A Yankee Dime

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. Think back to when you were a child, specifically, that point in your life where you knew just enough of your native language to get yourself really confused.

Last year.

Now, stick with me, Grant.

Okay, listening.

I can remember when I was young hearing people talk on television about guerrilla fighters.

Oh, yeah.

And then seeing them on the screen and thinking, wait, they don’t look so hairy. In fact, they look like people. What gives?

And I have a friend who said that when she first heard about cat burglars, she was afraid that we’re going to climb through her window and take her cat and nothing else.

And it got me to thinking about how as adults we take for granted that words have multiple meanings and that homophones don’t necessarily mean the same thing.

But when you’re of a certain age, it can really put some crazy images into your head.

And the reverse is also true.

Having a three-year-old growing up in my house, I find that he is so amazed that words have more than one meaning.

So many of the childhood jokes and riddles fall back on double meanings, right?

And he loves this stuff.

And even more interesting, he is not bound by the current meaning of a word.

He, for example, has a stuffed bear he calls car and a stuffed white beluga whale he calls tree.

Because as far as he’s concerned, that’s allowed.

You can do that.

You can call a bear car and you can call a whale tree.

And so that’s part of the formula, right?

Anyway.

So what words confused you when you were still a child?

Give us a call and talk about it, 1-877-929-9673.

You can call us about that or any other matter involving language, or you can email us.

The address is words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello there, how are you?

Super, who’s this?

My name is Alex Burton.

Hi, Alex, where are you calling from?

Dallas.

Well, welcome to the program.

Thank you.

What can we do for you?

Well, you may not realize it, but you’re talking with the founder and the sole member of the Society for the Protection of the Definite Article.

Oh.

And in a lot of cute publications, they use Y-E instead of the.

And it’s never been pronounced ye any time in the past.

It’s only in the present that they pronounce it ye.

Mm—

And so I’m here to tell you that it should be, if you see ye old shoppy or whatever, it should be pronounced the, not ye.

-huh. Very good.

You’re exactly right.

100% right.

And you’re the sole member of this society?

Well, I’m the sole member up to now, but I would guess that maybe I’ve got two more members.

I don’t know.

There’s no meetings.

There’s no fees.

There’s no election of officers or anything like that.

You just have to stop one in three as they pass you on the road and tell them about the proper pronunciation.

Roadblocks about deafened articles.

It’s sure to be a hit.

So, in other words, if we go to a tourist trap, go to Gatlinburg or someplace, and it says, ye oldie coffee shoppie, what do you want us to do?

I want you to go up there and raise some kind of a fuss, you know, say, what on earth is this?

You know, in high dudgeon, at least.

And explain to him that ye would, it was a printer’s convention because it was an Anglo-Saxon sound.

The TH sounds that we have in the common words like this and that and those were Anglo-Saxon words.

And there was one symbol in Anglo-Saxon for the voiced and one for the unvoiced.

The unvoiced was an O with a horizontal line through it, so it would be th.

And the other one was a T that sort of lay on its side.

And that was pronounced th, a voiced T-H.

And it was a printer’s convention because it looked so much like a Y that they began to use the Y with a little E beside it.

Well, you’re right.

Now, how do you know all this?

Because I’m a really smart guy, and I’m the founder and sole member of the Society for the Protection of the Definite Article.

You’ve got to have some history if you’re going to belong to an organization.

That’s a great summary of the history of the thorn and the F.

And the letter that we’re talking about is the thorn.

It looks kind of like a lowercase p and a lowercase b put on top of another.

That is, there’s a belly and an ascender and an ascender, right?

Yeah, it looks like a pregnant vertical line, sort of.

Yeah, and they…

I’ve never heard it described that way.

Well, I just thought of that.

And then the F looks a little like a…

Well, what is that letter in Greek?

It looks like an O with a line to it.

Well, it’s sort of like a theta, but there’s…

Theta.

Yeah, but it sort of looks like a lowercase d and a slash.

Yeah, with a crossbar, right?

Right, and you’ll see that in Old English, but you’re exactly right that the Y in Ye Olde Coffee Shop is a vestige of a letter that we no longer use in our language.

Well, there’s no reason why we can’t.

Right.

Okay.

Well, so your members number two and three now.

Martha, you can be number two.

I’ll be three.

Give you the honor of being the two.

Both of you are number one with me.

Fantastic.

I motion that the society close this meeting.

Can I get a second?

A second.

I’ll give you a second on that.

All in favor, say aye.

And we’ll set the date of our next meeting for the next time you want to give us a call, Alex.

Whenever.

All right.

Who’s going to be the treasurer?

Thanks for your time.

Thank you so much.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Wow, he’s right.

Well, he had something he had to get off his chest.

He formed a committee, even.

This is the place to do that.

It’s funny.

In Congress, committees never seem to get anywhere, but he got right to the point.

He probably got a whole lot more members, too.

You know?

Yeah.

The Society for the Protection of the Definite Article.

Now, wait.

How is he spelling the in that?

Very good.

-oh.

