XYZ PDQ (episode #1447)

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. If you need proof that rules about usage and grammar change over time, just take a look at some of the books by language mavens from the late 19th century.

Writers like Richard Grant White, who was a prominent Shakespearean scholar, and another guy named C.W. Bardeen who wrote a book called Verbal Pitfalls, a manual of 1,500 words commonly misused. For example, one of the things that stopped me in my tracks when I was reading is that both of those writers disdain the term campaign when you’re talking about a presidential campaign. Why? Because it’s appropriating military language. They’re saying that the word that you should use is contest rather than campaign because that’s associated with the military.

White wrote that using campaign in that way is inflamed newspaper English masquerading as eloquence. And then he went on and said, I do like that.

I know, right?

Even though I don’t agree with the rule, I do like that.

Yeah, he writes, is it not time that we had done with this nauseous talk about campaigns and standard bearers and glorious victories and all the bloated army bumming bombast? An election has no manner of likeness to a campaign or a battle. It is a mere comparison.

Oh, boy.

Isn’t that great?

And Bardeen says that its use is indefensible. That’s super interesting, but it kind of underscores the problem with a lot of this language mavenry, which is that 99 times out of 100, it is someone passing off their personal prejudices and preferences as some kind of universal rule.

And Richard Grant White, he did damage for a long time. Many of his rules, you can hear the air quotes, I hope, many of his rules were borrowed into many other books and taught by teachers. And even today, show up in a variety of different places in the training of teachers. And it’s a problem. He didn’t like it. Therefore, it’s a rule. And somehow he got respect for it. And it’s just his own opinion.

I know.

It’s kind of morbidly fascinating to read these manuals from back then. And I’m going to share some examples later in the show because they’re kind of unintentionally funny at this point. Today’s peeve, you know, is tomorrow’s standard.

Yeah, exactly.

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Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Rose. I’m calling from York, Pennsylvania.

Hi, Rose. How are you doing?

Hey, Rose.

Well, I was wondering, the other day I was folding my laundry and the zipper fly was down. And I remembered when I was a kid growing up, people would say X, Y, Z, sort of, but not exactly short for examine your zipper. But my parents were not from the area. I grew up in south-central Pennsylvania, but my dad was from northern Pennsylvania and my mom was from Wisconsin. So I wasn’t sure how local that expression was or how widespread.

Yeah, it’s a handy one, isn’t it?

X, Y, Z, to subtly tell somebody that their zipper is down.

Yeah.

Or gleefully tell people if you’re a child.

Yeah.

Yeah, that fits pretty well with what we know about the expression examine your zipper or X, Y, Z, because it is largely in the Northeast. It’s kind of spread all over the country, but mostly in the Northeast. And it’s been around since the 1960s or so.

Oh, wow.

We used it in the 1970s in Missouri for sure. I remember it. X, Y, Z, P, D, Q. Was the longer form of it, right?

Pretty darn quick.

Yeah.

Yeah, have you heard any other expressions like that for the same thing, Rose?

Well, I actually, I asked some friends on Facebook about it, and they said the one that Grant just said about XYZ PDQ, but I don’t remember that one from growing up, just the shorter one.

-huh.

Yeah, I have a long list of those here, like it’s one o’clock at the button factory.

What?

Or are you advertising? Or I like this one, what do birds do? Fly.

Exactly.

Oh.

Your cuckoo clock is working? The barn door is open is a common one.

Yes, the barn door is open.

Oh, yeah, I’ve heard that one.

You have?

Okay.

Okay.

Or some people say there’s a dime on the counter.

What?

Yeah.

I don’t think that one.

And then you’re supposed to look down and see the dime.

Oh, you look down at the counter and you’ll hopefully catch your zipper.

Yeah.

Yeah.

X, Y, Z is much more widespread than all of those.

Well, thanks, Rose. Appreciate it.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

You too.

Bye.

Bye.

Did you know that in British English they don’t say fly? They say flies. Your flies are open.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

Your flies are open. It’s one of those interesting differences.

That is. You can’t really fathom why, but…

And do they say X, Y, Z?

I don’t know about that. I don’t even know if they have that one.

Call us with your stories about language. A77-929-9673.

Hello. You have A Way with Words.

Hi, Grant. Hi, Martha. This is Heath Blue calling from Palmer, Massachusetts. How are you guys doing?

Doing well. How are you doing, Heath?

I am doing wonderful, thank you. Recently, I had somebody send me a link on Facebook, and it was Stephen Colbert performing Blister in the Sun with the Violent Femmes. And now I’m a product of the 80s and the 90s. You know, I’m 40 years old. So I was left with this feeling of nostalgia for the Violent Femmes, but also this feeling of love that I have for Stephen Colbert. And I was wondering if there’s any kind of word that describes those two feelings together, because I’ve experienced it several times, and it’s not one or the other distinctly by themselves. It’s a feeling all its own. Do you know what I mean?

Yeah.

So nostalgia plus what?

Plus the feeling of something new that you love, like when an artist takes something old and puts their own twist on it. And you love the old thing that they put the twist on, but you also love the new artists. And Heath, you said you’d experienced this several times. Do you have other examples? I mean, besides Stephen Colbert?

Like a Monet painting that gets redone by a digital artist. This is a tough one. I’ve never heard of a word like that that I can think of. I’m thinking of all my Greek and Latin roots.

