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KPBS A Way with Words

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A Way with Words is a lively hour-long public radio show about language, on the air since 1998. Author Martha Barnette and dictionary editor Grant Barrett take calls about slang, grammar, old sayings, word origins, regional dialects, family expressions, and speaking and writing well. Join them on the air at 1-877-929-9673, via email at words@waywordradio.org, or on the web at http://waywordradio.org/.

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KPBS A Way with Words

A Year of Words - 17 Nov. 2008

It's that time again, when people start thinking about a 'new or resurgent word or phrase that best captures the spirit of the past year.' And what a year! We heard the words 'bailout' and 'lipstick' more times than we'd ever dreamed, and saw also the rise of invented words like 'staycation' and 'recessionista.' What are your nominations for 2008's Word of the Year?

'Do English-speaking foreigners understand you better if you speak English with a foreign accent?' A Californian says that on a recent visit to Armenia, he discovered the locals had an easier time if he spoke English with an Armenian accent. Is this okay or could it be seen as condescending?

'Buckaroo' is an English word adapted from the Spanish word <i>vaquero</i>, meaning 'cowboy.' Is there a specific term for the linguistic process whereby such words are adapted into English?

Martha nominates another Word of the Year candidate: 'Joe the,' as in 'Joe the Plumber,' and subsequent variations on the 'X the Y' formula arising from a certain drain-fixer's quarter-hour of fame.

Quiz Guy John Chaneski stops by with a quiz about superlatives. Naturally, his name for the quiz is 'Best. Puzzle. Ever.'

Why do we say someone's 'bright-eyed and bushy-tailed'? Your chipper, chattering hosts are ready with the 'sciurine' answer. 'http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=sciurine&r=66

An Indiana woman shudders every time anyone uses the expression 'comprised of.' She wants to know if she's right that it's bad grammar, and more important, is she right to be a stickler about it?

Martha and Grant discuss some other Word of the Year candidates, including 'hockey mom' and 'hypermiling.'

The term 'Chinese fire drill' can mean either a 'state of confusion' or the adoloscent ritual involving a red light and a carful of rowdy teenagers. But a caller who overheard the expression at work worries that expression might be racist.

This week's slang quiz challenges a Seattle video game designer to pick out the correct slang terms from a mishmash of possible answers, including 'hammantaschen,' 'party party,' 'play pattycake,' and 'get off.'

In 2008, is using the term 'jive turkey' politically incorrect, or just a little dorky-sounding? A Las Vegas schoolteacher jokingly used it with her students, then had second thoughts. Grant sets her mind at ease.

It's raining, it's pouring, but the sun is still shining. Quick--what do you call that? Some folks refer to it a 'sunshower,' and others call it a 'monkey's wedding.' But a woman says her Southern-born mother used a much more unnerving expression: 'The devil's beating his wife.' Martha and Grant discuss the possible origins of this expression and its variants, like 'The devil is beating his wife and the angels are crying.' Around the world, this meteorological phenomenon goes by an astonishing range of names. In Lithuanian, the name translates as 'orphan's tears.' In Korean, 'a tiger is getting married.' Here's a list of many more, collected a few years ago by linguist Bert Vaux: http://www.linguistlist.org/issues/9/9-1795.html

Which of the following three factors has the 'biggest influence on a person's accent'? Is it your geographic location, your family, or the media?

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Get your language question answered on the air! Call or write 24 hours a day: (877) WAY-WORD/(877) 929-9673, words@waywordradio.org, or visit our web site and discussion forums at http://waywordradio.org. Copyright 2008, Wayword LLC.

Of Gossamer and Geese (minicast) - 10 Nov. 2008

It's a warm day in late autumn. You're out for a stroll in the country. If the air is still, and the sun is at just the right angle, you may see the glint of spider threads floating lazily in the air. Particularly at this time of year, some tiny spiders use an odd way to travel: They shoot out threads of their own silk, and then hitch a ride on the breeze. Entomologists call this technique 'ballooning.' Walt Whitman described it in a poem, writing of a 'noiseless patient spider' launching forth 'filament, filament, filament, out of itself. / Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them....'

And the word for these silky threads? 'gossamer.'

It's a beautiful word, gossamer--almost sounds like itself, doesn't it? This term's meaning has come to extend to anything 'flimsy, insubstantial, or gauzy.' .' Cole Porter sang of 'a trip to the moon on gossamer wings.' And Charlotte Bronte wrote of 'a gossamer happiness hanging in the air.'

