Transcript for the Piece Audio version of A Way with Words: Tweet, Tweet! Polly Wanna Cracker! (#1254)

Summary:

Twittering, tweeting, twirting, tweeple – it's rare too see a whole new body of language appear practically before your eyes. But that is what's happening with the microblogging community called Twitter. Grant and Martha discuss the snappy new shorthand used by the twitterati, and the creativity demanded by a messaging medium of 140 characters or less. Also, why all the parroting of "Polly wanna cracker?" around parrots? They settle the question of whether you can end a sentence with a preposition.

For a closer look at the language of the twitterati, check out Erin McKean's recent piece in the Boston Globe.

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/02/08/all_a_twitter/

A man who owns a parrot says that when people see his bird, they invariably ask the question "Polly wanna cracker?" He wonders about the origin of that psittacine phrase. Psittacine? It means parrot-like. http://www.bartleby.com/61/21/P0632100.html

Is it ever okay to end a sentence with a preposition? Oh, is it ever! Martha and Grant do their best to bury this tired old proscription. It's a baseless rule concocted by 17-century grammarians, and it's errant nonsense up with which your hosts will not put.

Quiz Guy Greg Pliska has a puzzle in which participants try to guess a word that could logically go before or after each of a trio of words. For example, if the three words are "nest," "calories," and "suit," the answer is "empty," as in "empty nest," "empty calories," and "empty suit." So, can you guess why Greg calls this puzzle "Crown Play Time"?

Is it more correct to say "toward an object" or "towards an object"? The answer depends on which side of the Atlantic you're on.

Martha tries out a couple of old-fashioned riddles on Grant. Here's one: "What goes around the world, but stays in a corner?"

An F-18 fighter pilot worries that a term he and his colleagues often use isn't a legitimate word. It's deconflict, which means to ensure that aircraft aren't in the same airspace. Grant reassures him that deconflict is a perfectly respectable term.

Is there a word for @#$%!^*)!&!, those typographical symbols standing in for profanity? There is indeed. It's grawlix-- not to be confused with jarns, quimps, nittles, lucaflects, or plewds. For more on such terms, check out cartoonist Mort Walker's Private Scrapbook. http://tinyurl.com/damste

Grant answers a letter from a listener who wonders if it's ever correct to use the word "fishes" instead of "fish."

In this week’s round of Slang This!, a member of the National Puzzlers League tries to separate the real slang terms from the fake ones. For example, which of following expressions is British rhyming slang for "wife": boiler house or the stitches? And which of these is prison slang for "cake" or "candy": cho-cho or grimpen mire?

It's one of those things that are inevitable as death, taxes, and come to think of it, people saying "Polly wanna cracker?" whenever they see a parrot. We're talking, of course, about the nasty black mixture of snow and ice that builds up in your car's wheel wells in wintry weather. Is there a word for this frigid gunk? Various names have been floating around, including hunkers, snared, grace, curricles, or snort. A caller shares another her own family uses, braxis.

If people are on warmly congenial terms, they're said to "get on like a house on fire." Yet an Irishwoman says when she uses this expression in the U.S., she often gets puzzled looks. Is the expression that unusual?

When something's crooked, some people describe it as catawampus, or catawampus, or catawampus. Ditto for something located diagonally across from something else. A caller wonders about the historical roots of all these words. Anything to do with felines?

CONTACT INFORMATION

Grant Barrett
Co-host, "A Way with Words"
http://waywordradio.org
cell/office (646) 286-2260
gbarrett@worldnewyork.org
words@waywordradio.org

Backup contact information:
Stefanie Levine
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slevine@waywordradio.org