Juvenal?

Yeah, I was thinking of the Italian nuovo vecchio, maybe, because that sounds fancy, right?

I like that very much.

New old together, nuovo vecchio, sounds classy.

It sure does.

It’s kind of fake elegance.

I like that very much.

Well, it sounds a lot better than the one thing I came up with, which was nostalgia.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, that’s okay.

That’s pretty good.

Nostalgia?

I like that.

I do like that. There’s also notions of a retro feeling here. So you might do retro-stalgia. There’s a short list somewhere, I don’t remember where I saw it, of words coined from the stalgia root, the false root of nostalgia.

Yeah, yeah.

The alga in nostalgia is pain, like an analgesic is something that takes away pain. People take nostalgia and put all kinds of prefixes on it because they don’t really understand the word.

That’s interesting.

Yeah.

I like new-stalgia, actually. That’s the best we can do. I wouldn’t be surprised if other listeners come up with their own words for that feeling of nostalgia mixed with the enjoyment of something new.

Exactly. Thank you, guys. I appreciate your help.

Thank you for your call.

Thanks a lot.

Bye-bye.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Do you have a better word for Heath? Let us know, 877-929-9673, or send it to us in email. The address is words@waywordradio.org.

Am I the only person who didn’t know until last week what a bollard is? Do you know what a bollard is?

Yeah, these are like these short concrete pylons that kind of block cars from going on the sidewalk. Or they protect the entry to federal buildings. Or they’re actually used in the seashore to wrap ropes and cables and things around.

Yes, those are called bollards.

How did I live all these years without knowing that?

It is a vast language.

You need to forgive yourself.

Thank you, Grant.

Thank you very much.

I was driving with a friend of mine to dinner at someone’s house, and we called the host as we got close.

The passenger did and said, “Where should we park?”

And she said, “I’ll park by the bollard.”

And my passenger said, “Okay.”

And I was like, “How come you two know this word and I don’t? What’s a bollard?”

But, yeah, it comes from a Middle English word that means the trunk of a tree.

The trunk of a tree.

I didn’t know that part.

Yeah, partner with a bollard.

B-O-L-L-A-R-D.

Bollard, yeah.

Yeah.

But isn’t that cool how you can go for decades in your life and all of a sudden you realize this thing that most other people know that you don’t know?

Yeah, you look around and everything probably has a name to someone, but just not to you.

I know. It has a name.

Like the parts of a computer monitor, all the trade terms for that crazy stuff.

Oh.

Beezle, for example. B-E-Z-E-L.

Oh, Beezle. Is that the edge?

Yeah, it’s more or less the edge.

Okay.

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Hello. You have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Angelina. I’m calling from Western Montana.

Hey, Angelina.

Hi, Angelina. Welcome to the show.

How can we help?

Well, I was just curious. See, I grew up in Dallas. I spent a lot of time in northwest Arkansas.

And, you know, growing up, we all used y’all. I’ve heard you guys and that kind of thing.

But in Arkansas, I lived in a little town of population 99 in the mountains.

And I made friends with my neighbors there.

And most of them were older people that had been there their whole lives.

And I would hear them say, you know, the people in your family, the people in your house, or if you have a close group of friends, and that kind of thing.

And it was just so cute.

And I was just wanting to know if you knew anything about that.

Yeah, Angelina, we can talk a little bit about it.

You know, where in Arkansas were you?

You wouldn’t happen to be in the northeast part of Arkansas?

Northwest.

Northwest.

Because I have family in southeast and southwest Missouri that also say U-ans.

And I agree with exactly what you said.

That part of Missouri shares a lot of language features with northern Arkansas.

They mean you and yours, you and your kin, or when I’m talking to you,

I mean the you plural and all the people you think of that belong to you

Or that you consider yourself of the same group.

And you can trace this back to some dialect features in the British Isles.

And then it came over and you find it really, really heavily used in western Pennsylvania.

But it also shows up in Ohio, the Ohio River Valley, Kentucky, North Carolina, Arkansas, Missouri.

The speckles here and there throughout the south.

And it’s kind of like this interesting arc that even after it leaves the Ohio River Valley,

You can kind of draw a line kind of towards the southwest United States through Texas.

And more or less the places that have tended to say this follow this line,

Which may reflect the old immigration patterns when people were coming west.

It goes back to at least the early 1800s in the United States,

And it’s directly related to all of our Pennsylvania listeners are going to love this.

It’s directly related to the yins.

They tend to spell it in Pennsylvania as Y-I-N-S, yins.

But it’s the same thing, just a slightly different pronunciation and a different spelling.

Oh, I wouldn’t even probably know what they were saying if they said it that way.

Even through context?

Even if the yin’s want to come over for some pie?

Yeah, through the context, I would.

Yeah, and a variant, not a variant, but like a matching word to keep in mind is we-ins.

And it’s far less common, but it had been for a while that people would say we-ins are going to the store now.

Meaning it’s the same kind of use of that pronoun with the uns attached to it, meaning ones.

Well, that’s really interesting.

Thank you.

Yeah, our pleasure.

I just thought it was a really adorable word to build my piece with you.

It is.

I love that response that you have to something new in the language.