Yee Definite Article.

He’s spelling it with a thorn.

That’s what the letter is called.

Yeah.

But he’s exactly right.

The yee has nothing to do with yee like you.

It’s thee.

We’ll post some links to some reputable sources on the subject, and you’ll find out that if you’ve been pronouncing it yee, you’ve been just being silly for no reason whatsoever.

If you’ve got something that’s been bugging you, give us a call, 1-877-929-9673, or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

And don’t forget, we’re on Facebook.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Lynn Arthur from Indianapolis.

Hi, Lynn. Welcome to the program.

Hi, Lynn.

Hi.

What can we do for you?

Well, something came up several years ago, in fact, with my stepfather.

He used to keep a little dish on a small side table next to wherever he decided, his own chair in whatever room.

And the dishes contained a collection of small items like tax or paper clips, that kind of thing.

I believe the dishes just were there to serve as a repository for things he wanted someplace to put.

But he referred to it as a colch pile.

A colch pile.

Yes, and I’ve just spelled it C-U-L-C-H pile, and I can’t ask him anymore.

He’s not with us anymore, but the darn thing keeps sticking in my mind of why was it a colch pile?

And he was in upstate New York in the Mohawk Valley and had lived there all his life, just in case it might be a regional thing.

So I was just curious if you might have any ideas.

Well, Lynn, was his family from upstate New York as well?

Yes.

Okay, okay.

So he had these little dishes in every room of the house?

Or his favorite rooms?

-huh, pretty much.

Yeah, in all but the kitchen, I think.

What else was in there then?

It was more than thumbtacks and paperclips, right?

Yeah, just…

Coins and dice and colorful stamps and playing cards and old matches.

No? Not that I can recall.

Oh, okay. No, it was all these little useful things.

You know, he was a master carpenter. I see.

And that kind of thing, you know. Screws and nail clippers and measuring tapes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, what do we know about this, Martha?

Does the Mohawk Valley give you a clue? Well, it helps.

It’s mainly in New England. -huh. It is a regional expression.

And it goes back to an old word for a layer of debris that forms an oyster bed. When they’re real little, the oysters tend to light on something like a rock or a broken shell.

And people will put that kind of stuff out. And that would be called the culche.

Oh, my gosh. Yeah.

It may be related to a French word for couch. Right.

Couch, which means layer. Right. Right. Right.

So it goes back to the oyster beds, which, of course, makes sense that people in New England would pick up on that. Oh, absolutely.

So it went from the idea of all that little broken stuff in an oyster bed to just a collection of odds and ends. Odds and ends.

How interesting. And so this is widespread.

Does this exist outside of New England as far as you know, Martha? I believe it started out in Britain.

Yes. Okay, here we go.

Yeah, I see that it’s in Francis Gross’ slang dictionary from the 1700s. Oh, no kidding.

Yeah, famous. It wasn’t a naughty word, though, was it?

No, no, but it was an odd bit of linguistic riffraff there, a little goo-gah that he picked up.

And put in his culture pile. That’s right.

Francis Gross did make slang works that were very much like culture piles, whatever he could gather, yes.

I didn’t catch what dictionary it was in. Well, you can find this in a wide variety of dictionaries because it’s pretty well established.

The American Heritage Fourth Edition Dictionary, which is a great dictionary, by the way, does have an entry for it.

There’s four spellings, C-U-L-C-H, C-U-L-T-C-H, and then the same two words with an S on the beginning. So S-C-U-L-T-C-H and S-C-U-L-C-H.

-huh, -huh. And their definition, which is really interesting, says clean trash or rubbish such as string, paper, and cloth.

So that would make sense. Yeah, it certainly would. Yeah.

Certainly would. Well, Lynn, I hope that helps.

It has immensely. It’s answered a question that keeps coming up into my brain.

Thank you. I’ll be able to let that one go now. Okay.

Oh, no, hang on to it. It’s precious. No, no, no.

I didn’t mean that. I didn’t mean that. Oh, you’re let go of the worry and hang on to the word.

Yeah. Oh, my God. Well said.

That could be a new bumper sticker. Okay.

Lynn, thank you for calling us today. Take care.

Well, thank you for helping. Good to talk to you. You too.

Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye.

What’s the word that you’ve wondered about for a very long time? We’d like to help you get to the bottom of it, 1-877-929-9673, or send us an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Or tell us what you call your culture pile. Grant, recently a fellow named Marty from Texas sent us an email, and the message header was some plays on words.

So I know you’re going to appreciate this. A lot of money is tainted. Taint yours and it taint mine.

Got something funny to share? Call us 1-877-929-9673 or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Get ready for a little wordoku. That’s right.

A puzzle about words coming up next. Here on A Way with Words.

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

And we are joined once again by that quiz guy, John Chaneski. Hi, John. Hi, Martha. Hi, Grant.

How are you guys doing? Yo, yo, yo. What’s up?

Yo, yo, yo. Hey, you know, people are always asking me, where do you get the ideas for your puzzles?

