What would you serve a plumber for dinner? How about leeks? (We didn't say it had to be appetizing.) What would you serve a jeweler? Carats. Martha and Grant play the "What Would You Serve?" game.

A Little Rock, Ark., caller has been going out with a Chinese woman. Her English is pretty good, but he wonders about the most polite way to correct a minor grammar mistake without ruining a new relationship.

What's the origin of the expressions "Word!" and "Word up!"? Grant shares a theory from the book "Black Talk" by Geneva Smitherman.

http://bit.ly/gLhqdo

By the way, here's that 1980's-era song "Word Up."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZjAantupsA

What would you serve a chronic procrastinator? Ketchup. What would you serve a fertility specialist? Eggplant. Martha serves up those and others.

Quiz Guy John Chaneski has a quiz based on news events of the last several months, all in limerick form.

A woman in Gainesville, Fla., says her father and his partner have an ongoing Scrabble feud over rebeheaded. Is it a word?

"Anymore, I play golf instead of tennis." Grant explains that this grammatical construction is known as the "positive anymore."

What would you serve to people separated by six degrees? Bacon!

A sign-language interpreter found herself translating the word doldrums. She wonders if it has to do the area of the ocean known by that name.

What would you serve a group of musicians and cardiologists? How about beets?

Martha shares some collective nouns sent in by listeners in response to a recent show on the topic.

http://www.waywordradio.org/roberta-of-flax/

What does nonplussed mean, exactly? Does it mean "unflappable" or "at a loss." Martha and Grant disagree about its use.

Is there some kind of snappy jingle for knowing when to use who and whom?

Grant shares some familiar proverbs that supposedly arose from African-American English. The book he mentions is Proverbs, by Wolfgang Mieder.

http://bit.ly/dQVxmQ

Need a word for "lover of the underdog"? It's infracaninophile.

What's in a pet's name? Martha and Grant swap stories about how they came up with names for their dogs. Also this week: Have you ever been called a stump jumper? How about a snicklefritz? And what's the last word in the dictionary? Depending on which dictionary you consult, it might be zythum, zyzzyva, zyxomma, or zyxt.

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Sometimes the process of naming a pet takes a while. The hosts talk about how their dogs' names evolved.

A native Japanese speaker is mystified by the expression happy as a clam. In Japanese, she says, if you had a good night's sleep you might say you slept like a clam or slept like mud. So why do English speakers think clams are content? 

What's the very last word in the dictionary? Depending on which dictionary you're using, you may see zyzzyva, zythum, zyxomma, or zyxt.

This week's word puzzle from Quiz Guy Greg Pliska involves taking a word, adding an "i" to the beginning, as if creating an Apple product, to get an entirely new word. For instance: "This is how Steve Jobs begins a card game."

A caller from Princeton, Texas remembers that after a satisfying meal, her late father used to push back from the table and say, "I am sufficiently suffonsified. Anything more would be purely obnoxious to my taste. No thank you." What heck did he mean by that?

A Vermonter says he's sometimes called a stump jumper. Should he be flattered or insulted?

Martha shares a couple of Tom Swifties, those funny sentences that make great punny use of adverbs, like "'My bicycle wheel is damaged,' Tom said outspokenly."

Why do we say that someone who's happy is in hog heaven?

Martha tells the story behind the term Tom Swifty. Grant shares some more funny examples from the "A Way with Words" discussion forum.

http://tinyurl.com/y8bf6ok

Gradoo is a word for something undesirable, the kind of thing you'd rather scrape off your shoe. A man who grew up in Louisiana wonders about the term, which he heard from both English and Cajun French speakers. 

Someone who says, "I'll be there directly," may not necessarily get there right away. How did the meaning of  "directly" change in some parts of the country to mean "by and by"?

"You little snickelfritz!" An Indiana man says his mother used to call him that when she meant" You little rascal!" Although the term's meaning has changed over time, its original meaning was a bit naughty.

Grant and Martha talk about new and unusual slang. If something has you puzzled or mystified, you're metagrobolized. If you're speaking voice sounds like grunting, you're said to be gruntulous. And what does spox mean? It's journalistic slang for "spokesperson."

Some musicians are having a dispute over the word repeat: If the conductor says, "Repeat this section two times," how many times should they play the passage? Twice? Three times?

