You Talk Like a Sausage (episode #1592) 

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. The editors of the Oxford English Dictionary just added some more words from Irish English, and some of them should be in your vocabulary, too, if you don’t know them already.

One of my favorites is segotia, S-E-G-O-T-I-A, segotia.

And Grant, do you know what that word means?

I do. I included an entry for that in one of my books, The Official Dictionary of Unofficial English.

Yeah, I didn’t, of course, take it back as far as its full history, but yeah, it just means a friend.

It’s a term of endearment.

Right, right. You’re my old Segocia.

We don’t know the etymology for sure.

Some people have guessed that it comes from French meaning my dear child or maybe Irish Shugutcha, which means here you are.

But nobody knows for sure.

What else was in there? What other Irish words do they include?

Well, my other new favorite word is kitug. That’s C-I-O-T-O with an accent mark G. C-I-O-T-O accent mark G. Kitug means somebody who’s left-handed. And it used to be a little bit more negative, but now it’s sort of ameliorated over the years. I think it means more like lefty. You know, my wife’s a kitug, bless her.

Well, you know, in my dictionaries, and I have a ton of reference works here, as you can imagine, there have been a number of different collections of words for left-handed in Ireland.

And one of my favorite ones is clabberclawed.

My goodness, clabberclawed. That means left-handed?

Left-handed, yeah. Clabberclawed.

I don’t know that it’s used anymore, but it was recorded.

Well, we’ll talk about another Irish word or two later in the show.

We know we’ve got listeners all over the world.

We know people speak a wide variety of Englishes.

There’s more than just one, and there always has been.

And we’d love to hear about your variety of English, wherever you are and however you speak it.

877-929-9673.

words@waywordradio.org.

Or talk to us on Twitter @wayword.

Hello. You have A Way with Words.

Hi. This is Lily. I live in Iowa City, Iowa.

Hey, Lily. Welcome to the show. What can we do for you?

Well, the other day, it was a beautiful day out, and my roommate came home, and she was telling me how she spent her day.

She went hiking with friends, and then she told me that she went out to lay in the hammocks.

And I stopped her, and I was like, okay, wait, the what?

She said, the hammocks.

And I said, you mean the hammocks?

And she was just like, yeah, those things.

And I’d never heard anybody say hammock.

And I told her about that.

And she was like, I think we’re saying the same thing.

She’s from eastern Iowa here in Iowa.

And I’m from northern Illinois.

And they’re similar regions.

But I just thought maybe it’s one of those regional things.

But I asked around.

And suddenly everybody’s saying hammock.

I just thought I’ve never heard this thing before.

But there’s two separate pronunciations of what I call a hammock.

Hammock versus hammock.

Hammock.

Well, one thing I’m hearing right away is that there’s a difference in stress.

Hammock tends to have a stress on the first syllable, where hammock tends to have a stress on the second syllable.

It’s actually really hard to say anything but hammock if you stress the first syllable.

You know, it’s interesting.

If you check all major dictionaries, as a matter of fact, in both the U.S. and the U.K., you will find the hammock pronunciation is the only one that they give.

Oh, wow.

Etymology is interesting on this word.

I think it comes from a Taino word from the Caribbean.

But etymology doesn’t rule pronunciation.

It’s what people say.

What I think is happening here is that the dictionaries have missed a chance to do more fieldwork and find these other pronunciations of this word.

When you Google pronunciations of this word and look for people talking about it, you’ll find that people say they say it a lot of different ways.

I think I counted six different ways that people say they say it.

Now, whether or not they’re accurate, I don’t know.

People tend to self-report their own pronunciations pretty poorly.

So dictionaries, I think, may be behind.

There might be a whole slew of people in the United States and perhaps other English-speaking countries who do say hammock.

Although, when I go to YouTube and I’ve done this, I’ve sampled a hundred different places where people say the word H-A-M-M-O-C-K.

And I know that’s a small sample size, but they all said hammock.

All of them.

That is so interesting.

Yeah, I don’t know that there are a lot of people who say hammock, but I could see how that last syllable might become a sight pronunciation, where if you never hear it, you pronounce it like you see it.

I think that’s going to be a new thing, and anytime I meet a new person, I’m going to ask them how they say it.

Right. We hereby deputize you as an A Way with Words field worker. Here is your badge. Here’s your certificate.

That’s right.

And your responsibilities are to record their pronunciation and their location.

All right?

I will.

Thank you so much for your time, you guys.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Take care now.

Bye-bye.