And, of course, I always say, you know, if I’m just looking around and noticing some interesting pattern, just like nature does.

Now, at least one fan of A Way with Words knows exactly what I’m talking about. I got an email from Tim Walters of Redwood City, California, in which he says,

John, love your puzzles on A Way with Words. So right off, we’re off to a good start right there.

We were standing at the register of a shop selling souvenirs and saw several packs of Mentos candy for sale.

It occurred to me that they should offer a special version for tourists called Mementos. From this, we came up with other special packs.

Okay. For eating quickly, Mementos. For the sad, Lementos. For inciting a riot, Fomentos.

Okay. Now, this is pretty creative, right? So Tim said I could borrow his idea.

All right. So I decided to go right ahead and steal it. Okay.

And I’m going to give you some clues for brand new Mentos brands, and you have to guess what they are, okay?

Okay. They’re all Mentos? They’re all Mentos something.

I call this puzzle Mentos stimulation. Okay. Get it?

All right. For example, what kind of candy is appropriate for musicians?

Is there some kind of musical phrase for slowing down that ends in Mento or something? No, Lento is slow.

Think more basic. What do musicians do? They play. What do they play? Instrumentos.

Instrumentos. Very good. Yes. Oh, I see.

So they don’t necessarily have to be real words. Very good. Right. Exactly.

Almost all of these are not. Actually, I don’t think any of these are real words. Okay.

Very good. They’re a mint brand. They’re a new candy brand. I see.

They’re all different. All right. So some of these have multiple right answers. So no worries.

We’ll just have fun with it. Here we go. What kind of minty candies would be appropriate for?

A judge, lawyers, and jurors who are on break from a trial. Well, it’s not recessementos.

It’s on break from a trial. On break from a trial. No. Recess.

Adjournementos. Oh, adjournementos. Yes. Adjournementos.

Very good. What kind of candy is appropriate for a flatterer? Complimentos.

Complimentos. Very good. That may very well be the Spanish word for compliment.

I was going to say that. Mentos, the fresh maker. Very nice.

What kind of candy is appropriate for imaginary friends? Figmentos.

Figmentos, yes. What kind of candy is appropriate for a scientist? Experimentos.

Experimentos. Experimentos are the mentos you use if you’re going to do that Diet Coke thing.

Oh, experimentos. Yeah. What kind of candy would you give a priest? Sacramento’s.

Sacramento’s. Where do you get those? In Sacramento.

What kind of candies would you give an artist? Pigmentos.

Pigmentos, very good. You’re just kicking some butt here. Those are the ham-flavored Mentos.

What minty candy was eaten by Voltaire? Enlightenmentos.

Yes, the Enlightenmentos. You guys were fantastic.

Once again, I want to thank Tim Walters and his family of Redwood City, California, for this great puzzle idea.

And if any of our other listeners would like to do my job for me, I’d greatly appreciate it. Thanks very much.

If you’d like to talk about words and how we use them, the number to call is 1-877-929-9673. That’s 877-W-A-Y-W-O-R-D.

Or send an email to words@waywordradio.org. Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Skipper Turk calling from Cary, North Carolina. Skipper, welcome to the program. What can we do for you?

When I was in the, oh gosh, probably around 68 when I was a young kid, and I was doing a favor for my grandmother. I think I was vacuuming the floor.

And she said, if you vacuum the floor for me, I’ll give you a Yankee dime. And I was all into archaeology and history and finding arrowheads and things like that.

And I’m like, wow, I’ve never heard of a Yankee dime before. I can’t wait, and no one’s ever mentioned it, you know, all my life.

I’ve never heard about this incredible Yankee dime. So I went and hurriedly vacuumed the floor, and I came in and I said,

So, where’s my Yankee dime? And I got the nicest kiss on the cheek from my grandmother, and she said, there’s your Yankee dime.

-huh. And how did you feel about that, Skipper? I was a little let down, but now thinking about, you know,

Now that it’s been quite a few years later, I think about it that it’s a warm remembrance. Oh, that’s nice.

And so I’m curious about where Yankee Dime came from. Is it a carpetbagger holdover from the Civil War? Where did it come from?

Well, I think you’ve described it really, really well, that usually when you see or hear this, it involves bribing a little kid to do something, and then they do it, and they come back expecting their Yankee Dime. And then wah, wah. They don’t get it.

Well, I think that we don’t know for sure the origin, but I think you’re onto something with the carpetbagger, the Yankees who came down after. It predates the Civil War, though. Does it? Yeah. Well, all right. It has more to do with Yankee thrift than anything, because Yankees were seen to be… Oh, penny-pinching. Yeah, and they were less likely to give you their copper than they were to give you a smooch, because a smooch didn’t cost them a thing.

Oh. Well, yeah, there is another expression, Quaker Fip, which is a Quaker five pence, right? Which means sort of the same thing. So you can find uses of this as far back as the 1840s, probably earlier, if I dug a little bit. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Well, cool. But I’m sure that after the War of Northern Aggression, as my grandmother from East Tennessee called it, I’m sure that that… But it is a southern term, right? Sure. Yeah. Sure. Especially Alabama, but you’re from North Carolina, right? Well, but my grandmother was from Florella, Alabama, which is on the Florida-Alabama line. Florella. Florella. Florella. Yeah. So that was where she was from. Get in here, Florella. Yeah.

