Piece Description

Some call them crash blossoms, those funny turns of phrase that copy editors may or may not intend, like "Milk Drinkers Turn To Powder. More about crash blossoms in this article in Good by Mark Peters:

http://www.good.is/post/confusion-caused-by-crash-blossoms/

Where'd we get the expression they're selling like hotcakes?

A Pensacola man says he's invented a gender-neutral pronoun, and wants to know how to popularize it. He's not the first to try, as linguist Dennis Baron's chronology of failed attempts to create and popular epicene pronouns.

http://www.english.illinois.edu/-people-/faculty/debaron/essays/epicene.htm

If a recipe calls for "unthawed" corn, is that corn supposed to be frozen or unfrozen?

Quiz Guy John Chaneski has a quiz called "Scronsonants." The object is to guess two-word phrases containing a pair of words starting with the same three consonants. Here's one: "I get a particular joy from the pain of others, but I had to learn how to do it. So I attended ___________."

A Texas listener says her infant daughter is soothed by white noise. She's curious as to why it's called white noise instead of gray noise.

"You knucklehead!" Where'd we get an epithet like that? Grant tells the story about the wartime cartoon that helped popularize the term. Check out the adventures of R. F. Knucklehead.

Grant shares more crash blossoms.

A Southern California woman says she was caught up short when she enthused, "It's the bomb," and a 12-year-old had no idea what she was saying. Does our slang need to change as we grow older? And why do we say "the bomb," anyway?

In an earlier episode, the hosts talked about the slang term bobo, meaning "stupid" or "inferior." Many listeners wrote in to discuss about their own use of bobo and its variants, and to point out that bobos also refers to a kind of cheap canvas shoes. Grant reports on some of their emails.

http://www.waywordradio.org/zig-zag-and-shilly-shally/

How should you pronounce the word jewelry? That prompts a conversation about the transposition of letters and sounds called metathesis--not only in jewelry, but many others including realtor, foliage, larynx, and introduce.

Here's a handy word: fomite. It means "an inanimate object that can transmit an infectious agent" like a doorknob handle or a comb infested with head lice. It also has a picturesque Latin origin. Martha explains, and shares a related word: Dracula sneeze.

If you have a word lover on your gift list, Martha and Grant have a couple of recommendations for you. For adults, Martha recommends linguist Geoffrey Nunberg's collection of essays, The Years of Living Dangerously. For kids, Grant's been enjoying David Shannon's series, which includes, Good Boy Fergus, O David, No David, David Smells, and David gets in Trouble. You'll find several of them here.

http://tinyurl.com/ylyukeb

http://www.amazon.com/No-David-Shannon/dp/0590930028

A woman from Dallas wants to know about a verbal habit she grew up with in her Cajun French speaking Louisiana family. It's use of repetition for emphasis, as in, “it’s hot, but it’s not hot hot.”  Grant explains how reduplications, or a repetition of a word or part of a word, appear in many languages, including Cajun French.  For more, check out Albert Valdman's French and Creole in Louisiana, and Mary Ellen Scullen's New Insights Into French Reduplication.

http://www.amazon.com/French-Creole-Louisiana-Language-Linguistics/dp/0306454645

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CONTACT INFORMATION

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

Backup contact information:
Stefanie Levine
Senior Producer of "A Way with Words"
cell/office (619) 890-4275
slevine@waywordradio.org