Well, we love getting those field reports, so give us a call, 877-929-9673, or send them to us an email.

The address is words@waywordradio.org.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi.

My name is Chris Freeman.

I’m in Northampton, Massachusetts right now.

I’m calling because I was at my parents’ house a few weeks ago now with our new dog.

And my mom is not a dog person.

She loves a lot of people, but not dogs.

And she was really worried about her new couch and rug and kind of anxiously protecting it from all kinds of hazards, like drinks and children, but mostly from my dog, Fergus.

I said to her, you know, how can you love this stuff more than somebody that I love so much?

And she said, that’s not somebody, that’s something.

And I firmly disagreed, and we had our, you know, a little debate about it.

And she ended up looking it up in the dictionary, and the dictionary definition said that it has to be a person, or use the word, it says that it’s any person.

But I feel like that’s too limited of a definition, and it makes, in calling a, whether it’s an animal or anything, any living being, some thing just feels not right.

And so anyway, I’m calling because I’m wondering if there’s a better word other than something to describe some, you know, an animal or a pet or, you know, somebody we love.

Okay, well, first of all, what kind of dog is Fergus? I’m just curious.

He’s an Australian Shepherd.

Oh, nice.

He’s a smart dog.

Yeah, Chris, this is really fascinating.

You raise a lot of fascinating questions here because I know of no dictionary that defines the word somebody without specifying that it refers to a person or human being.

But boy, do we really want to speak technically and strictly all the time?

I mean, I guess you can argue that it’s a mistake to anthropomorphize animals and give them qualities that we think are uniquely human.

But I got to tell you, in our household, we have four cats.

And my wife and I have both been known to slip up and say, you people need to stop scratching the furniture.

Sometimes we just don’t think and we say, you people.

The more I live with animals, Chris, the more I’m inclined to use the pronoun who rather than that when talking about them, you know, or at least about the animals I live with.

I mean, is there a difference between what you would use for pets and wild animals?

I don’t know if I would say the grizzly bear who just killed an elk.

You know, you’re raising all kinds of questions.

My mind is just swimming here.

Well, it makes me think also of like when somebody dies, like they’re a lifeless body is no longer somebody. Right. It’s like there’s a there’s a humanity.

There’s like a certain amount of like connection that you have that we have with other living beings.

But it’s also strange to just put it as living because, like plants, you wouldn’t say somebody about a plant, but that’s living.

But when something has a personality, when it has desires and shows empathy and affection, it just feels too disconnected to call them an it.

Right. Calling them an it or a thing kind of removes their, yeah, somehow treats them less than, right?

It removes their dignity almost.

Exactly.

But I agree with everything you’re both saying.

But on the other side, if I were to say somebody was in the doghouse,

You might think I meant a person who was in trouble with their spouse

Rather than a dog who was in a little shelter, right?

You’re probably more likely thought I meant a person than a dog.

Yeah, probably.

I mean, it really depends on context, though.

Yeah, exactly.

What if I said somebody was in the barn?

Yeah, or somebody’s at the bird feeder.

Yeah, somebody’s at the bird feeder.

There’s a neighbor standing there eating the millet.

Yeah, but I’m with you.

We talked to the cats, too.

It was like, all right, exactly like you, Martha.

We’re like, well, if somebody hadn’t put their whiskers on my nose at 4 a.m., I might have gotten some sleep last night.

Exactly.

But, you know, body.

There’s a whole other classes of words here, Chris, too.

Nobody, everybody, anybody, someone, everyone.

Does the body and the one in all of those words, do they only refer to people?

Kind of?

Maybe?

No?

It really, like Martha says, is context dependent.

Body has been used to refer to a person for at least 700 years.

Body alone.

You know, it does a body good.

You know that expression?

It does a body good to, you know, relax once in a while.

Body meaning a person.

Not your physical body, but meaning your personhood.

But I’m generally with you.

I think in your case, your dispute with your mom comes through her feelings towards dogs in general.

And her feelings towards the way she wants to protect her house.

It’s one thing to take a dictionary and use it as a usage guide,

Which I don’t always recommend because that’s a little circular.

Dictionaries kind of get their evidence from the people.

And then to use a dictionary to say,

Well, now I’m going to tell the people how to speak

Because the dictionary used the evidence of how those people speak.

That just goes around and around.

So I think your argument with her is a little clouded

By both your relationship with her and her relationship with dogs.

So it’s not really a linguistic conversation, is it?

Right, yeah.

There probably were a lot more layers to it than that.