Well, thank you all for the information. I’ll make sure to go and check out the thriftiness of things. My grandmother was definitely thrifty. A child from the Depression, but she was a wonderful lady. Well, thank you all very, very much. Our pleasure. Thanks for calling, Skipper. Thanks, Skip. Have a great day. Thank you. Bye-bye.

What did your grandmother say that has you still puzzled today? Call us, 1-877-929-9673, or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello.

Hi, who’s this?

This is Catherine Doobie from Garland, Texas.

Well, hello, Catherine Doobie. Welcome to the program.

Hi.

Thank you.

What can we do for you?

Well, I have a couple of kids in middle school, and we have found that the English language tends to be abused a little bit for our middle school-aged kids and their friends. And when one of their teachers, their English teacher specifically, was teaching them that they don’t start sentences with prepositions, I went a little bit ballistic because I’m the grammar police in our family.

So I had never heard that before, and I thought after I went and addressed the teacher and told her, you don’t end sentences in prepositions, I understand that, of course, but what I didn’t understand was why you wouldn’t start sentences with prepositions and how boring our English language would be if we did that.

So then I started thinking, well, maybe I’m off base. Maybe there is some reason you wouldn’t start sentences, and I thought you guys might be able to shed some light on that.

Wait a minute, Catherine. Prepositions? Are you sure she meant prepositions?

I am sure she meant prepositions.

What did she say when you talked to her about this?

Yeah, give us an example.

Well, she didn’t want the kids to start sentences just with prepositional phrases. She thought they absolutely needed to modify the object of the sentence and be immediately following those. So you couldn’t start a sentence during the fifth grade. This happened. In the swimming pool, this happened. In the beginning, God created, I mean.

And that is the exact example that I used with her because this happens to be a Catholic school.

What did she say?

King James got it wrong, huh?

Well, she backpedaled a little bit and said, well, I think what I’m after is that our kids are using prepositions just excessively. Five sentences in a paragraph, all starting with the same preposition.

And I said, okay, maybe if you’re trying to teach them a style where they wouldn’t have all one type of sentence.

Yeah.

I could understand that.

But she had told me that her professor in college had told her that she could not start sentences and prepositions for a research paper.

So then maybe I thought there was something I’d missed in college about specific writing for research.

Catherine, I appreciate what she’s trying to do. She’s trying to stop her students from using a crutch. But what she’s doing is inappropriately transmitting her own personal preference as if it’s somehow a universal rule about English. And it’s not.

I’ve never even heard that as a rule ever. I mean, vary your sentence structure, yes.

Yeah, sure, yeah.

I remember getting those kind of comments from my teachers in the fourth and the fifth grade.

Sure.

And that makes sense, right, as you said.

Well, let’s just take this another way. Martha, we get calls all the time from people who say things like, you know, Mrs. Frobisher in the fifth grade said that I wasn’t ever supposed to do X, Y, Z. And we’ll be like, you know, Mrs. Frobisher was just simplifying for you. You were supposed to figure that out a little bit later on.

It does stick with people.

It does stick, though. That’s the thing is when you get these adamant black and white absolutes from teachers, people believe that they are true forever. And they’re just, I mean, what a difficult task it must be for a teacher, right? How hard it must be to let your, you know, because nuance kind of falls away in a classroom, right? You’ve got time for the basics. You’ve got a really simple point you want to make. And you don’t have a lot of time to be wishy-washy about it.

Exactly. You’re teaching this stuff for the first time to people. They’re hearing it for the first time from these really tall people with a lot of power. And so, of course, they’re going to want to please the teacher.

But, whoa.

I wonder if we were to talk to the teacher, if we could help her come up with a better way to teach that lesson.

Oh, that would be interesting.

That’s a great question.

Well, you know, she’s welcome to call us, Catherine.

So, Catherine, where does that leave you? What are you going to do? What do your kids think?

Well, I will offer for our teacher to give you guys a call.

We can certainly do that.

I do think I have resolved it with her. To my satisfaction, I’m glad you agree with me because we’ve had the conversation a couple of times, and I believe she did see that through a variety of sources that is perfectly acceptable.

And I agreed with her that if she’s trying to teach my kids overuse in this paragraph of the same sentence structure is what we want to avoid.

Catherine, thank you for giving us a call today. This is incredibly interesting. And thank you for sharing the dilemma with us. And let us know if she wants to talk to us. On the air or off, by the way.

Great.

Thank you.

I appreciate it.

Okay.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

And if you’ve got a teacher’s dilemma that you want to share with us, give us a call. 1-877-929-9673. That’s 1-877-WAYWORD. Or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Grant, we were talking earlier in the show about that point in your life as a child when you hear words and you don’t realize that they have more than one meaning or you’re not quite sure what they mean.