I love it when somebody says, “It’s adorable, I love it, I need to find out more,”

Because that is what Martha and I try to do as well.

So cool for you.

Nice.

Well, I love it.

Thanks, Angelina.

Thanks, Angelina.

Cool for you.

I appreciate it.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

All right.

Well, call Grant and me to share your language stories, 877-929-9673,

Or send them an email to words@waywordradio.org.

English, one language, many voices.

Share your stories as A Way with Words continues.

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

I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett, and we’re joined on the line by John Chaneski from New York.

Hi, John.

Hey, John.

Hi, guys. How you doing?

Well, today we’re going to talk like serpents.

We’re going to work on our sibilance with phrases that take the form something and something,

Where the first and last words begin with S.

Now, this should be easy for all you parcel tongues out there.

Okay.

This is my nerd reference.

All right.

For example, if I asked what 1970s sitcom had a theme song by Quincy Jones called The Street Beater,

It went like this.

Sanford and Son.

That’s right.

Sanford and Son.

Based on an English show called Steptoe and Son.

That’s right.

I didn’t know that.

Both of those are good shows.

Yeah, great.

So now you go to the S and S.

We’re going to do S and S today.

Here’s how it goes.

Here we go.

This phrase, which is also the title of a Johnny Winter album, a Whitesnake album, and a Canadian hair metal band, and a few movies, refers to the moral extremes of the Catholic life.

People who are really good and people who are really not good.

Saints and sinners.

Saints and sinners is correct.

Not that I know anything about that music.

It was the white snake that did it for me.

It was the Catholic that did it for me.

You never know what it is.

Yeah, the Catholic.

Here’s the next one.

This company’s first publishing venture was the first ever book of crossword puzzles,

Which jumpstarted the crossword craze of the 1920s and made them the phenomenon they are today.

Simon & Schuster.

Simon & Schuster, that’s right.

The book actually came with a pencil attached.

Back then, that was a huge gimmick.

Huge.

It is the principal subject of the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Search and seizure?

Search and seizure is correct.

Right.

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, effects, etc. Against unreasonable search and seizure.

Very good.

It is the first published work by Jane Austen and the only one that fits the theme of this puzzle.

Sense and sensibility.

Sense and sensibility.

Very good.

This phrase describes a common and convenient way for men to differentiate the teams when playing an informal game of basketball.

Shirts and skins.

Right. Either way, he’s fine. Shirts and skins, skins and shirts.

The title of his 1962 album of standards by Old Blue Eyes would seem to suggest that it features the chairman of the board himself accompanied by just one section of the orchestra.

Sinatra and Strings?

Yes, Sinatra and Strings.

A 1974 hit song by singer-songwriter and comedian Jim Stafford,

This tune told the tale of a boy whose girl needed to remind him

That she likes neither arachnids nor legless reptiles.

What do you got, Martha?

Boo-ee-boo.

Spiders and snakes.

Spiders and snakes.

I don’t like spiders and snakes.

Very good.

Finally, it’s a genre of fiction which would include the chronicles of Conan the Barbarian

And features both arms and magic.

Arms and Magic.

Yes.

Conan the Barbarian.

Swords and Sorcery.

Yes, Swords and Sorcery is correct.

Very good.

Well, that was very short and sweet.

Yeah, that was a good one.

I was waiting for Simon and Simon to come up.

You know that show that was set here in San Diego?

Yeah.

I love that show.

Holding that one in reserve.

Yeah.

Maybe for next time.

John, thank you so much.

So much.

Bye-bye.

Thank you, guys.

See you later.

This is a show about language.

Give us a call, 877-929-9673, or email us, words@waywordradio.org.

Grant, do you know the expression, go lemony at?

Go lemony at?

Yeah, he went lemony.

No, like as in Lemony Snicket?

Sort of.

No, I don’t know that at all.

Yeah, yeah, that’s a bit of Aussie slang that means to lose one’s temper.

Get irritated. Yeah, he went lemony at me. Sort of like being salty these days. I hear that a lot from college kids, right? Meaning the same thing, irritable, irritated, that kind of thing, salty.

What new slang have you picked up? Call us 877-929-9673 or send it to us in email.

That address is words@waywordradio.org. Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hi, this is Lynn. I’m calling from Tallahassee, Florida. Great to have you, Lynn. What’s up?

Okay. So I know how you guys usually help out from relationships when it comes to arguments over particular words.

Yeah, usually. I need you guys to settle an argument.

Okay. Let’s hear it.

Okay. So basically what this all comes down to is whenever my boyfriend and I start debating something and then it turns into an argument, we stop, and we either let it go or we bring in a third party.

And right now, for the past five years, he will not let this particular instance go.

Oh, boy. No pressure there.

He’s adamant that I am using words incorrectly and that I need to change my position. So I’m hoping you guys can help.

Okay.

Oh, five years.

Five years.

And part of it is I’m pretty sure I’m doing it just to torment him now.

Right.

It comes down to the difference between a couple and a few.

A couple and a few?

I use them interchangeably.

Give me a few napkins or give me a few moments or give me a couple of straws.

And he hates that.

He hates it because he’s convinced a couple is always two and a few is always three to four.

Okay.

Okay.

I know.

It seems kind of silly, but when I say give me a couple and he gave me two and I need more, he told me that I was not being precise in my language.

