we always say when somebody sneezes at our house.

Scat Tom, get your tail out of the gravy?

Yeah, scat Tom, get your tail out of the gravy.

So I have no idea if it was just a family thing.

And, of course, being a child, you never ask where anything came from.

And so I have no one to refer to.

So I thought I’d ask you guys.

Right, right.

And do you know, Jerry, this phrase is pretty darn widespread, although I’ve never heard it.

It’s very southern, though, right?

Yes, yes.

You take a look in the Dictionary of American Regional English, it is all over the place.

Oh, my goodness.

So it’s not just your family.

Yeah, and I bet you picked it up when you were in southern Illinois, because there’s some of the southern language heritage there.

Yes, definitely, yes.

Because my family that grew up in California, my children, we kind of talk a different language.

Well, you sound fine to me, but I’m from Missouri, so.

Okay, because I wash my clothes and she washes her clothes.

Okay.

I see, I see.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Put a little R in there, right?

Yes.

So D.A.R.E. has an entry under scat for this, right, Martha?

Yes, and it’s just marvelous.

There are all these different versions of it.

Scat, get your tail out of the butter.

It’s great, and it’s what you say to someone who’s just sneezed, possibly because there used to be an old belief that evil spirits would enter your body, and that’s why you sneezed to get them out.

Oh, I see. Your body, it was expelling the demons?

Yes.

Yes, and you want to get rid of them.

And especially in the South, it wasn’t always cool to refer to the devil, so you might refer to a cat, perhaps.

That’s one explanation we don’t know for sure, but there are all kinds of examples of that.

But the other possible explanation was it just tried to explain the sneeze away.

You might sneeze when a cat was around if you had mild allergies or some kind of rhinitis, right?

So it just might be kind of a joking way to explain why you sneezed.

Yeah, that’s another possibility.

We really don’t know, but it’s just…

So this is widespread in the South, still common enough to show up in fiction, right?

Because you can find a number of examples in Google Books and on Amazon.

Yeah.

Just kind of colorful and wonderful, just very American as well.

This is not the kind of thing that they say in the UK.

I love it.

It’s just not me saying it.

No, no.

No, no, it’s all over the South.

I wish I could ask my Aunt Mazo because that sounds like something she would say.

Well, you answered my question.

All right.

Well, we’re glad we could help.

Yeah, we aim to please.

Thanks for calling, Jerry.

You’re welcome.

Thank you.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

I like it a lot better than Gesundheit.

Scat, cat, get your tail out of the gravy.

In a book by Donald Yates called The Bear Went Over the Mountain, he uses it.

And there’s a version he’s got, they used to say skedaddle as well.

Skedaddle.

Yeah, not just scat, cat.

Scat cat being the short version.

Yeah.

Get your tail out of the gravy.

I’m just imagining a cat sitting there, you know, in the gravy boat keeping his rump warm.

Having a grand old time.

You know, cats seek the warm spot, right?

They do.

They do.

And they get fixated on one for a few weeks and then they move to another one, you know.

They move to the sunbeam or something.

You can’t do better than a warm bowl of gravy.

I’ll say.

Give us a call, 877-929-9673, or send your questions to words@waywordradio.org.

More than a few of these international color idioms have made their way into English basically intact.

For example, the French bête noire, right?

Right.

Dark beast.

The dark beast.

We use that in English, in the French phrase, to mean the thing that is your kryptonite.

Yeah, yeah.

The thing that’s most likely to do you in.

Right, right.

That’s a good way to put it.

Your kryptonite.

I love this list of color idioms.

We’ll share the whole thing online.

You can find it at waywordradio.org.

Send us an email, words@waywordradio.org, or try us on the phone, 877-929-9673.

More of your questions about language as A Way with Words continues.

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You’re listening to A Way with Words.

I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

Martha, I spend my days in the trenches of editing and copy editing, you know, when I’m not doing the show.