Well, Chris, I am absolutely certain that there are going to be lots of folks

Who want to weigh in on this.

I agree.

Chris, thank you so much for bringing this topic to our attention.

And we require one thing of you.

You must send us a picture of Fergus.

Oh, gladly.

At least one.

Yes, I have plenty.

And that address for you and for all of our listeners is words@waywordradio.org.

Let us know what you think about this topic or call 877-929-9673.

Chris, thank you so much for your call.

Thanks for having me.

All right.

Thanks, Chris.

Bye-bye.

All right.

Bye.

Well, we know that you have thoughts on this matter.

Do you think that somebody and anybody and someone and everyone can be used to refer to animals?

Are those just reserved for people?

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

And the address for cats and dogs is woof, woof, meow, meow, meow, meow, woof, woof.

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 coming in fresh from his turn at center field is our main player, our quiz guide, John Chaneski.

Hi, John.

Hi, Grant.

Hi, Martha. I’m not sure exactly how fresh I am, but I am ready to go nonetheless.

The answers to every clue in this quiz contain both the name of an animal and the name of a body part.

It’s called animal anatomy, I call it.

Of course, now many of these terms are derived from a comparison of an object to the body part of a specific animal.

But the answers, though, are typically nouns or adjectives that refer to something that is not actually an animal part.

All right, for example, even though horse flesh contains an animal, horse, and a body part, flesh, it actually refers to horses.

Now, dog leg, though, contains an animal, dog, and a body part, leg, but it refers to a sharp bend in a road or route.

Right?

Right.

Got it?

Good, you understand.

Now, here are your clues.

Here’s the first one.

A high, close-fitting turnover collar used especially for sweaters.

A butterfly collar?

No, not a butterfly.

How about a turtleneck?

A turtleneck.

Yeah, that’s our animal and our body part.

Turtleneck.

Good.

How about a large cask or barrel?

Large cask or barrel?

Large.

Is there…

In the U.S., it’s a unit equal to 63 gallons or 238 liters.

Oh, thanks.

That helps.

Is it a hog something?

Oh.

Yeah.

A hog’s head?

Yes, it is a hog’s head.

Very good.

This is used to describe a sofa or other piece of furniture with a rising section between two lower sections.

Boa constrictor that swallowed it.

No.

Camelback?

Camelback, indeed.

Yes.

I’m trying to do a question like that without using the word hump.

And there, I’ve done it.

Now, this is an informal term for a diploma.

Oh, sheepskin.

Sheepskin, yes. Sheepskin.

Now, this word describes a pattern and also a type of cloth with that pattern.

It’s also called broken twill weave.

Or houndstooth.

No, it’s not houndstooth. It’s the other one.

Oh.

How about herringbone?

It is herringbone, yes. Broken twill weave is herringbone.

It resembles sort of stair steps or a W shape.

Now, this adjective is used to describe a lens that produces strong visual distortion

To create a wide hemispherical or panoramic image.

Fish eye.

Fish eye, yes.

And finally, we try not to throw insults around here.

This adjective seems an insult to Lapines.

Hair brained.

Hair brained, exactly.

And speaking of brains, the body part we’re working with today,

You guys are using yours perfectly.

Nice job.

All right, well, I think the seventh inning stretch is over,

And they’re calling you back out to the field, John.

Got to get back out there.

Just a squirt of Gatorade, and I’m back out in the field.

See you guys later.

It’s supposed to go in your mouth, not your hair, but okay.

Not until after the game.

Thanks, John.

We’ll talk to you next week.

Talk to you then.

And we’d love to talk with you about any aspect of language whatsoever,

So give us a call, 877-929-9673,

Or send your questions and stories about words to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Oh, thank you, Martha.

This is Dan.

I’m calling from Bella Kinwood, Pennsylvania.

Hi, Dan.

Welcome to the show.

What can we do for you?

A question about spelling.

When I was back in school, we would have a spelling test,

And for each word on the test, there would be one answer that would be graded correctly.

And, of course, I’ve observed words spelled differently in Britain.

And words in the U.S. might change their spelling, like donut got a simplified spelling to fit on signs.

But when you look at older works, you see different spellings.

And not just that it’s different, like when you’re reading Shakespeare and you might have words spelled differently,

But sometimes in the same document you would see multiple spellings, like Pennsylvania is spelled two different ways in the U.S. Constitution.

So I was wondering whether at an earlier time, perhaps before the printing press,

Whether the concept of a correct spelling didn’t exist, that as long as people could sound out the words, that was considered acceptable.