Right.

The cool thing about learning another language is that you get placed in that same childlike state. And a few years ago when the Harry Potter books came out, I was learning Spanish. And my Spanish wasn’t too good, but it was pretty good, good enough to read Harry Potter very, very slowly.

And I knew that the word lechuga meant lettuce. What I didn’t realize was that the word lechuza means owl. And so for the first several chapters of reading Harry Potter, I was reading and thinking that these flying heads of lettuce were delivering messages to Harry and his friends.

Which in a magical world is possible.

Yeah, which made perfect sense. And so I’m thinking, boy, this is some fantasy story. Nice.

So I was chastened and had to go back and read those over again. But that’s one of the joys, isn’t it, of learning a second language is when you screw up like that.

Misunderstanding of language can be hilarious.

Give us a call with your stories, 1-877-929-9673, or send your language misunderstandings to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, how are you?

Doing well. Who’s this?

This is Mark, and I’m from Poway, California.

Hello, Mark. Welcome.

Hi, Mark.

Hi.

What’s going on?

Thank you.

Listen, I appreciate what you do and love the power of language and the fact that I can utter a couple of things. The next thing you know, you have a pretty good idea what I meant in general.

Oh, yeah.

Right.

But it’s come to my attention that not only do I mumble in person, and I seem to stutter on my text messaging as well, so I need a word to cover me on this.

You stutter. How do you do that?

Well, you know the predictive texting?

Mm—The T9?

The T9 predictive texting, yes. You’re thumbing your way through there, or two-thumbing your way through there, and your phone is filling in any possible combination of words, hopefully in the order that you might want to use them.

So, like, if I’m trying to put in home, the first thing that tends to come up is good, and then I have to somehow squint. Of course, I wouldn’t do this driving, but I am 50 years old, and it’s a pretty small screen. A lot of times I just assume it knows that I mean home, so I keep going.

So I send off these messages like, you know, I’ll see you at good later. And then, you know, most of us kind of understand now that, oh, yeah, yeah, he means home.

So I’m looking for a word to describe this particular problem, aside from inept.

Don’t use inept.

No, I don’t think we were going there. But, Mark, you’re talking about the way that phones can guess what you’re going to type, correct?

Yes.

Yeah.

They have an autocomplete function, which tries to fill it in to save you from typing the rest of the word.

Yeah, so people do understand what you mean. So it seems like it’s a phenomenon, therefore it should be described in a single word.

Okay.

There we go, a single word phenomenon. It’s not autocomplete so much as it’s autocorrupt, right?

You put that one on the list. That could be a good one.

As a service, I, of course, have polled a number of my friends. We have some serving suggestions here that might work.

So here’s the list as of today. So the synetextic.

Synonym, synetext.

Okay, sure.

Dystextic.

So these are all describing the person.

As distextic.

Potentially.

Okay.

I received a cinetextic message from Mark.

Mm—

Another one of your cinetextic messages.

Okay.

We also have textlexic.

Okay, okay.

Textlexic.

Okay.

I want to tell you, there’s a word out there that is already being used for the mistyped words themselves.

Okay.

And they’re being called textonyms.

Ew.

And that word has been around for about five or six years. And so if you meant word A and you get word B, if you meant home but you get good, then good is a textonym.

Oh, that makes sense.

I like mine better, of course.

Oh, of course you do.

I think the easier ones to say are have a better chance of succeeding. Like, this is sinotextic. That’s pretty easy to say, right? Or sinotextic. Or sinotextic. Or synonym.

Otherwise, it’s like my English came out in Chinese.

Mark, we’re going to play around with these suggestions you’ve got. We’ll put them out to the world at large, and we’ll see if any of them take hold.

And maybe in a few years, synotext or dystectic or the other choices will be the words that people use when they describe that situation.

Who knows?

It’s certainly worth a shot.

Hey, Mark.

It’s my big chance at fame.

That’s it?

Well, Mark, it was home to talk to you.

Yeah.

It was really home.

You sound like a book fellow.

Thanks for calling.

Home by.

Home by.

Bye-bye.

You know, sometimes home and good.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

They are interchangeable on there.

Oh, my.

1-877-929-9673.

Hey, you know, Martha.

Yep.

People can call us when we are not on the air, too.

It’s amazing.

Yeah, 1-877-W-A-Y-W-O-R-D.

Or send it any time of day or night to words@waywordradio.org.

More linguistic thrills and chills coming right up next on Way With Words.

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You’re listening to A Way with Words.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

A lot of you sent us recently an article that ran in the New York Times called, Does Your Language Shape How You Think?

You remember that one, Grant?

I do, yeah.

Guy Deutscher.

Yeah, it was really fascinating.

It was adapted from a book by Guy Deutscher that just came out.

And it talks about the idea that was popular for a while that the language you speak may limit your ability to perceive or describe things.

And that’s an idea that was popular for a while, but now pretty much most linguists have debunked that.

But there’s a really interesting section in this essay where they talk specifically about directional languages or geographic languages.