Oh, I see.

And what’s your position?

I grew up using them interchangeably.

I don’t see a big deal, especially when I found a dictionary that said not only are they synonyms, but it actually said one of the definitions of a couple was a few and he didn’t like that.

So he’s going to argue with the dictionary.

Right.

Or bring out a different dictionary.

Exactly.

Dueling dictionaries.

Interestingly enough, I’ve mentioned this at work, and it’s created an interesting dynamic with my coworkers, too, because some are definitely on his side and some are definitely on my side.

And I’m thinking, is this a regional thing? Is this just how we were all brought up or even our generation?

But it’s interesting. It has caused some interesting discussions.

Yeah, you’re going to get that, particularly when you interrogate somebody directly about their own language use.

They usually really honestly don’t have any real idea how they speak and what they say.

They’re kind of like, they’re using their own judgment for the moment and trying to come up with the best possible version of themselves.

Any field worker in linguistics will tell you, if you directly interrogate people about their language use, you’re not going to get very good results back.

So you always have to go it indirectly, which is why lexicographers and dictionary editors look at written text that wasn’t written to be examined for linguistic cues, right?

We look at books and we look at novels and newspapers and transcripts of things that people are writing on Facebook and wherever.

And we use that text to say this is unguarded speech.

They did not know that we were going to look at.

This is their true selves.

This is how they really speak.

So that’s, I suspect, is what’s happening with your significant other is that he is not fully aware of his own patterns as well.

But let’s set that aside for a second.

Here’s what the New Oxford American Dictionary says about couple.

It’s second entry.

It’s first entry is for two or a pair, right?

It says an indefinite small number, okay?

An indefinite small number.

And this isn’t the only word that we do this.

I’ll be there in two seconds.

Well, is it actually two seconds?

No.

It’ll only take five minutes.

Come over.

We’ll do this together.

Is it actually five minutes?

No, it isn’t.

Oh, it’s just a 20-minute drive away.

There’s this old joke in a lot of cities across America that everything is just 20 minutes away because it’s kind of the generic number we use.

It sounds specific, but it’s actually not.

It’s very imprecise.

So the bottom line is that couple can mean more than one thing.

Lynn and her partner are not a few.

They’re a couple.

Right, right.

Well, one of the jokes about this is that if few always meant three, then we’d only have three Marines in the U.S. Marine Corps.

Oh, good point.

I like that argument.

And where you find that border between couple and few is really contextual.

And, you know, we often say this on the show, words do not exist alone.

They keep company, and you examine them according to the company they keep.

To merely look at the couple alone without a larger body of text is a mistake and just really not going to give you the results that you want.

So couple is used vaguely and imprecise all over the place.

And few is already vague and imprecise, right?

Is it three or is it four?

Can I go up to five?

Can few be two?

And you will get occasions where it turns out to the two.

And here’s the other thing.

I’m sorry.

I’m really excited about this, Lynn.

Here’s the last thing I want to say.

I like it.

No, this is good.

So when somebody says, give me a few napkins, nobody involved knows exactly how many napkins they’re going to give back to you.

And it’s not that they carefully counted and said, here’s three napkins.

You just kind of grab a little bit off the top and you give it to the other person.

This is all to say, Lynn, your boyfriend needs to stop arguing about this because he’s firmly wrong.

All right?

Excellent.

Lynn is high-fiving herself right now.

If he wants to be right about this.

I am.

If he wants to be right about this, he should only ever use the number two, the number three, and the number four, and stop using those two words altogether, because he is a minority by like 100 million to one.

Wow, that’s great.

Lynn, so now what will you torment him with?

Well, first of all, I’m going to probably torment him this for a while, because he did ask me if you guys were going to call him and get his side of the story, and I told him that’s not how it works.

Sometimes we do.

That’s going to be the first thing I torment him with.

If he wants to send us his point of view, if he disagrees, by all means.

But it sounds to me—

Well, they take a couple of minutes.

Yeah.

They take a couple of minutes, yeah.

Write his email.

Yeah, there’s another joke that I saw on Metafilter, which is a discussion forum I go to, where somebody says, anytime somebody asks me about couple versus few, I say, I’ll get back to you in a couple of minutes.

I have a few things I need to finish up first.

Oh, that’s excellent.

So, Lynn, I think we’re sending you away happy.

You very much are.

And the next time he is upset with me because I was not precise with my language, I’m going to do exactly what you suggested and say, well, then don’t use the word couple or few at all and give me numbers.

And that might be the next thing I torment him with.

Yeah, but how many do you mean?

You just said a few.

Do you mean three or do you mean four, buddy?

Exactly.

Thank you guys so much.

Thank you, Lynn.

You don’t even know how much I appreciate it.

Yay, there’s a happy woman in Florida.

I think we do.

Okay.

Thanks, Lynn.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Thanks.

Bye.

877-929-9673.

Well, you know, if you want to apologize to somebody for being long-winded, you can always say, sorry, I had to go around my elbow to get to my thumb.

Who says that?

A lot of people.

Really?

Google it.

Yeah.

Go around my elbow to get to my thumb.

Yeah, yeah.

Take the long way around in a story.

Right.

This came up when we were talking not too long ago about looking for a word for the opposite of a shortcut.

Okay.

That’s a good one.

Yeah.

What is it again?