Well, I got to tell you, one really nice thing about it is that it just trains you to edit text really fast.

It’s kind of a high-speed approach.

You’ve got a deadline coming.

This stuff needs to be clean.

You’ve got to read everything.

No time for fooling around.

Right.

Deadlines are handy.

And so you’re looking for shortcuts, right?

You want to learn from other people’s mistakes.

Well, there are two blogs that I read that let me learn from the mistakes of the pros.

One of these blogs is The Language Corner at the Columbia Journalism Review.

Merrill Perlman edits this.

She used to be the director of copy desks at the New York Times.

And she just talks about errors, you know, style errors, copyediting errors, the things that people are doing wrong that she finds in the reading that she does of professional journalists.

For example, she recently tackled overnight, but she tackled it as a noun instead of the usual adverb, like, you know, it’s going to rain overnight as opposed to it’ll get colder in the overnight.

The overnight?

The overnight?

Yeah, the overnight.

Yeah, interesting, right?

She does a ton of this stuff, and so I can read her stuff, and she doesn’t talk about

The outliers.

She talks about the common mistakes, the things people are doing repeatedly.

Another blog which does exactly the same thing, also associated in one way or the other with the New York Times, is by Philip Corbett.

This is the After the Deadline blog.

It’s on the Topics section of the New York Times.

Philip will write about the mistakes actually in the pages of the New York Times.

Oh, wow.

Airing the dirty copy laundry.

Yeah, the mistakes that have slipped through.

Oh, wow.

Genius, right?

Because it actually gives them more credibility, not less, when they talk about their mistakes.

Exactly.

So the kind of thing that he talks about, I loved this one.

He pointed out how many times that newspaper has misspelled the names of Alberto Gonzalez, Warren Buffett, and Danielle Steele.

Is there a little chart?

No, not a chart, but they do it with frequency because these names are just a little less obvious than you would think.

Oh, really?

So lovely blogs.

We’ll link to these both, the Language Corner at the Columbia Journalism Review after the deadline from the New York Times.

If you’ve got some blogs to recommend about language, drop us a line, words@waywordradio.org,

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

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, Grant. This is Bob Giannini calling in from Indianapolis.

Well, hello, Bob. Welcome to the program.

Hello, Bob.

Hello, Martha. It’s a pleasure to be talking with you all.

Well, it’s our pleasure. Well, how can we help you today?

Well, I have come across a poem.

It’s been a part of our family’s tradition for as long as I can remember.

It was a poem that was written for my mother and father when they got married,

Written by a fellow named Charlie Gus, who was an Episcopal priest who was one of the ushers.

And it begins with the line, Thrice Happy Pair.

And for years, I just knew that poem by heart because it was embroidered

And it was on the wall of my mother and father’s bedroom.

But just this past winter, being with my sister in Florida and seeing it again hanging on her wall,

I was reminded that I hadn’t the slightest idea of what thrice-happy meant.

Well, I looked it up, and I found some references to it in both Wagner,

In the wedding march of all things from Lohengrin,

And also in Edmund Spencer uses thrice-happy lovers.

But I kept looking for a footnote to say, what does thrice happy mean?

Now, I couldn’t find it, so I’m going to throw the ball in your court.

Do you still have it memorized? Can you recite the lines in question?

I can recite the whole poem. It’s not that long.

Well, let’s have a snip of it.

Yeah, let’s hear some.

Okay, thrice happy pair who knelt to pray before the throne of God.

Remember, ere this sacred day, and give your thanks to God.

The vows are said, the ring is given, the host is lifted high.

The living bread comes down from heaven, your love to sanctify.

Charlie is another high church.

I can hear that.

That’s lovely.

So you’re curious about the thrice in thrice happy.

Yes.

Which just basically means really happy, as you can imagine.

Greatly happy, extremely happy.

Sort of more than twice happy, but…

Yes.

It goes back to the same idea in Latin.