All right.

So that’s a really big question.

So your question in a nutshell is kind of, I mean, if I can rephrase it a little bit, is like before the printing press, what was the standard for spelling or was there one?

And the answer was, no, there wasn’t one.

Not really.

But there were some times when spelling in English became a little more standardized.

And there are just these kind of touch points where things happened in history where spelling got a little clearer kind of through accidents of history.

For example, if we go to the very earliest period of English, when English kind of first became something we could call English,

The runic alphabet was replaced by the Roman one.

And so the people who were literate, the scribes, had to do a sound-for-sound match of the Roman letters to the runic one.

And so they standardized a little bit in that regard.

But they had to introduce three runes into the Roman alphabet to represent some sounds that were in Old English that weren’t in the Roman language, in Latin.

And those were the thorn, the F, and the yoke.

It’s spelled Y-O-G-H.

So that’s one kind of real basic standardization that happened.

Another one might be when we’re talking about the Norman conquest of 1066.

If you remember, this introduced a huge number of changes in English.

I don’t know what your field is, but there’s a ton of French influence in English.

And this all came about because of the Norman French influence on English.

Even our spelling and the way we spell often reflects French spelling norms rather than Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, or Roman ones.

So that itself is a kind of standardization to these French rules or these French norms.

Does that make sense?

Yeah, yeah.

And there’s usually a little twist to it because I lived in France for a few years,

And words that have a circumflex end up getting an extra S, like foray becomes forest.

That’s right.

You wouldn’t necessarily see the connection until you see them spelt out.

That’s right.

And you made a really good point because forest became standardized with that spelling in an old French in English.

Later, French became standardized with a newer spelling, but we kept the older spelling of the old French word.

So English, if we can say standardized, let me put that in like suspicious quote marks, earlier than French did.

So French is a little more regular in some regard.

So at the time of the Norman Conquest, they didn’t have the A and the E circumflex?

No, it was after that, I believe, in my understanding.

So another time of standardization was when London became the seat of power in England.

And so all of this governmental power and this religious power kind of moved in that direction.

So the accent and dialect spoken in that part of the country became the preferred one.

And therefore, if you were a scribe, you are writing down the way that people in power speak there.

And that becomes the preferred spelling.

And those become the preferred words for the language.

And so all these other dialects then become unimportant or not prestigious and become considered regional.

And the same thing happened with the universities.

Oxford and Cambridge became important centers of learning in the 1300s.

And education, as we know, is a great standardizer.

And so they educated the leaders and the teachers of the future, and they set the linguistic and spelling examples that others would follow.

So all of these things are kind of, again, before the printing press really came about, are these kind of brief moments of standardization.

None of them perfect, and none of them complete, and none of them permanent.

But each one of them making their small impression upon the language to kind of bring this chaos and madness of English spelling a little, making it a little more regular.

Although, as you know, there was never any one English,

And there was never any one spelling of English.

At no point in the history of English has it been written just one way.

And there were also all these attempts here and there to simplify spelling or just impose a standardized spelling, and usually they didn’t work.

And I would say that the two last things, Dan, worth remembering,

And you probably are already ahead of me here in your thinking on this,

The two things that had the most impact on standardization,

And again, those are in suspicious quotes,

Are the King James Bible of 1611 and the rise of dictionaries.

And so these are after the printing press.

Just the constant presence of these in so many homes and schools meant that they were the resources that people were reading and turning to when they wanted to decide how to spell a word.

If you want two books, I can recommend two to you if you’re interested.

There’s one that’s, I would call this a popular book on spelling.

It’s by David Wollman, W-O-L-M-A-N.

It’s called Writing the Mother Tongue from Old English to Email, the Tangled Story of English Spelling.

And writing is spelled R-I-G-H-T-I-N-G, Writing the Mother Tongue.

And this other one is more academic, but I still recommend it if you’re up for just a little, something a little more chewy.

The History of English Spelling, and it’s by Christopher Upward and George Davidson.

They both complement each other very well in terms of their scope and their readability.

So, Dan, in other words, you’ve raised a vast, vast question that we could talk about for hours and hours and hours.

But we can’t.

Try those two books, all right?

And we’ll link to them on the website.

Thank you so much for your call on letting me just barely dip my toe into a giant subject.

Oh, thanks so much.

I really enjoyed this.

Call us again sometime, all right?

All right.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

You too.

Bye, Dan.

You know, I’m thinking another reader-friendly book that includes a lot of this is Erica Okren’s book,

Highly Irregular about the history of English. It’s very, very accessible and addresses a lot of these spelling issues.