I had to go around my elbow to get to my thumb.

Okay.

Pretty good.

Yeah.

Pretty good.

Have to do with driving or telling a long story.

Share your words and language and cool things to say to WeWord on Twitter or call us 877-929-9673.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Ana E. I’m calling from the San Diego area.

Welcome to A Way with Words.

Yeah, what can we do for you?

Well, it’s actually something that will get me out of trouble.

I grew up in a Spanish-speaking household, and so idioms in English always really got away from me.

And I remember once I was having this conversation with my mother in Spanish, and she has a temper, and she has her ways and whatnot.

And I remember telling her, Mom, you know, you should really try not to do that anymore.

You should try to maybe say things a little bit differently or in a different tone.

And she just kind of laughed and said, well, and said it in Spanish.

Well, you know, an old tree does not grow straight anymore.

And it gets a little bit lost in translation.

And it makes sense.

But when I said it to her in English and not directly at her, but I said, oh, Mom, I guess it’s true.

You know, an old dog can’t learn new tricks or things like that.

She gave me the look of death and pretty much said, I can’t believe you just said that.

And I kind of tried explaining to her that it’s not that offensive in English, but she just kind of got a little bit upset with me.

And I was wondering if there’s a way to say something similar in English without it sounding so offensive.

Was it the dog part she didn’t like?

She didn’t like being connected to a dog like that?

What was it?

She doesn’t really understand English that much, but she knows what that means.

But she didn’t like being connected to a dog that way, because in Spanish, when you translate it, it becomes a feminine word.

So it sounded like I was calling her something else.

Oh, I see.

Okay.

Never mind.

Oh, dear.

So, yeah, that would be a problem, right?

Right, right.

And I said, no, that’s not what I meant.

But the harm had been done.

Luckily, she got over it and I explained it to her.

But yeah, some people do get offended when I say certain things in English and vice versa when I translate certain idioms from English to Spanish and Spanish to English.

Oh, that’s so interesting.

So you had to explain to her that it’s pretty much a benign expression in English.

Can’t teach a dog new tricks.

Right.

And the only equivalent that I can think of in Spanish has to do with a tree that’s twisted, never straightening out or something to that effect, right?

Right, right.

Yeah, yeah.

We do have in English the expression that goes as the twig is bent so the tree grows.

But I would say it’s far less common than can’t teach an old dog new tricks.

There’s another Spanish saying that I want to see if you know.

I don’t know where in the Spanish-speaking world it’s spoken, but pardon my Spanish, which is not that great.

El oro viejo no aprende a hablar.

The old parrot doesn’t learn how to speak.

Do you know that one?

I haven’t heard it, no.

But it does make sense.

And there’s some really ancient ones, too.

And actually, one of them, I believe, goes back to Latin, which says an old parrot doesn’t mind the stick.

And what they mean by that is that if you, another version of the old parrot doesn’t pay attention to the strokes of correction, which if you hit a parrot to get it to behave and to do the thing you want it to do, an old parrot doesn’t pay attention to you because it’s set in its ways.

Right, right.

Yeah, well, it’s sort of, I mean, you could take it all the way back to the Bible and the book of Jeremiah where they talk about can a leopard change its spots?

Right, I’ve heard that one.

That might be a really good one to use.

And I actually looked a few things up, and my mom loves leopards.

So when I heard that one, I said, oh, mom, listen, I found this one that I might use on you now.

So eventually she understood about the dog then.

She did, but you should have seen the look on her face.

I thought I was not going to leave that room alive.

Yeah.

Well, good.

We’re glad you got it straightened out.

Anna, thank you so much.

Well, thank you so much.

Thank you.

Yeah, thanks for sharing that story.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

You know, we could have given Anna a word for somebody who learned something late in life.

Oh, yeah.

What’s that?

Opsimath.

Oh, Opsimath. I don’t know that.

O-P-S-I-M-A-T-H.

That’s a cool word, Opsimath.

Yeah.

We welcome calls from Everybody Opsimaths Included, 877-929-9673.

The words plethora and drastic have something in common.

Do you know what it is?

Okay, knowing you.

Knowing me.

Something related to etymological roots.

Nice.

And plethora vaguely strikes me as a Greek origin.

Yes, yes, yes.

The plethora part of it.

Yes.

Drastic probably is Greek through Latin, guessing.

I don’t know.

I have no idea.

Help me.

Save me.

You’re right.

You’re right.

They both come from ancient Greek.

Plethora, which means a whole lot of things, comes from a Greek word that means to be full.

Okay.

And drastic comes from a Greek word that means to do or to act or to do.

Now, the thing that they have in common is the fact that plethora and drastic were first used in the English language as medical terms.

Oh, interesting.

Plethora being an accumulation of fluid, engorgement of blood.

And drastic referred to a medicine that actually works.

A drastic medicine is something that is efficacious.

And only later did drastic and the sense of having an effect become even more intensified, having a big effect, having a huge effect.

That’s all super interesting, but even more interesting to me is how even when I’m wrong, you tell me I’m right, and then you explain all the ways that I’m wrong.

Did I just do that?

You always do that.

You always say, that’s good.

That’s right, Grant.

And then you’re like, let me tell you the 100 things you didn’t say.

I should have been a kindergarten teacher.

No, it would have worked great.