They’re spoken by some aboriginal tribes and spoken in parts of Polynesia, I think even Mexico, and even in Africa as well.

And the idea is that in these languages, you don’t say things like come to my house by taking a right turn here and then a left turn here, and then our house will be the second house on the right.

They say go north and then go east, and then our house will be on the eastern side.

And so, for example, Grant, if I were telling you in one of these languages that I wanted you to scoot over in the car seat, I wouldn’t say move over to your right, Grant. I would say move east.

So giving directions and using the cardinal directions is fairly reasonable.

But when you replace prepositions of orientation like front and behind and back and forth with cardinal directions like north, south, east, west, then you really get into a strange situation.

It seems odd to us because we don’t do that, right? Right.

It seems odd to us, but the weird thing is that people who speak those kinds of languages have what’s described as an almost superhuman sense of direction. I mean, you can spin them around and around and around, and they’ll still be able to tell you which way is which.

It’s very odd. And maybe this is one place where language does influence the way they think.

Well, but there’s a subtlety here that I think we need to make sure that we express carefully, which is the myth has long been held, especially outside of academic circles, that the language you speak controls the thoughts that you have.

Exactly. And this has been almost thoroughly disproven. I say almost because in linguistics there are no certainties.

There may yet be a language, un-chronicled, where it does behave that way. And it’s easy to prove because you have often had the occasion where you wanted to say something and were unable to articulate it.

And now that might be the fault of the speaker. Pretty much any thought can be expressed, but it would just take a long time to say it.

It might take a book to say a simple idea, but you can do it, right? Right.

And they’re whole books of words in other languages that we don’t have in our language. And so therefore people think that, well, they can perceive things differently.

But the fact is that we can describe those things. Right, right. We can describe.

It’s just not a pat-set. We don’t have a single word. A single word.

That’s worth exploring a little bit more, too. You don’t have to have a single word for a thing in order for that thought or that idea to exist in your language.

It can be a paragraph. And that thought can exist just fine and is just as valid as that thought existing in another language where they have a single word.

I do think it’s fun to have a single word for it. Yeah, but there’s no, I mean, it might be compact and it might be efficient, but it’s not necessary.

And that leads us to the point here. And this wonderful way of putting this, Roman Jacobson was a linguist who’s quoted by Guy Deutcher in this article.

He says languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not what they may convey. Another way of putting that is our language allows us to think of things, but it does not oblige us to think of things.

Does that make sense?

We’re not obligated to think of north, south, east, and west if our language is built that way.

But we do because that is the way that we express ourselves in that language.

Right.

Yeah.

Let’s link to this on our website.

Well, not only will we link to this article, but we’ll link to some responses to this article and some of the vast discussions about this article.

So exciting to see linguistics treated in a national publication in an academic way with a little bit of popular tone and to really invigorate the conversation about language.

That is exciting, too, right?

Yeah, lots and lots of discussion.

Lots of response in other newspapers, other magazines, online from the experts and the amateurs, just a huge explosion of talk, and people are trying to figure this out together.

Well, do you have familiarity with one of these kinds of languages or thoughts about it?

Call us, 1-877-929-9673, or send your emails.

The address is words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Jane. I’m calling from Greenwood, Indiana.

Hello, Jane. Welcome.

Well, I read the book, To Kill My Mockingbird.

And in the 24th chapter, it’s got this word Charlotte in there,

And I’ve never seen it as a word.

You know, I’ve always known it as a name for someone or a place.

And anyway, the sentence goes like this.

She carried a tray of Charlotte, and it got me to thinking, what is that?

And they’re talking about food here.

Where is she when she’s carrying this tray?

Is she in a parlor, outdoors, in the kitchen?

I think it’s in a kitchen, and she’s getting ready to go into the dining area.

So she’s bringing in some treats for the ladies that’s there for a meeting.

Okay.

So, you know, it just got me to thinking, what exactly is a Charlotte?

Well, you called the right show because we love food questions.

Okay.

If we could get away with it, we’d do every episode about food words,

But I don’t think that would work very well.

A Charlotte is definitely a kind of treat.

And looking in the recipes, the receipts as they used to call them,

From the last 100 plus years or so, it’s a fairly complex recipe.

And it’s nothing I would tackle in my home except for somebody that I really loved

Or a very special occasion.

I do find it in some dictionaries.

One dictionary says,

Charlotte is a dish made of apple marmalade covered with crumbs of toasted bread,

Also a similar dish made with fruit other than apple.

Now, what makes this more complex is that there are a bunch of different kinds of Charlotte.

So there’s Charlotte Russe, and there’s Charlotte Polonaise, and there’s Apple Charlotte.

And sometimes Charlotte is filled with a cream called Bavaroise, which is a French way of saying Bavarian.

So it’s a Bavarian kind of custard cream.

Drooling, drooling, stop.

Oh, I’ve got to tell you, these are incredible recipes, Jane.

You just wouldn’t believe it.

Just beautiful stuff.

Charlotte Polonaise, for example, looking at this recipe is amazing.

It looks like it would take a day to make.