Yeah, Erica writes great articles. If you can find her, it’s A-R-I-K-A-O-K-R-E-N-T,

And we’ll link to that on the website as well. 877-929-9673.

Here’s another word recently introduced into the Oxford English Dictionary that probably comes from Irish.

The word is bockety. B-O-C-K-E-T-Y, bockety.

If you’re talking about a person who’s bockety, they have trouble walking.

But you can also use the word bockety to refer to anything that’s fallen into a state of disrepair.

You know, my bockety old chair over there.

But I love this term. I’m going to start using it.

You know, you can talk about your bockety knee won’t let you do this or that.

Oh, yeah. It’s got a bit of rhythm already built into the word, right? The awkwardness or the lack of balance is right there in bockety, bockety, bockety, bockety, bockety.

It’s like a car with a bent axle. Bockety, bockety, bockety, bockety. Or the grocery cart that doesn’t roll well.

Right. Or both the wheels go in the same direction.

Yeah. Bockety, bockety, bockety, bockety.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Joan Bowie, and I’m calling from Oxford, Ohio.

Hello, Joan. Welcome to the show.

What can we do for you, Joan?

This has been in my head for over 50 years.

I was born and raised in the U.K., came to the U.S. in 1967,

And my husband at the time went to Tulane in New Orleans for his master’s degree.

And I got a job at Tulane Medical School in the orthopedic department, answering the phones and whatever.

All of the teaching staff, faculty, the doctors had private practices, and I would book appointments for them.

And one day I got this call from a man, a gentleman with a very unusual accent, and he asked me for an evening appointment.

And I said, I’m sorry, we don’t have any evening appointments.

And I don’t know if it was him.

I think I may have had another similar call where the caller asked me,

Well, what are the office hours?

And, you know, whatever they were, they were, you know, two to five or whatever.

He said, well, that’s an evening appointment.

So I found out, I think that was the way I found out,

That anything after noon was evening.

And I just wondered how that came about,

If it had anything to do with the French language,

If you had any answers to that.

Well, Joan, you’ll find that evening is used in many places across the southern United States to mean exactly what you’re talking about,

That period between midday and sunset,

Which is kind of weird if you’re not used to hearing it, like your story.

I know, and I’ve lived in Florida for a little bit,

And nobody calling from the city of New Orleans ever said evening.

I’ve never heard that before, only that once or twice, yes.

Interesting.

Well, you know, one of my favorite examples of using evening that way is in the book Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain.

At the very beginning of this book, Aunt Polly is talking about Tom Sawyer.

And she says he’ll play hooky this evening.

She’s talking about how rambunctious and mischievous he is.

And she says he’ll play hooky this evening.

And then Twain actually puts a footnote on that page that says that evening is southwestern for afternoon.

And I’m wondering, too, Joan, what part of England are you from?

Yorkshire.

Yorkshire. Okay. Because we do have records of the use of evening in this way in the UK.

Particularly in the West Midlands, like Shropshire and Worcestershire. In fact, there’s a wonderful glossary from Worcestershire where they have a citation where a woman is talking about an experience that she had with this word. It quotes her saying, a woman lately wished me good morning at 1:30 p.m., then having passed, turned back to apologize.

Good evening, ma’am, I should have said. And it was at 1:30 in the afternoon.

Oh, so it’s not that uncommon. And do you think it’s still relevant? Do you still think that’s in use now? Grant, what do you think about that?

I’m not sure that it’s as common. No, I think in the U.K., usage has faded. It would be incredibly rare. I think in the United States, it’s still around, but especially among the older folks. I mean, folklore and language was collected in the 1950s and 60s in places like North Carolina and Kentucky that shows that afternoon was hardly used or even known in parts of those states. Or if people did know afternoon, it was considered not one of their words, just not a word that they would use.

Really? They used evening for that time of day after the noon hour. That’s really remarkable. I had no idea. Paul, you’ve answered my question. I just didn’t know if it was anything with them being Cajun and the French language.

No, it’s English going back to the 1500s. Okay. Many hundreds of years. Thank you for answering my question.

Sure, Joan. Thanks for sharing that story. Well, you’re welcome. All right. Take care now. Thank you. Goodbye. Bye-bye.

So you moved to a new place, and you sound different than everyone around you. How are you dealing with that? What’s different about your language versus theirs? Let us know, 877-929-9673, email words@waywordradio.org, or talk to us on Twitter @wayword.