You know those dull sports cliches like "We came to play" and "He left it all on the field"?  They're called bromides. The hosts explain the connection between the tired platitude and the sedative called potassium bromide. The answer involves a book by the humorist Gelett Burgess called Are You a Bromide? You can see a copy here.

http://bit.ly/gp0UqU

In theology, epikeia involves observing the spirit of a law rather than the literal rule.  Grant explains how in many cases, epikeia actually serves a greater good. Thomas Aquinas defends cases of epikeia in his Summa Theologica.

http://bit.ly/icozsT

In honor of the 2011 Academy Awards, Quiz Guy Greg Pliska offers his own version, The Oxcars. The trick is that the nominees for Best Picture at the Oxcars have the same titles as this year's real nominees for the Oscar, but with one letter changed. Example: What was this year's installment of the hit animated series about headline news? Why, that would be "Top Story 3."

A Wyoming native asks about the origin of her father's term of approbation, good leather. Grant says it's probably from baseball, where good leather means "good fielding with a leather glove." 

Are we a nosy species? A listener married to a woman from Bangladesh explains how a Bengali term that translates as "nose-going" reflects the naturally inquisitive style of Bangladeshi culture. In many languages, the nose figures prominently in words and idioms involving inquiry or investigation. Martha notes a Spanish term, olfatear, related to the English olfactory, meaning "to sniff or pry into." 

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." Martin Luther King Jr. wrote those words in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail. The hosts discuss this and other modern proverbs with staying power.

A dental student wonders about acetabulum, the anatomical term for the hip socket. Martha traces it back to the Latin word for "vinegar cup." In ancient Rome, households had a vinegar cup on the dinner table for dipping bits of food. The cup bore an astonishing similarity to the human hip socket. Many of our body parts came to be named after familiar, mundane items. The word pelvis, for example, comes from Latin for "basin."

Who doesn't love a couthy lad? Grant plugs this Scottish adjective for someone who's sociable. 

An earlier episode of "A Way with Words" addressed full-deckisms, those clever phrases describing someone who falls short in some way.

http://waywordradio.org/a-few-pickles-short-of-a-jar/

Simon Ager's site omniglot.com is stacked with full-deckisms from around the world. In English-speaking countries, someone who's not quite with it is said to be two sandwiches short of a picnic. In Germany, however, this is described with the question "Are you still ticking on time?"

http://omniglot.com/

How do children acquire language? Do they start with nouns, like "Mama" and "cat," then graduate to verbs and other parts of speech? Grant explains that language acquisition starts even earlier, with children simply emulating sounds they hear. Around the world, kids learn to speak in remarkably similar patterns.

http://bit.ly/dPxmZk

http://bit.ly/hktMV8

http://bit.ly/i4L2ZB

If something is in your wheelhouse, it's well within your area of expertise. According to The Dickson Baseball Dictionary, the term wheelhouse refers to swinging a bat when the ball is right in your crush zone. 

http://bit.ly/fenGp3

When it's raining cats and dogs, the Greeks say, "It's raining chair legs!" Omniglot has many more terms for downpours around the world.

http://bit.ly/9kAaAt

Who is Cooter Brown? And just how high is he? His name appears in lots of phrases, including high as Cooter Brown, drunk as Cooter Brown, dead as Cooter Brown, fast as Cooter Brown, and fertile as Cooter Brown. The earliest known references to him appear in African-American publications in Atlanta in the 1930s. Cooter Brown, also known as Cootie Brown, even made his way into the work of Langston Hughes. Yet the identity of Mr. Brown remains a mystery.

If you listen to the show via podcast, then you might say it's coming to you in silico. This computer science term means "performed on computer or by computer simulation." It's the equivalent of in vitro, or "in glass," or in vivo, "in a living body," used in biological experiments.

"Red sky at night, sailor's delight. Red sky at morning, sailor take warning." Martha talks about this weather proverb, which has been around in one form or another since ancient times. Grant shares a favorite weather word: slatch. Also this week: Is there a better alternative to the word mentee? What's pooflapoo pie?

A Dallas listener and her boss have a dispute. The boss says the staff should get "on the stick." The caller and her co-workers say the correct phrase is on the ball. Grant gives her an answer, then suggests a third option used in Hawaii: on the kinipopo.

What's the best term for someone who's being mentored? A woman in a mentoring program at church thinks the word mentee sounds like "manatee." She's hoping for an alternative.

Grant shares another weather-related word from Britain: parky.

Quiz Guy John Chaneski offers a puzzle in honor of the hosts' initials. Every clue prompts a two-word answer beginning with the letters M and B or G and B. For example: "Paper or plastic?"