So how did spider silk ever get the name 'gossamer'?

It seems the spider's filaments take their name from an old word for late autumn. In this country, that period is often called 'Indian Summer.' But in Britain, the same period was long known as 'St. Martin's summer,' a reference to Martin's feast day, November 11. Centuries ago, though, speakers of Middle English referred to this period as 'gosesomer'--a name that means 'goose summer.'

Why the goose in goose summer? That's where things get a little hazy. The most likely explanation is that early November traditionally was the time when people feasted on fattened geese. In fact, an old German word for November literally translates as 'geese month.'

The name for this warm period, goosesummer, was later applied to the phenomenon that country folk observed at that time of year, those silky, gossamer threads floating in the autumn air.

It seems that over the years, just like those tiny spiders, the word 'gossamer' has drifted a long way.

...

You'll find the Walt Whitman poem here:

http://www.internal.org/view_poem.phtml?poemID=222

For more about gossamer, including Henry David Thoreau's fascination with it, check out 'Beneath the Second Sun: A Cultural History of Indian Summer,' by Adam W. Sweeting.

http://tinyurl.com/56odbo

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Get your language question answered on the air! Call or write 24 hours a day: (877) WAY-WORD/(877) 929-9673, words@waywordradio.org, or visit our web site and discussion forums at http://waywordradio.org. Copyright 2008, Wayword LLC.

Pwned Prose, Stat! - 10 Nov. 2008

[This episode first aired September 13, 2008.]

When you get to the end of a wonderful book, your first impulse is to tell someone else about it. In this week's episode, Martha and Grant discuss what they've been reading and the delights of great prose.

An Illinois man recalls that as a kid, he used to mix fountain drinks of every flavor into a concoction he and his friends called a 'suicide.' He wonders if anyone else calls them that. Why a 'suicide'? Because it looks and tastes like poison?

It started as a typo for 'own,' now it's entrenched in online slang. A Kentucky caller is curious about 'pwn.' It rhymes with 'own' and means 'to defeat' or 'to triumph over.' Our hosts talk about a special meaning of 'own' in the computer-gaming world.

Quiz Guy John Chaneski is Havana good time with Martha and Grant on an round-the-world 'International Puzzle Hunt' that will leave you Beijing for more.

You seem to hear it on all the television hospital dramas: 'stat!' A physician says she knows it means 'immediately,' but she doesn't know its origins. Quick! Is there a Latin expert in the house?

A San Diego fisherman notes that he hears mariners talk about 'snotty weather.' 'Snotty?' Is it the kind that gives you the sniffles? Or is does it cop an attitude?

Do you ever stare at a word so long that you think it's mispellllled? Even though it isn't? Your dialectal duo hunt up a word for that phenomenon.

Grant and Martha reveal what books are on their own nightstands, waiting to be read. Just the top of the stacks, natch, because there are just too many.

This week's 'Slang This!' contestant tries to guess the meaning of the terms 'liver rounds' and 'put the bite on someone.'

An Indianapolis woman who grew up in the South says that when her slip was showing, her father used to say, 'Who do you think you are, Miss Astor'?' Martha shares other euphemisms for slips showing. If someone sidles up to you and says, 'Pssssst! Mrs. White is out of jail,' it's time to check your hemline.

You can tell someone's an 'A Way with Words' listener when they confess to lying awake at night wondering about questions like, 'Are the words 'fillet' and 'flay' etymologically related?'

A Minnesotan has been observing his infant babbling, and wonders if words like 'mama' and 'papa' arise from sounds that babies naturally make anyway. Are there some words or sounds that are instinctive? Or do they only learn them from their parents?

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Get your language question answered on the air! Usage, grammar, spelling, punctuation, slang, old sayings, other languages, speech, writing, you name it. Call or write 24 hours a day: (877) WAY-WORD/(877) 929-9673, words@waywordradio.org, or visit our web

Language Headlines (minicast) - 3 Nov. 2008

Last year British slang lexicographer Jonathon Green struck a deal with the publisher Chambers Harrap to create an exhaustive dictionary of English slang. Now, says the London Telegraph, the first fruit of that relationship has appeared in the form of the Chambers Slang Dictionary.

The main sources of slang, Green says, have remained the same: sex and sexual organs, drinking, and terms of abuse. But ,there are always innovations.