Here’s another cool borrowing from Irish. Cunas. C-I-U-N-A-S. Cunas. Right. It means silence or quiet. And it’s the kind of thing that a teacher in Ireland might shout in the classroom to get the kids to be quiet. Cunas! Be quiet! Cunas! Or I’ll get the bata out, which means the stick. The stick that they’ll be behind the knees with.

And one of my dictionaries by Niall O’Donnell, he’s got a lovely little quote in there under the entry for Qunis. And it’s, Toe en siel mor fricunis, which means all the world is hushed. Oh, yeah. There is this sense of hushing, of refraining from speaking. Yeah, Toe en siel mor fricunis. Oh, that’s beautiful. Yeah. I want you to read more of that. Pardon my Irish accent. I did my best.

It sounds lovely. 877-929-9673. You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett. And I’m Martha Barnette.

There’s a new play that I’m aching to see. It’s called English, and it’s by Sanaz Tusi. She’s an Iranian-American playwright. She’s the daughter of immigrants who settled in California. The play takes place in Iran, and it’s about four people in a class who are learning English, and they’re working on becoming fluent. And the play sounds like this brilliant depiction of the frustrations and the rewards and the funny mistakes you make when you’re trying to learn another language as an adult. And also how it means that when you’re trying to learn a language as an adult, you’re trying on a whole new identity.

And reviewing the play in the New Yorker magazine, Alexandra Schwartz describes the process this way. To learn a second language as a grown-up, when the pliable plastic brain has hardened into brittle glass, is to know the locked-in sensation of being shut out from other people with their enviable, easy fluency, and worse, from your own articulate self. We are as much made of words as we are of flesh and blood. Personality dissolves in an unfamiliar language, like a sugar cube dropped into a cup of tea.

I just love that, Grant. It’s such a great description, isn’t it? Yeah, it’s what happens. Here I am in my 50s trying to learn German and realizing the best I can hope for is to read it. And I mainly want it for academic purposes, because there’s so much good language stuff written in German. And I’ll be jiggered if I can speak it. I’m just going to settle for reading it, because it is. It’s a fragile classworks in there, and I don’t know if I can add much more to it.

I will tell you that I do miss being in my teens and 20s when I was an avid shortwave listener listening to shortwave radio and I would listen to Spanish radio from around the world. I swear it’s the only reason that learning Spanish now works for me is because in there somewhere is a residue from when my brain was pliable plastic and it’s kind of coming back to me. And don’t you find when you speak Spanish now that you do try on a different personality?

I know I’m far more expressive when I speak in Spanish. Yeah, I do. But yeah, it’s confusing. I’m looking forward to hearing more about that play and seeing it myself. There’s a great deal of empathy that I have for people who make that journey and they don’t just abandon their family and their history and their ties to the old place, but they abandon themselves. They abandon who they were and become someone new in the new place with a new language.

Well, if you ever get a chance to see this play, it’s called English by Sanaz Tusi. I’m going to be there. Me too.

We’d love to hear about what you’re reading, what you’re seeing on stage, what you’re listening to in your ears. We’re about language, all aspects of it. Tell us more, 877-929-9673. Email us your stories, your ideas, your questions. words@waywordradio.org or shoot the breeze on Twitter @wayword.

Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hi, my name’s Christy and I’m calling from Philadelphia.

Hey, Christy, welcome. Hi, Christy. Thank you. Thank you. I was hoping that you all might be able to settle an ongoing debate I’ve been having with my boyfriend. And the stakes are low. I maybe have a long term plan of just low key playing this episode in a space that we’re sharing so that the debate can be settled without actually instigating a conversation about it. So we’ll see.

Like in a locked car. That’s the most passive aggressive thing I’ve ever heard. I know, but it’s not even so much passive-aggressive as it is. It’s a long-term discussion that’s been unsettled or has remained unsettled in very unsatisfactory ways. So maybe more like while we’re having coffee, something a little more gentle than a locked car.

So you’ve got to debate with your boyfriend. There’s not much on the line here, but what are you going to do if it doesn’t go your way? Oh, I will just be pitiful, I guess.

Okay. All right, let’s hear it. What’s the debate? So we are both subscribers to The New Yorker, and we read it every week. I’m a little behind since I’m a teacher. And we’ve had this ongoing discussion about what you call the proper name of the magazine.

So he has made this argument, and I do suspect that there is a little bit here about me being an English teacher and him wanting to be right and giving me a hard time. But he likes to argue that we should maintain the integrity of the full title, The New Yorker, in all circumstances.