It’s working on me.

I feel great because you told me I was awesome and then you corrected me.

But you absolutely are correct.

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More conversation about what we say and how we say it.

Stay tuned.

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

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

I promised more examples of pet peeves of people from the 19th century that eventually became things that are perfectly acceptable in English.

And this one is from a book called Vulgarisms and Other Errors of Speech from 1869.

And it’s talking about the use of love instead of like, the use of the word love when you actually just like something.

And this writer says, although the word love may be applied to many things less exalted than those capable of inspiring the passion of love, there are limits.

If persons really mean what they say when they speak of loving oysters, cake, ice cream, etc., it is confessing a deplorable circumstance which they would do better to keep to themselves.

Yeah, right. Sure.

A deplorable circumstance.

But my question for you is when these guys, and it’s almost always old white dudes from the Northeast, when they made these pronouncements, they weren’t actually wrong.

I mean, those pronouncements were wrong even for the time, right?

They were not in accord with common usage at the time in any case.

Yeah, yeah. And there were women, too, who wrote these books.

Right. But it’s not. I just wanted to go back to what you said at the top, though.

It’s not that it’s become correct. It’s that it’s always been correct.

Is that somehow they took a detour and took it upon themselves to perfect an English they saw as broken.

Yes, exactly.

Let me give you another example of another writer talking about love.

A man loves his children, his mother, his wife, his mistress, the truth, his country.

But some men speak of loving green peas or apple pie, meaning they have a liking for them.

I mean, this is just hair splitting, right?

Right, it’s totally hair splitting.

It’s just somebody who, yeah, I don’t know.

I’m just waiting for him to go in.

And teenagers today, because it sounds very much like the kind of peeve against the young people that you hear today.

Let me give you one more example then.

Here’s another one on that same topic.

Still less say of anything which you enjoy at table.

I love it.

I love melons.

I love peaches.

I adore grapes.

These are schoolgirl utterances.

We love our friends.

Love is an emotion of the heart, but not of the palate.

There we go.

This is what we see time and time again, that there’s classism, elitism, racism, and other isms wrapped up in this notion of correct English.

And really, I don’t even know if they realize that they’re manifesting their own prejudices in this way.

Exactly.

I don’t really know.

Yeah.

It’s pretty funny reading, actually.

Yeah.

Sexism was the other ism, right?

Lots of isms.

Gender-specific complaint about the speech of other people is sexism.

Indeed.

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Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Heather. I’m calling from San Diego.

Hey there, Heather. Welcome.

Hello.

What’s up?

Well, I have quite the debate going with my boyfriend, and I’m hoping you guys can settle the score, so to speak.

Oh, good. We will try.

We’re trying to determine when it’s appropriate to use the term like sister-in-law or brother-in-law versus saying my brother-in-law’s wife or my sister-in-law’s husband.

Okay, this is immediately complicated because the relationship terms are.

So who is your brother-in-law?

Okay, let me give you a little context.

I don’t have any.

However, my friend, Summer, she’s married to a man named Chad.

Chad has a brother named David, and David is married to Terry.

And me and my boyfriend were discussing some of my friends, and he didn’t know who Terry was.

And I said, oh, it’s Summer’s sister-in-law.

And he’s like, but wait, you know, Summer’s an only child.

That can’t be possible.

And I said, oh, well, it’s Chad’s brother’s wife.

And he said, well, then technically that’s her brother-in-law’s wife, not her sister-in-law.

Oh, I see.

So let me just see if I can get this right.

Summer and Chad are married.

Chad has a brother, David.

David is married to a woman named Terry.

And Summer said that Terry was her sister-in-law.

Yes.

Okay.

Okay.

And who are the different sides of the debate?

There’s me and my friends and family who agree that, yes, that it might be more correct to say brother-in-law’s wife, but nobody actually talks like that, and everybody would think that that’s her sister-in-law.

And my boyfriend and some of his colleagues say, no, no, no, you know, learn the English language that’s not correct, and it would be brother-in-law’s wife.

Interesting.

Oh, boy.

This is really interesting because both parties are right.

We look at common uses across the billions and trillions of words that people use, and that’s how we vote.

And that’s where we get right and wrong when it comes to language.

And here’s why you’re both right.

A sister-in-law can be the sister of your spouse, the spouse of your sibling, right? Or the sister of your sister-in-law or your brother-in-law.

So it’s very complicated here.

Right. And I, you know, I sometimes confuse people I don’t know well because I’m not married and I’ll talk about my sister-in-law and, you know, I’ll get a look.

I mean, I wish we had a more specific term in English for it.

So the clear thing here is like sister-in-law isn’t just that one relationship.

It isn’t only the sibling of your spouse. All right.

Right.

A sister-in-law is not just the sister of your spouse.

And that’s the mistake that your opponents in this argument are making.

They think it’s very specific when it’s actually broader than that.

It’s much broader.

Yeah, after talking with friends and family, we kind of came to this consensus that it depended on how close you were to the person.

For instance, in this scenario, Summer and Carrie are like best friends.

So, of course, she would just call her sister-in-law, where maybe if it was a relative she wasn’t very close with or maybe even fond of, she might take the longer route and refer to her as brother-in-law’s wife.

I don’t have any data on that, but that makes a lot of sense to me.

I could actually see that being true.