A caller named Todd says that when people meet him for the first time, they sometimes call him Scott, even if he's wearing a nametag with his real name on it. It's happened too many times to be a coincidence, he says, and wonders if there's something about the double letters that registers the wrong name in people's minds.

Whip up a big batch of pistachio pudding, then add pineapple, walnuts, Cool Whip, and marshmallow bits, and what do you have? A Los Angeles woman says her grandmother used to make a dish with those ingredients that she called pooflapoo pie. Is that just her family's name for it, or do other people refer to it that way? Other people call it Watergate salad or ambrosia.

Have trouble remembering the difference between stalagtites and stalagmites? Martha shares a mnemonic that will help.

A police officer says that the prosecutor edits out the word that from the reports he submits, as in, "The subject stated that he met the co-defendant at a party." Is the word "that" necessary here? Martha and Grant disagree. Also, the cop also has a brain-teaser for the hosts: Can you use the word "that" five times consecutively in a sentence correctly?

The hosts talk about the tricks they use to remember how to spell certain words.

Why do we say that someone finely attired is dressed to the nines?

A woman says that when playing hide-and-seek with a small child, her mother-in-law says "Peep-eye!" instead of "Peekaboo!" Is that usage limited to certain parts of the country? And where do they say "Pee-bo!"?

Grant talks about two other weather-related terms, frontogenesis and aeromancy.

When comparing one item with the rest of the items in a group, which is better: more or most?

When it comes to joining Facebook affinity groups, grammar lovers have lots of choices. Take, for example, the group whose motto is "Punctuation saves lives." It's called  "Let's Eat Grandma!'" or "Let's eat, Grandma!" Martha and Grant talk about their favorite tongue-in-cheek Facebook groups for grammar lovers. Also this week" when to use apostrophes, whether to distinguish between bring and take, and the difference between a murphy and a wedgie.

Ever notice how you can sing the lyrics of "Amazing Grace" to the theme from "Gilligan's Island" -- or for that matter, to "The House of the Rising Sun"? Turns out there are many more examples of this. Is there a word for this musical phenomenon?

A Connecticut listener says her Generation Y friends make fun of her when she describes something happening in fits and starts. Is it that antiquated a phrase? Where does it come from, anyway?

Quiz Guy Greg Pliska has a quiz about famous trios. Try this one: "Steve Martin, Martin Short, and ___________?"

If someone gives you crazy props or mad props, they're congratulating you. A Chicago college student wants to know what props means in this context.

What's the difference between bring and take?

When someone grabs your underwear from behind and gives it a good, vertical yank, it's called a wedgie. A caller knows that term, but wonders whether and how a wedgie differs from a murphy or a melvin.

Grant quizzes Martha about the meaning of several rhyming verb and noun phrases: cuff and stuff, the cherries and blueberries, chew and screw, eat it and beat it, and flap and zap.

A Lawrenceville, Georgia, woman wonders: If chalkboards go the way of the buggy whip, what simile will replace the expression nails on a chalkboard?

Grant answers a listener's email question about the meaning of the musical phrase chicky-wah-wah.

A caller from Veroqua, Wisconsin, is fascinated by hoarfrost and wonders about the origin of its name. Grant explains its relation to the English term hoary.

The mother of a boy named Hendrix wonders how to punctuate the possessive of his name. Should she add an apostrophe or apostrophe with an "s"? Hendrix' or Hendrix's?

As members of the Bob o'clock Facebook group know, the expression "It's Bob O'clock!" means, "It's 8:08!" The hosts discuss this and other silly ways to tell time inspired by the boxy numbers on a digital clock.

http://bit.ly/cufbDx

What's the word for that gesture you make with your fingers when you want to make an image larger on an iPhone? Unpinch? Fwoop?

A Wisconsin man says he learned an expression that sounds like quixibar from his father to describe something confusing or befuddling. But he's never heard anyone else use it. Is it unique to his family?

Does anyone use the expression fat chance any more?

Quiz Guy Greg Pliska has a puzzle about heteronyms, words that have the same spelling, but different meanings, like "moped" as in "acted glum" and "moped" as in a motorized bike.

A San Diego caller wonders about the expression a-gogo, as in the name of a local restaurant, Hash House A-Gogo. Where'd it come from?

You look like death eatin' a cracker walkin' backwards. In Appalachia, this phrase means, "you look terrible." A caller wants to know its origin.

A Dallas listener is struck by the fact that Texans talk about East Texas, North Texas, South Texas, and West Texas. So why, she wonders, do people in other states say things like Southern Indiana and Northern California?