So did your copy of The New Yorker arrive? And it makes me crazy because I can’t imagine it’s right. And in my brain, I automatically move into MLA format. So I see it typed out on the page where you would merge the New Yorker altogether based on the context of the sentence. There would be no need for the double the.

So can you help us out? What does he say again? Say it. Has your copy of the New Yorker arrived yet? So he’s saying the New Yorker. Because, and his argument is that the proper name of the magazine itself has the article the. So it must remain intact.

Right. T-H-E. I would say one the, right? Right. Has your copy of The New Yorker arrived yet? And that sounds natural. Mm—

So we’re talking about spoken language versus written. I think we’re talking about it in a both-and kind of way. What evidence have you brought to bear on your side, or has he brought to bear on his side? Just opinions?

Yeah, no one has really brought great evidence to the table, more just stubborn beliefs. Okay, I’ve got some evidence for you. Okay.

And you’re not going to like it.

No!

Well, let’s hear it.

All right.

Carolyn Corman has been a contributor to The New Yorker since 2012. That, Christy, is from The New Yorker itself, from the staff page of Ms. Corman. So that’s the style, apparently, of The New Yorker.

Carolyn Corman has been a contributor to The New Yorker since 2012. And here’s another one for you. Here she is featured in this week’s edition of The New Yorker Magazine’s Poetry Podcast. And that one’s from the A Way with Words newsletter.

No!

So the proper way to do it is to include the article and the article in the title. And I’ve got more if you want them, but I thought those two were.

No, I think that’s sufficient.

Oh, but Christy, I have to say, I would never say, where is my copy of The New Yorker?

I would never say it either.

I would never.

Right.

In spoken language, I just, that would be weird.

Yeah, I think it is a written versus spoken divide. It’s fine to read it and see it in print, but to say it sounds ridiculous, and I would mock whoever said it relentlessly, continuously for a very long time.

Right.

So it sounds like a situation where we’re both right. I think the strategy of mocking him relentlessly should continue into and through marriage.

How should that happen?

Okay.

Noted.

And I think you should get like mocking t-shirts with it in quotes.

Yeah.

Just like really commit, go really hard.

Oh yeah.

Like a trophy with it engraved.

Perfect.

Perfect.

I like all of these suggestions. But yeah, I think it really is a written spoken device. Spoken, it sounds ridiculous. It sounds unnatural. And the spoken language is so much more fluid and doesn’t have to be rule-bound in the way that written language. Written language is far stricter. Far stricter. It has these restraints, you know, where it does go through this strict editorial process and doesn’t have to really ring to the ear quite the way that spoken language does.

Right.

That makes sense. And just tell them the first the is silent. The first the is silent.

I like that approach, yes.

All right, Christy, now your job is to video his response or have him send his tirade directly to us or CC it to us.

Will do.

Will do.

I’ll keep you posted.

Yes, please.

Take care of yourself, all right?

Perfect.

Thank you so much.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

If there’s a dispute about a word or phrase in your household, we can help you out. Give us a call, 877-929-9673, or send it to us in email. The address is words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Tim calling from Alaska. How are you guys today?

What’s on your mind, Tim?

Well, I called you guys because there’s something that’s come up and miggled my brain for several years, and it has to do with rope, and I use that term because everybody knows what rope is. But it has different names depending on where you use it. So, for example, line and rope. I was always trying to figure out the difference. So I looked it up, and the only distinction I found was that line is something that had a definite purpose and rope did not. But my experience doesn’t bear that out.

I was a commercial fisherman in Alaska for 15-plus years. You might carry a piece of rope down to the boat, but the moment you set foot on that deck, it became line. If you called the rope, then you clearly hadn’t spent much time on the water. My wife ran sled dogs pretty seriously up here for quite a while, and she taught me how to do that. I noticed the same thing in that occupation or in that activity. Gang line, tug line, neck line, that kind of thing.

But as a young man working on a ranch in eastern Washington, you didn’t line a cow or a calf, you roped it. And the rope hanging from your saddle had a very definite purpose. So that distinction didn’t bear out. It’s one of those things you can lay awake at night and you can’t sleep and say, what’s going on here? Hopefully you can help me out. A fellow word nerd.

Oh, yeah. I don’t know that we’re going to get to the bottom of this, Tim, but I love that you’ve got these disparate experiences. Working on a ranch, sled dogging, and working as a fisherman. And all three of these you bring to bear on the subject of rope versus line. And I think it’s important just to say that they’re probably all right. And it’s really the custom of the trade or the profession. It’s really whatever the people agree, that’s the word you need to use. Otherwise, you’re going to be seen as an outsider.