Now, on the other hand, our brother-in-law’s sister is fine, too, because it’s technically correct.

It’s just not as—

It’s a mouthful.

Yeah, it’s a mouthful.

It’s more formal, a little less polite, probably.

Probably just not getting the force of the relationship across.

You can say co-sibling-in-law, which kind of covers the bases as well.

Oh, wow.

Co-sibling-in-law.

Now, that sounds formal or made up.

But I have my final word for you that you could just, just to clarify all this, is the more generic term for these people that you’re related to by marriage but not blood.

And these are your affines.

A-F-F-I-N-E-S.

Affines.

Yeah.

A-F-F-I-N-E-S.

Wow, I think I’ve never heard that word again.

I know, right?

It’s pretty common.

Yes, this is our job.

We bring new things to light.

I’m writing this down.

But in general, Heather, I think you’re totally fine.

You’re more right than they are, I think.

But they had one particular point, which I thought that they were being incorrect about, which is they’re being overly specific.

Cool.

Okay.

Okay, Heather, take that back to the Klan.

If you need a place to stay when they kick you out, call Martha.

You can stay with me.

Thank you so much.

All right, bye-bye.

All right, bye-bye, Heather.

Cheers.

Let us know what you think, 877-929-9673.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Perry from Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Hi, Perry, welcome.

What’s up?

How are you doing?

What can we help with?

I’m doing great. I’m so excited to be on the show.

The question I have is about the phrase, no tea, no shade.

This is a phrase that I know from shows like RuPaul’s Drag Race or from the drag queen community.

And what I understand it to mean is it’s something you say right before you’re going to tell it like it is, but you mean no offense.

And I’ve read it spelled either with the letter T, like a capital T, or as drinking tea, like T-E-A.

And I’m pretty sure it’s related to other phrases like spill the tea or throwing shade.

But I just wanted to get y’all’s opinion or y’all’s experience and where this phrase comes from, the origins and when and where, that sort of thing.

No tea, no shade, right?

Yeah.

No tea, no shade.

And so if I were going to say something in the context of the show, they didn’t pull off the dress that they were wearing.

I’d be like, no tea, no shade, but I got to tell you that gown is all wrong for you, right?

Right, exactly.

Okay.

It’s definitely popularized by RuPaul’s Drag Race.

And as a matter of fact, they have a really decent entry on it on RuPaul’s website.

They have a whole lexicon of all the drag terms and all this.

Some of this stuff going back decades, well before even RuPaul was born.

Really interesting stuff.

And they do have a definition for this.

It pretty much conforms to what you’re saying.

The spelling is variable, but what’s interesting is, although it’s usually spelled T-E-A, it’s actually supposed to be just the letter T or spelled T-E-E because it’s an abbreviation of truth.

And what’s funnier still to me about that is that originally when it was used, you find the very earliest uses online, they’d say all T, no shade.

What they meant is I’m going to tell you totally the truth, but I’m not throwing shade at you.

I’m not trying to make you feel bad or to diss you.

And somehow along the way, it just switched to no T, no shade, even though you are actually giving all truth still.

On the website, however, they make one, they say one thing that’s not quite true.

They say it was coined in season five, which would be 2013 by one of the performers.

And actually the term is at least five years older than that.

And I think it may actually predate RuPaul’s show.

So that’s pretty interesting to me.

So that the shade itself, though, throwing shade has had something of a vogue in the last, say, eight to nine years, maybe 10 years even.

And when I last looked at this, I did an entry for my double-tongued dictionary.

I was able to trace it back to the 1920s when to shade somebody meant something very similar, which would be to defeat or to outdo or to best someone.

And then we start to see it transition.

It’s very heavily used in the African-American community.

And by the 1980s and 1990s, shade and throwing shade starts to show up in the drag scene.

And also it pops up in this whole voguing craze.

If you remember Madonna and voguing, all that, she kind of wrote on top of a trend that was already taking place.

And then here we are in 2016 with shade still being a thing that you can throw, but it’s definitely left the drag community and it’s definitely left the African-American community.

And do you know how it came to transform into TEA?

Because people weren’t sure.

They only heard it and didn’t see it.

It wasn’t written down.

And they did their best guess.

Okay.

Great.

Well, thank you for all that information.

Yeah, sure.

Perry, thanks for calling.

Thank you.

Bye.

Thanks.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673 is the number to call to share your stories about language, or you can send them to words@waywordradio.org.

I was watching, as I am wont to do sometimes, a video of people in Appalachia talking.

Okay.

Talking about the way they talk.

I love watching these things on YouTube.

And I came across an expression that I really liked.

I’d sooner be in hell with my back broke.

Oh, that means like instead of doing whatever is on being offered, you just like give me the worst possible situation.

Yeah.

And what I love about it is the way they intensify it.

It’s not just I’d sooner be in hell.

It’s I’d sooner be in hell with my back broke.

With my back broke.

And it’s got a nice sound.

It’s almost poetry.

I know, I know.

And if you Google it, it Googles pretty well.

Plenty of people say that.

I’d sooner be in hell with my back broke.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi.

Oh, this is March calling from Stagecoach, Nevada.

Very cool.

Well, what’s on your mind today?

Actually, I was listening to Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me a couple of weeks ago, like I usually do, and they were talking about a word in German, and they swore it was true, and I just wanted to find out if it is true.