The Telegraph offers some of them: boilerhouse, modern British rhyming slang for spouse. Jawsing, US teen slang for lying. And, muzzy, an Irish word for a naughty child.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2008/10/27/sv_slangmain.xml

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2008/10/27/sv_slang.xml

In the Paper Cuts blog of the New York Times, Jennifer Scheussler reviews 'On The Dot,' by Nicholas and Alexander Humez. It's an exhaustive look at the period or the dot, that little piece of punctuation that does so much. And I do mean exhaustive. The book is so digressive and sometimes so far afield of its subject matter that you might find yourself flipping to the front to make sure you're still reading the same book.

http://papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/27/dot-everything/

In the discussion forum on that page, I discovered the 'fini.' This is a new piece of punctuation created by Dave Rosenthal, an assistant managing editor at the Baltimore Sun. The fini is a square instead of a circle.

Dave says, 'A period is usually a fine way to end a sentence. But when there's a forcefulness attached to the words, I worry that the period will roll away. It is, after all, just a tiny black ball.'

http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/books/blog/2008/07/the_endofdiscussion.html

Do you want to find out what Virginia Woolf and John Steinbeck sounded like? They're part of an audio collection from the British Library, called 'The Spoken Word: British Writers.' It was discussed and played on NPR's All Things Considered.

The audio is a rare find, as many recordings of the early days of radio were never saved. Recordings by George Orwell, for example, have yet to be found, even though he worked for the British Broadcasting Corporation.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=96030704

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Get your language question answered on the air! Call or write 24 hours a day: (877) WAY-WORD/(877) 929-9673, words@waywordradio.org, or visit our web site and discussion forums at http://waywordradio.org. Copyright 2008, Wayword LLC.

Hair of the Politics that Bit You - 3 Nov. 2008

This week on 'A Way with Words': Feel like having a little 'hair of the dog'? Grant and Martha explain what dog hair has to do with hangover cures. And what do you call it when random objects form a recognizable image, like a cloud resembling a bunny, or the image of Elvis in a grilled cheese sandwich?

With all this talk about this year's election ballot, did you ever stop to think about where the word 'ballot' comes from? Martha and Grant discuss terms related to politics, including 'ballot' and 'leg treasurer.'

'A fish stinks from the head down.' When an Indianapolis woman is quoted saying this, she's accused of calling the leader of a particular organization a stinky fish. She says she wasn't speaking literally, insisting that this is a turn of phrase that means 'corruption in an organization starts at the top.' Who's right?

Dude, how'd we ever start using the word 'dude'? The Big Grantbowski traces the word's origin - it's over 125 years old.

Quiz Guy John Chaneski drops by with a puzzle involving overlapping words. He calls it, of course, 'Overlap-Plied Linguistics.'

If you're hung over, and someone offers you 'a little hair of the dog,' you can rest assured you're not being offered a sip of something with real dog hair in it. But was that always the case? Grant has the answer, and Martha offers a word once proposed as a medical term for this crapulent condition: veisalgia.

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=crapulent&r=66

A new resident of Pittsburgh is startled by some of the dialect there, like 'yinz' instead of 'you' for the second person plural, and nebby for 'nosy.' What's up with that? For a wonderful site about the dialect of that area, check out Pittsburgh Speech and Society.

http://english.cmu.edu/pittsburghspeech/index.html

If someone says he 'finna go,' he means he's leaving. But finna? Grant has the final word about finna.

Good news if you've wondered about a word for recognizable images composed of random visual stimuli - that image of Elvis in your grilled-cheese sandwich, for example. It's pareidolia. Here's the article Martha mentions from wordorigins.org:

http://www.wordorigins.org/index.php/site/comments/audio_pareidolia/

In this week's 'Slang This!,' a member of the National Puzzlers' League from Boston tries to guess the meaning of four possible slang terms, including 'labanza,' 'woefits,' 'prosciutto,' and 'moose-tanned.'

At Murray's Cheese http://www.murrayscheese.com/ in Grand Central Station, the workers who sell cheese are called 'cheesemongers.' The store's opening up a new section to sell cold cuts, and workers there are looking for more appetizing term than 'meatmonger.' (Meat-R-Maids? Never mind.) Martha and Grant try to help.

At sports events in North America, we enthusiastically root for the home team, right? But a woman from Kenosha, Wisconsin, says an Aussie told her that they most assuredly don't do that Down Under. There, he tells her, rooting means 'having sex.' Is he pulling her leg, she wonders?

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Get your language question answered on the air! Call or write 24 hours a day: (877) WAY-WORD/(877) 929-9673, words@waywordradio.org, or visit our web site and discussion forums at http://waywordradio.org. Copyright 2008, Wayword LLC.

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