But its main features are almond paste, chocolate, and lemon.

And a wide variety of ways mixed with sponge cake and filling and different layers and the whole thing.

It’s a big production.

Oh, Grant, stop!

But the main feature of most of the Charlottes is a type of sponge cake with a type of filling,

Usually some custard cream and fruit in there somewhere.

Grant, are those Charlottes capitalized?

Like a person’s name?

It’s interesting, yeah.

A couple of the dictionaries claim that Charlotte comes from the woman’s name, Charlotte, right?

But nobody knows who the Charlotte was.

So there’s no record of this particular Charlotte.

But Charlotte Russe, which is the most common kind of Charlotte as far as I can tell, means Russian Charlotte.

So perhaps it was named after a woman whose name was Charlotte and was from Russia.

And it’s a pretty old recipe, too.

I see it going back at least to the 1790s.

Oh, yeah.

I found one recipe from 1750s.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

Okay.

And there’s a wonderful citation in the Oxford English Dictionary from 1796,

Which I just loved the sound of this.

And this is a different type of Charlotte.

The Charlotte Brown, within whose crusty sides, a belly soft, the pulpy apple hides.

Oh, wow.

Isn’t that nice?

That’s marvelous.

The belly soft.

Food porn on the radio.

Anyway, so yeah, it’s a yummy treat made of sponge cake and custard and some fruit.

There are a lot of different varieties of it.

I highly recommend, if you have a day to kill, tackle the recipe and send us some of your results.

We’d love to taste them.

Well, that’s a maybe.

I don’t know.

I’m not much of a cook.

All right.

Well, sweet talk of a family member.

Maybe they make them frozen and you can just microwave it.

I don’t know.

Yeah.

Oh, that couldn’t possibly be the same.

So, Jane, thanks for sending us down that path.

Yeah, well, thank you so much.

I appreciate it.

It’s our pleasure.

Thank you for calling.

All right.

You’re welcome.

Bye-bye.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Call us with your food word questions.

The number is 1-877-929-9673, or send a sweet email to words@waywordradio.org.

Yum.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi.

This is Suzanne from Dallas.

Hi, Suzanne.

Welcome to the program.

Thank you.

Well, I’m calling about an expression that I grew up with.

I grew up in Philadelphia, and no one here in Dallas seems to understand it when I use it.

Oh, good. We love these.

And it is hanging crepe.

And basically, it’s negative.

And so I’ll say, oh, stop hanging crepe, or oh, he or she’s always hanging crepe.

And everybody just looks at me kind of cross-eyed.

And so what do you mean by it?

That they’re being negative.

You know, glass is always half empty.

Pessimistic.

And you learned it where?

You learned it from your family?

It’s a common expression in Philadelphia.

Oh, really?

Still?

Interesting.

Yeah.

Well, we’ve definitely heard hanging crepe.

Yeah.

That’s a familiar one.

Oh, it is.

Have you been to any funerals lately?

Or maybe I shouldn’t ask that.

What a rude man.

Somebody should kick him in the pants.

I can’t take him anywhere.

But they don’t do what they used to do, Martha, right?

This would be a more transparent expression if our funeral rituals are what they were.

Right, right.

Yeah, back in the pre-phone call, pre-email, pre-Twitter days,

If you wanted to indicate that somebody in the household had died,

You would hang crepe, meaning this kind of sort of gauze-like black fabric,

Outside the house to indicate.

On the house?

Yeah.

Yeah, on the doorknob, on the door, around the windows, maybe on the eaves.

Oh.

Sure, yeah, even on the vehicle, you know, on the horse and buggy even.

Oh, my goodness.

Yeah.

Yeah, so it has a very, very vivid original sense, but I’ve definitely heard that,

And I’ve often heard doctors talking among themselves about hanging crepe.

I mean, I think that’s a term in the medical world.

If you hang crepe with a patient, then what you’re doing, if you’re hanging crepe,

Then you’re painting the worst possible prognosis.

Well, yeah, you sure wouldn’t want to go to that doctor, would you?

Well, maybe not, but for a doctor, it’s to their advantage

Because if they say that a patient’s going to die and then the patient doesn’t,

Then they look like a hero.

Under promise, over deliver, right?

And if the patient does die, then they look like they’re very wise and good at telling the future.

Right.

So it’s kind of a good position for a doctor to be in.

That’s true.

But this is at least 100 years old, this expression, probably a lot longer,

Because the hanging crepe tradition lasted for quite a while.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, maybe they just didn’t do that down here in Texas.

I don’t know.

I don’t know what they did.

But we can assure you that it’s definitely a legitimate expression.

It’s sort of like Debbie Downer.

Do you ever watch Saturday Night Live?

Yes.

Okay.

And you remember Rachel Dratch has this character, Debbie Danner.

Yes.

Wah, wah.

Yes.

Okay.

She’s hanging crepe.

Just tell your friends that.

Maybe that’ll help.

Okay.

All right.

Well, that’s very helpful.

Suzanne, thanks for your call.