The word is Witzelsuch.

Now, I’m not quite sure how to spell it.

It would probably be W-I-T-Z-E-L, and after the S, I’m kind of lost.

I’m not sure how to spell it.

But anyway, it’s a person that has the habit of constantly making puns.

And I’m really interested in puns.

I always have been.

In fact, I told people Bennett Surf was my patron saint.

Oh, okay.

So the word is Witzelsucht.

Witzelsucht.

Yeah, Marge, it is a word, and it’s W-I-T-Z-E-L-S-U-C-H-T.

Witzelsucht.

Peter Segal, we have your back.

Oh, okay. All right.

Yes.

Well, I’m only half German, so I only got half of it right.

Oh, that’s how it works.

Yeah. Yeah.

And actually, the thing about this word is that people get all excited when they hear that this word exists, and they think, oh, this is for people who aren’t pun control advocates.

Ha, ha, ha.

But actually, it refers to a very serious problem with brain dysfunction in the frontal lobe.

It’s actually a medical condition.

And you don’t hear much about it because it’s pretty rare.

But neurologists see folks with Witzelsucht a few times a year.

Some of them have reported that.

And it has to do with a problem in your frontal lobe.

And you can’t stop making puns or you can’t stop making bad jokes.

And you can’t respond to the jokes of others.

I mean, it’s really sort of a perception problem.

Yeah, one of the medical dictionaries that I read said something about they’re unable to suppress unacceptable responses, which to me describes most puns as an unacceptable response.

Yeah. And the term itself, Witzelzug, might be translated as joke addiction or something.

And I mean, it’s a serious problem if, say, you’re married to somebody who wakes you up every hour on the hour to tell you a bad joke.

I mean, that actually happens.

How long would that marriage last?

That’s terrible.

I mean, seriously, doctors say that if you have somebody in your family who suddenly starts making a whole lot of jokes, like suddenly, like it’s not their ordinary kind of behavior.

So something going on with the frontal lobe.

Yeah, maybe a stroke or an injury or a tumor.

So the frontal lobe is like the behavior governor, right?

The frontal lobe, right?

The right side, yeah.

Okay.

Yes.

Well, that’s really interesting.

Yeah, I had no idea it was a medical condition.

I just figured it was something that they called people that, you know, annoy the heck out of you with dumb jokes.

You know, I mean, I have a friend like that, too.

You’re calling for a friend, as they say.

Is that right?

Yeah.

Yeah, no, actually, I’m not.

No, it’s true.

It’s just he has terrible jokes.

But he can control himself when he’s trying to impress somebody.

It’s only when he’s around his close friends that he does that, just to annoy him.

Yeah, yeah.

I can’t tell you, Marge, the number of puns that I repress.

It takes a lot of energy to be me.

Marge, thank you so much for your call and telling us everything.

All right?

We really appreciate it.

Okay, thank you so much.

Cheers.

Keep up the good work.

All right, thank you so much.

That’s really good to be.

Thank you, Marge.

Take care.

Take care.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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Talk to us on Twitter @wayword.

Or join our community and our Facebook group.

You may have heard about this new book by Dan Lyons called Disrupted.

It’s subtitled My Misadventure in the Startup Bubble.

Yeah, I read a couple of the articles that he wrote based upon the book.

And actually I might have read the articles that preceded the book.

Okay.

Okay, well then maybe you know about what he reports about language in terms of the term graduated in a startup.

Graduate.

I don’t know exactly what that is in a startup.

He says that in the startup where he worked, when someone gets quit or gets fired, the event is referred to as graduation.

So you might get an email that says, team, just letting you know that Derek has graduated.

Oh, no.

And then you go out into the open office space and you don’t see Derek or his stuff anymore.

Is that jocular slang or is that like business jargon gone awry?

I don’t know.

It’s hard to know, right?

I don’t know.

Dan, for people who haven’t read the book, is a guy in his 50s who worked at a startup for several months with lots of young people where he was by far and away the oldest person there, right?

Right, right.

And so he brought his skills with him, but there was a lot of culture shock.

Part of it was each difference.

Yes, yes.

And another term that he picked up there was delightion.

Delightion, what’s that?

It’s a made-up term that they used in that company to refer to pleasing customers, delighting customers.

And I have heard that from people.

Tech world, that we’re designing for delight and delight this and delight that.

But delition is a word.

Delition.

That’s enough to me.

It is now.

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Listen to years of past episodes at waywordradio.org or find the show in any podcast app or on iTunes.

Our toll-free line is always open, so leave us a message at 877-929-9673, and we’ll take a listen.

We’d love to get your messages at words@waywordradio.org or hit us up on Twitter at W-A-Y-W-O-R-D and look for us on Facebook.

This program would not be possible without you.

Grant and I are out to change the way we listen and think about language, and you’re making it happen.

Thanks also to senior producer Stefanie Levine, director and editor Tim Felten, director Colin Tedeschi, and production assistant Emma Kelman in San Diego.

In New York, we thank quiz guy, John Chaneski, and that master of keeping it real, Paul Ruist at Argo Studios.

A Way with Words is an independent production of Wayword, Inc.

From the Recording Arts Center at Studio West in San Diego, I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

So long.

Bye-bye.