I mean, we all know how easy it is on a ship to be seen as a landlubber, right?

Absolutely.

Don’t call the toilet the head or you call the galley a kitchen, and you don’t know the difference between port and starboard.

Yep. I’ve had those experiences many times. It’s what I always say on the show. When people spend a lot of time together working towards one common goal, they develop a lingo of their own. And that’s just the way it stays. And it’s probably not even something that they think about. It becomes the language. And then they teach that language to others. And that’s how it passes from person to person. So that’s why a rope is line in seafaring. And that’s just the way it is. I hate to say that because we’d love for there to be a wonderful story or a reason. But sometimes there isn’t.

Although sometimes, particularly with boats, there’s a little bit of avoidance of classism or elitism there. There’s a line in Richard Mayne’s book, The Language of Sailing, where he talks about the basics of referring to sea craft. And he talks about ship versus boat. And how landlubbers will often call things boats that people who know the sea would never call a boat. They would call it a ship. And then he says yacht owners will self-deprecatingly refer to their own crafts as boats. But they will call somebody else’s vessel a yacht. But they would never refer to their own as my yacht. Because they would never be respected. You know, that’s no self-respecting person would say, my yacht this and my yacht that, because it would be snobby.

Well, that condescension is something I’ve seen on boats. If you use the wrong term, people look as candid.

Well, I will say, as you said, that’s a little bit dissatisfying, but at least I know. I appreciate that. And you guys take care.

All right.

Take care.

Bye bye.

All right.

Thanks, Tim.

You bet.

Bye bye.

877-929-9673.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Bill Schmalfeld calling from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. How are you doing today?

All right. How about you?

Wanted to get some information from you guys. Although I’m living in South Carolina now, I’m originally a Midwesterner. And my late wife was a South Milwaukee girl. And I’m sure I don’t have to tell you guys what a rich place Southern Wisconsin is as far as regional dialects and colloquialisms and that sort of thing.

We were having a discussion, and apparently she disagreed with what I was saying. And she said, Bill, you’re talking like a sausage. And I said, I’m talking like a what? She said, you’re talking like a sausage. I had to state the obvious here. Well, sausages can’t talk. And she said, right. And you’re making as much sense as a sausage would if it could talk. I decided that was the point to just kind of let it go. But after that, anytime somebody wasn’t making sense on TV or a politician, that guy is such a sausage. So I’m wondering, is she the only person in the world who spoke like that? Or have you guys heard that before? Or am I still talking like a sausage?

Bill, this is so interesting that you bring this up and that she was from Milwaukee. The south side of Milwaukee. South side of Milwaukee. Very important. Right. Because my first guess when I first heard this expression was that this has to be of German origin because Germans love to talk about Wurst, you know, sausage. But I can’t find a German expression that directly correlates with that. If you’re talking nonsense in German, you’re talking a lot of cheese, kaiser reden.

And then there’s a Dutch saying that roughly translates as he talks like a sausage without the fat.

So I don’t know if there’s any Dutch in your family, but I think that she had the right idea, that the English version simply reflects the fact that it’s absurd to think that a sausage could talk.

And maybe also that, you know, a sausage is stuffed full of all kinds of things.

I’m looking at a newspaper article from 1907 in the Mount Sterling Advocate from Kentucky.

And somebody says, it is now considered highly improper to say he talks like a sausage.

The proper expression is, he orates in a manner similar to that which would be adopted by a wienerwurst, were it gifted with the faculty of speech?

I think that’s kind of where she was going with that, though.

But we know it’s older than that, Bill, just so you know.

Yeah, it is older than that.

And some people play with the expression by saying, here’s another example from 1907.

I must close, but my talk is like a sausage.

It is good wherever you cut it off.

So that’s one way to end a speech.

So, Bill, I think we might conclude that your wife was right.

I had to call a nationally syndicated radio show to get that.

Thanks, guys.

All right.

Take care, Bill.

Keep talking like a sausage.

You bet.

It’s working out for you.

I love your show.

You guys just roll on and do what you do.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Thanks, Bill.

Bye-bye.

Be well.

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Special thanks to Michael Breslauer, Josh Eckels, Clare Grotting, Bruce Rogow, Rick Seidenwurm, and Betty Willis.

Thanks for listening. I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett. Until next time, goodbye.

Bye.

Thank you.