There’s a word ter, T-E-R, that’s related to all those three words, like three and tres in Spanish.

And it means the same thing.

It means three times or greatly.

And you see this all the way back in the poetry of Horace.

There’s a poem where he talks about a thrice-happy couple.

All the way back there.

Thrice-happy they that free from strife maintain a love as long as life, loosely translated.

That sounds almost like one of the odes.

So thrice happy doesn’t have anything to do with three or trinity.

It’s simply an intensifier that has somehow or other Charlie Gus knew about it,

But almost the rest of the whole world has forgotten it.

Right.

But, I mean, it is an intensifier, but I think it does go back to this idea of three being more than just one.

It’s like 300%.

That’s pretty happy.

But 300% happy is very happy.

Just like on the program you had a few weeks ago, that means it’s as happy as a clam.

That’s right.

In Hog 7.

Something like that.

It’s been a pleasure talking with you all.

And thank you for helping me finally understand this wonderful poem that’s been part of our family’s heritage.

It must have been quite a gift to be kept for so long and be passed to the new generations.

Well, I hope my children have a chance to see that poem and my grandchildren and hear it and just continue the tradition.

Super.

Very cool.

Bob, thank you for calling today. Best of luck.

A pleasure indeed. Thank you all so much.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

That’s the number to call us and talk about your linguistic heirlooms and language questions.

Or you can email us.

The address is words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi there.

This is Nancy Gillis calling from Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.

Well, hello, Nancy.

Welcome to the program.

What can we do for you today?

I am looking to find out where the expression petered out came from.

I know it’s not necessarily a common expression that people use anymore,

But I’ve heard of it my whole life,

And I started asking around when I was a teenager,

You know, where did this come from?

Is it something biblical, like from the Apostle Peter?

Is it not referring to a person at all?

And it’s not really common in today’s use, but I use it a lot.

I tend to stick to the old expressions.

Do you?

Yeah, I use it.

Peter it out?

Isn’t that petered out?

Yeah, me too.

Sometimes it seems like the only choice for me.

Really?

Yeah.

Yeah, it was exhausted or it was extinguished.

I know, petered out is kind of more informal than those choices, right?

Yeah, Peter small p, right?

Yeah, Peter small p.

Yeah, Nancy, we don’t know for sure what the origin of it is,

But we can pretty much rule out the Peter in terms of the biblical St. Peter.

I don’t think there’s any connection.

Yeah, because that doesn’t make any sense.

Right.

A lot of the reference works will still include that old story.

I just guess they haven’t been updated in a while,

But it probably has nothing to do with St. Peter.

The part where he lets Jesus down.

Yeah, yeah.

But we really don’t have any evidence for that.

Usually, the earliest examples we see of it tend to be associated with mining and a vein of ore petering out.

And it’s an American term.

It comes from mining in the American West.

If you use petered out in the other English-speaking countries of the world, they might recognize it, but they’re probably going to give you a cockeyed look.

So it’s not completely widespread.

One theory, the strongest theory that we have about the origins of petered out is perhaps it comes from the French word for to fart.

F-A-R-T.

Oh, my goodness.

P-E-T-E-R. It’s spelled the same way.

And it’s a very tenuous connection, but it’s pretty strong because the French, for many years, were very common in the American West,

Starting with the missionary days, frankly, and then the trapper days and so on and so forth.

And even, you know, of course, the Louisiana Purchase, buying all that land from the French.

And even where I come from, Missouri, there’s still plenty of streets and towns that carry French names anyway.

So there’s a strong history of the French language in the United States.

It’s possible that it came from some euphemistic use of passing gas.

Passing gas, yeah.

Yeah, fizzling out, in other words.

Fizzling out, exactly right.

I mean, that might be a word that you substitute for, right?

Fizzle?

One little interesting note is that in the earliest forms that we find, it’s usually just to peter.

So the vein petered.

Not petered out, but just petered, meaning that was the end of it.