Thank you so much.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

A bit of business advice in a 1917 issue of The National Drug Clerk.

Instead of being dissatisfied with your position and the boss, it’s up to you to be constructive.

Boys, don’t hang crepe all your lives.

Right on.

Be positive. Accentuate the positive, right?

That’s right. And send your questions to words@waywordradio.org.

And you can always call us, leave a message anytime, day or night.

The number is 1-877-929-9673.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Scott. I’m calling from Kokomo, Indiana.

Hello, Scott.

Hey, Scott. Welcome to the program. What can we help you with?

Well, I’m having a little trouble with a nice little word that I’ve used over the years, and the word is rubric.

Rubric.

R-U-B-R-I-C.

Well, I’ve always thought it was a nice little word, and I’ve used it as if it were a category or a heading.

I would say, file that under the rubric, using a fancy word to convey an ordinary idea.

Exactly.

But lately, my daughter’s bringing home things. I’m looking at a picture that says grading rubric, and it seems that teachers are using the word rubric to, well, this is how you’re getting your grade.

These are the procedures and systems we’re using to figure out what kind of grade we’re going to give you.

How old is your daughter?

She’s 13.

So she’s in the eighth grade?

Yes, that’s correct.

In the eighth grade.

And so when you were in school, you didn’t have this sort of thing, a rubric by which you were measured.

Well, as a matter of fact, the last time I was taking college courses was 1993, and they weren’t using it then.

I went back in 2002 to take a refresher course, and that’s when I first heard it.

And I thought, rubric, really? Are you sure?

But I didn’t say anything, you know, because this person was going to give me a grade.

It really matches almost perfectly some of the older meanings of rubric, because there are a bunch of them.

Of course, Martha knows this because she’s an etymological expert, but rubric comes from the color red, I believe.

Right, the Latin word for red.

Related to the word rubius, right?

Yeah, it’s related to the word ruby.

It was a name of red ochre, right?

Right, the color, and you would put that in a manuscript to make things stand out.

Right, so you’d use it for a headline, the headings or the chapter headings or the section headings, right?

Right, right.

And then now on another path, Scott, we have in religious studies or in religious dogma, they also have a rubric, which are the kind of the guidelines, the rules for the religion.

Am I portraying that correctly, Martha?

Yeah, I think so.

But again, you mean in religious texts?

Well, I’m talking even beyond the color. I’m just talking about the content.

And so the color, the importance of the headline became transferred to the importance of the text.

So a rubric, I’m looking at the Collins Dictionaries right now. It’s one of the definitions is a set of directions for the conduct of Christian church services often printed in red.

And so you can see the natural extension there.

And I feel like the educational use of rubric in this way is kind of a natural extension of the religious use of rubric, you know.

And maybe it came into educational circles from religious education circles.

I don’t really know.

From the parochial school.

Possibly.

It’s interesting. And when you look this up in the historical record, you find that it really starts to gain inertia in the 1970s.

And there’s not much use of it in educational circles before that.

Right. I don’t remember anything like that.

I didn’t have it in any of the schooling I ever did, in any of the schools that I went to.

And it’s completely new to me.

But when I talk to friends and colleagues now who have children in school or else they are themselves teachers, they know it perfectly well.

What’s really interesting is it’s – tell me if I’m portraying this correctly, Scott.

It’s a document.

They’re kind of like a scorecard for bowling.

You have columns and rows, right?

Right.

Yeah, it’s a grid.

Yeah, it’s a grid.

And so on the left-hand side, you’ll have a list of categories or responsibilities of the types of things the student is supposed to be learning.

And then across the top is a ranking or a scoring of, say, 1 to 5 from bad to good or A through F or a variety of different levels, say, beginning through accomplished or basic through advanced, right?

And then where the columns meet the rows, then we have a square.

And if a student is in that square, it means that they’ve met these criteria for that particular category under that particular level of advancement, right?

Right.

Yeah, that’s how they’re using it.

And, you know, it was a new use to me, but I guess if enough people are using it, then that’s the way it’s going to be.

Well, thank you for your help.

I appreciate that.

Thanks for calling.

Take care.

You’re welcome.

Okay.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Well, if you have a question about language, call us 1-877-929-9673 or send those emails to words@waywordradio.org.

That’s our show for this week.

If you didn’t get on the air today, you can leave us a message anytime.

The number is 1-877-929-9673.

Or email us. The address is words@waywordradio.org.

You can also stay in touch with us all week by following us on Twitter.

We’re there under the username Wayword.

Stefanie Levine is our senior producer.

Our technical director and editor is Tim Felten.

We’ve had production help this week from Josette Hurdell and Jennifer Powell.

From Studio West in San Diego, I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. So long.

Bye-bye.

You say either and I say either.

You say neither and I say neither.

Neither, either, neither, neither.

Let’s call the whole thing off.

You like potato and I like potato.

You like tomato and I like tomato.

Potato, potato, tomato, tomato.

Support for A Way with Words comes from National University, where flexible online classes let you earn your degree or credential on your schedule.

More at nu.edu.

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