Grant talks about his daily work as a lexicographer.

A Wellesley College student has been reading about the Victorian fear of being buried alive -- also known as taphophobia -- and the bizarre 19th-century burial practices associated with it. She's heard that they gave rise to such expressions as dead ringer, graveyard shift, and saved by the bell. Martha and Grant debunk those linguistic myths. By the way, here's a cool article about those weird Victorian "escape coffins."

http://obit-mag.com/articles/escape-coffins-the-fear-of-being-buried-alive

A listener in Buford, Ga., says his mother's maiden name was Barnett, and reports that he was told that the addition of an "e" to a last name was once an indication that the person was descended from slave families.

Why do physicians speak of turfing an undesirable patient?

Can you guess what a smiley is? Or how about tarantula juice? You could, of course, happen upon someone with a muffin top drinking inferior whisky, or you could look these terms up in Jonathon Green's new Historical Dictionary of Slang. Green spent decades assembling this three-volume collection of slang from the United States, Great Britain, and every other nook and cranny of the English-speaking world. Grant explains what has linguists so excited about its publication.

http://bit.ly/ienVE3

If you preface a statement with "I'm not trying to be racist, but," does that then make it okay? And is there a term for such disclaimer?

It's always fun to catch moviemakers' blunders. Say you're watching an epic about ancient Rome and spot a toga-clad extra who forgot to remove his wristwatch. That's an anachronism. But what do you call something that's geographically incorrect. Take, for example, an exterior shot of what's supposed to be Dunder Mifflin's Scranton office, but includes a fleeting glimpse of a palm tree? That's called an anatopism (accent on the second syllable), from the Greek topos, meaning "place."

For an excellent timewaster along these lines, Grant recommends moviemistakes.com. (Yo, "The Nativity Story"! Everyone knows maize wasn't grown in Nazareth during the time of Christ. Anatopic FAIL!)

http://bit.ly/39Ji

Understandings aren't just for epistemologists and marriage counselors. In the 18th Century, the slang term understandings was a jocular name for "boots" or "shoes." Later, the word also came to be a joking term for "legs."

Quiz Guy Greg Pliska has a set of Topical Limericks from the world of media and entertainment.

A listener from Dallas wonders about the origin of I'm not cotton to, meaning "I'm not in favor of" or "I don't get along with." Though it sounds like a classic Southern phrase, Martha traces it all the way back to England, where the verb to cotton had to do with textile work. Saying I'm not cotton with or I don't cotton to means that you don't get along with something.

What do you call those convenient props in illustrations and movies that cover up the proverbial naughty bits? A listener remembers an old illustrated copy of The Emperor's New Clothes that made clever use of twigs and berries for covering, well, the twigs and berries. Martha opens the kimono on the rare term antipudic, from the Latin pudor meaning "shame." It's the source also of the English words impudent and pudenda.

Alfred Hitchcock specifically referred to his own use of antipudic devices regarding the shower scene in Psycho. And of course, nobody makes better use of antipudic devices than Austin Powers, International Man of Mystery.

http://bit.ly/Zikak

Listeners emailed us in response to a call on the sonorous bow-chicka-wow-wow cliche, and we're glad they did. We learned that country star Trace Adkins has a song called "brown chicken, brown cow" that uses puppets to demonstrate just what it means to take a roll in the hay. We're sure it'd have Statler and Waldorf whipping out their opera binoculars.

http://waywordradio.org/a-murphy-a-melvin-and-a-wedgie/

http://bit.ly/fNoots

Who is Boo-Boo the Fool? A listener wonders if this African-American character has any relation the Puerto Rican fool, Juan Bobo. Martha draws a connection to the Spanish term bobo, meaning "fool," and its Latin root balbus, meaning "stammerer". Grant notes that the name Bobo has been extremely common for clowns since at least the 1940s, and the bobo/clown/jester character is prevalent in most all cultural folklores, be they African, South American, or Anglo-European.

When it comes to language, a listener from Dallas wants to know, as a fellow Texan might put it, "Who's the decider"? Grant explains that nobody makes the rules about language--and everybody does. For those seeking professional guidance, a whole community of lexicographers, dictionaries, and style guides offers rules and provenance on vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation. However, on a daily basis all the users of a language implicitly write the rules by choosing words and syntax that have semantic clarity for the people they're trying to communicate with. You could go to a reference book, or you could say something to your neighbor, then judge by their reaction whether or not you made sense.