And then peter out later became the more common form of it.

Yeah, and there’s another theory that maybe it has to do with salt peter,

Which was an ingredient in explosives, and they’re just…

Right, because you would put a hole in the wall,

And you’d throw in some explosives,

And then you’d blow up the wall of your mine,

And you’d check the ore.

That actually makes a lot of sense,

Because then they would just blow things up.

You know, trying to get at that source of ore.

Yeah.

And then eventually, there’s just no more.

They’ve done as far as they can, and so now it’s now petered or petered out.

Exactly, yeah.

Thanks so much for answering my question.

You have no idea how delighted I am to find the answer to this.

Well, we’re delighted to speak with you.

Thanks.

All right.

You guys have a great day.

Take care.

Keep warm.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Mining is another one of those things that gave all these words to American English, and sometimes we forget about their roots, right?

Yeah.

So something pans out, right?

Right, right, right.

Pay dirt.

Pay dirt.

Exactly.

Love it.

Love it.

Minero.

Chilean mineros, right?

Oh, there we go.

Fantastic.

Here we are discussing the beauty of language.

Give us a call, 877-929-9673, or send your questions about language and how we use it to words@waywordradio.org.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

How are you there?

My name is John Paul, and I’m in Tallahassee, Florida.

Hi, John. Welcome to the program.

Thank you very much.

What can we do you for?

Well, I’m a fan of the TV show The West Wing, and I have the complete box set, and every once in a while I pull out the videos and just sit for a few hours.

And one of the later seasons, I think it might have been the last season, but Brian Dennehy is playing a senator from Florida, and they were trying to send one of the interns from the White House, one of the female interns, and he was commenting that you sent me someone with some pulchritude.

And I found that to be a very interesting word because it just didn’t sound right.

So I looked it up and it’s just a word that you don’t hear very much.

And I don’t know why it went out of fashion because it actually explains the situation perfectly.

Well, let me ask you this.

Do you think that pulchritude is a beautiful word itself?

No.

Yeah, I don’t either.

I don’t either.

Some people do.

It means beauty, but I think it’s not a very pretty word.

So Brian Denny’s character, I haven’t seen that season.

Was he a bit of a kind of foghorn leghorn in that he spoke big and talked big and had a way with, he was very stentorian and used long words and that sort of thing?

Well, you know, he was a very old senator from Florida.

He would offer orange juice to his visitors and would add some vodka to his own.

Sure.

That’s a great description of somebody.

So he’s an older guy who might find pulchritude in his mouth comfortably.

Let me rephrase that.

I would guess so.

But it definitely, when you hear it, I thought they were being, and here’s another funny word, pejorative regarding the female.

You thought pulchritude was a negative word.

Yeah, I thought it was a negative word.

But she was beautiful, this woman.

But yes, it means beautiful.

But, you know, how do you use it?

Is it a noun?

Is it an adjective?

Is it an adverb?

Well, does one use it at all is the question.

Oh, that’s true, too.

Oh, I hear it all the time.

Oh, do you?

Yeah.

Martha and her pulchritude.

On the phone, though, right?

Not face-to-face?

The truth is I rarely hear the word pulchritude.

And I think because it’s not a pretty word.

You know, I mean, I wouldn’t put it past Aaron Sorkin to use it because he’s a smart guy.

He’s the guy that writes West Wing, right?

Yeah. I mean, I do have a special affection for this word, John Paul, because I learned it when I was taking Latin, because about a third of the way through your Latin course, you’ll come across the word pulcher, which means beautiful.

And, you know, but it’s not even beautiful in Latin, I don’t think.

You know, you talk about puela pulcra, meaning beautiful girl, and it’s just, puela pulcra is just too plosive, you know.

Sounds like a plucked chicken.

Yeah.

A plucked polio.

So, I don’t know, is it a word that you’re going to start using?

I don’t think so.

Yeah.

I just found that, you know, the character used it so freely and easily, and I just figured it was just an Old South word.

It’s an old word.

I would probably classify this as what they call an inkhorn term, which is a long word for a short idea that’s pulled out in order to make the writer feel august, make the writer feel a little important about him or herself.

But thanks for sharing the word with us.

And it’s definitely old-fashioned.

You can use it if you want, but you’re going to get a lot of weird looks, John Paul.

I appreciate it. Thank you very much.

Take care.

All right. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Television brings us new language, particularly if you’ve got the writing talents of Aaron Sorkin to observe.

What have you heard or what have you seen?

Give us a call, 877-929-9673, or send your observations of popular media to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello. You have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Jeff Kirchman from Madison, Wisconsin.

Hey, Jeff.

Hi, Jeff. How are you doing?

Very good, thanks.

What’s going on?

My local school district refers to its sports and academic teams as the vanguards.

The football team is the vanguards.

The basketball team is the vanguards.

I suppose even the math team is the vanguards.

Now, a few years ago, it occurred to me that we might be using the term vanguards improperly.

So I looked up Vanguard in the dictionaries available to me, and they all pretty much agree that a Vanguard is a group of soldiers at the leading edge of an advancing army.

Okay, so in other words, it’s a number of individuals working together to accomplish a common goal, just like a team.

So in my interpretation, the term Vanguard is already plural, and we should no more refer to the football team as the Vanguards than we would refer to them as the Bearses or the Lionses.

And I think the appropriate cheer would be go Vanguard.

Now, my wife is not entirely convinced of my argument, so I guess I’m looking for an expert opinion from you guys.

Here’s the thing.

I think you’re more or less right.

But I think the bigger thing here is to understand that each game can have its own Vanguard.

There is one group or two groups or multiple groups in each game that are in the front.

So technically, if you take all the sports and all the games in their aggregate, there are many vanguards.

And to go further up the tree in the argument here is you’ll find in military context that it’s often used in the plural.

Because different spurs of advancing troops come in from different directions.

They maybe form a pincer and they are both vanguards in the same battle at the same moment.

So that’s one thing.

So I think vanguards is a plural.

You can kind of twist it around to make it okay.

And then that throws into doubt whether or not you can go with confidence to the school administrators and the coaches and say, this is wrong and it’s always been wrong and you really should fix it.

If anything comes out of this call, we’ve undermined your confidence.

But made your wife very, very happy, right?

Well, there’s no doubt about that.

But I’m very well practiced in saying that I’m wrong to her.

Oh, to your wife?

And doing dishes as a result. I get it.

I think what you’ve certainly pointed out is that while it may not be completely right, it’s not exactly completely wrong.

Yeah, I think there’s an argument made for each one of these people being a fighting force and yet together also being a fighting force and in effect being multiple vanguards on the field at one time.

Yeah, Jeff, I think you summed it up very well.

Okay.

Well, very good.

Well, I appreciate your take on it and I will move forward like the vanguards.

So we’ll send a copy of this call to your wife just to make sure she actually hears it.

And can play it periodically, once a day.

When you’re feeling smug or overconfident.

Right, right.

Well, thank you very much.

Thank you, Jeff.

I appreciate it.

Go vanguards.

877-929-9673 or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

That’s our show for this week.

Don’t forget, you can leave us a message even when we’re not on the air.

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

The address is words@waywordradio.org.

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Stefanie Levine is our senior producer.

Our technical director and editor is Tim Felten.

Tim also chooses our great music.

We’ve had production help this week from Josette Herdell, Jennifer Powell, and James Ramsey.

A Way with Words is independently produced and distributed by Wayword, Inc.

A non-profit organization.

The show’s recorded at Studio West in San Diego, California.

Thanks for listening. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. So long.

Love ya.

Oh, if we call the whole thing off, then we must part.

And oh, if we ever part, that would break my heart.

So I say oyster, you say oyster.

I’m not going to stop eating oysters.

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