Your mother gave you life, and you gave her . . . a boondoggle? Or is it a lanyard? Or maybe a gimp? Grant assures a listener there are several terms for that long key fob you made at summer camp out of plastic yarn. Boondoggle seems to have originated among Boy Scouts in the Rochester, N.Y., area in the 1930s, and was later picked up by those in politics to mean "a wasteful debacle." Grant also shares a French term for these summer-camp crafts, scoubidou, pronounced just like the cartoon dog, but apparently no relation.

Nobody writes more movingly about lanyards than poet Billy Collins.

http://bit.ly/YqF7g

If you get an email called Life in the 1500s, hit "delete"! Grant explains that the etymology provided is not entirely accurate. That's what this show is for. Also, if you're getting an email that says Free Money, Click Here, you shouldn't trust that either. That's what jobs are for.

Snopes.com has a good debunking of these linguistic urban legends.

http://bit.ly/fJQD

A college senior has invented a word to describe that anxiety we feel when there's unfinished work looming over us. He calls it desgundes. As in, that twenty-year-old in the library making a three-foot boondoggle must likely be dealing with some inner desgundes.

An Indianapolis listener says his father used to often speak of "leaving this veil of tears." His son wonders about the origin of that phrase. Grant and Martha explain the term is actually vale, a synonym for valley. In some translations, Psalm 84 refers to traveling through a vale of tears.

Martha and Grant share some of their latest guilty-pleasure reading from Twitter feeds that show just how much meaning can be compressed into 140 characters. Cases in point: @veryshortstory and @GRAMMARHULK.

http://twitter.com/veryshortstory

http://twitter.com/GRAMMARHULK

He can't hold a candle to someone means that he can't possibly compare to the other person. The hosts explain where this phrase comes from.

A zoo tour guide wants a specific word to describe how elephants procure hydration.

Quiz Guy John Chaneski presents a puzzle called "This, That, and the Other."

A Facebook newbie asks if it's okay to misspell words on purpose when communicating via social media.

The mother of eight-year-old twins wonders why one of her girls habitually adds Dun-dun-DUN! to sentences in everyday conversation. The hosts suspect it's related to the audio element known as a "sting" in television and movie parlance, like this one in the famous "Dramatic Prairie Dog" video clip.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHjFxJVeCQs&NR=1

The term skosh means "a small amount," and derives from a Japanese word that means the same thing.

Remember when the expression "reading a book" meant, well, actually reading a book? Martha and Grant discuss a Los Angeles Times series about how electronic devices are changing the way we read.

http://lat.ms/auLP0c

The distinctive shape of the dragonfly has inspired lots of different nicknames for this insect, including snake doctor, devil's darning needle, skeeter hawk, spindle, snake eyes, and ear sewer, the last of which rhymes with "mower."

What's the correct term for the male lover of a married woman? The hosts share suggestions from listeners, including paramour and Sancho.

A firefighter is annoyed by his boss's use of the term pre-plan.

Martha shares the term hit and giggle, a bit of sports slang term she picked up while working as an announcer at this year's Mercury Insurance Open tennis tournament.

There's a point when children understand just enough of their native language to be confused by homophones and metaphors. What misunderstandings do you remember? Maybe you thought cat burglars stole only cats, or that you might be swept out to sea by the undertoad? The hosts discuss childhood misunderstandings about language.

Some business owners give their establishments names like "Ye Olde Coffee Shoppe." What most people don't realize is that the letter Y in this case is a vestige of a letter we no longer use, and has a "th" sound. More about this letter here.

http://bbc.in/9Vy8Ba

A woman from upstate New York says her stepfather used to keep small dishes in various rooms to collect small odds and ends like paper clips and rubber bands. He called them culch piles. Martha has the story on this term.

Quiz Guy John Chaneski has a puzzle based on the candy called "Mentos." It's called Mento Stimulation. Example: What kind of minty candy would be appropriate for musicians?

A North Carolina man says he was surprised as a child when he did a chore for his grandmother, and the Yankee dime she promised him turned out to be a peck on the cheek.

A Texas caller says her child's middle-school teacher insists that students should never begin a sentence with a preposition. The hosts are shocked, shocked.

Martha describes a funny linguistic misunderstanding she had while trying to read Harry Potter in Spanish.

Predictive text on cellphones can result in some amusing accidental substitutions. The word for that: textonym.

Does the language you speak shape how you think? The hosts discuss an essay on that topic adapted from the new book "Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages," by Guy Deutscher.

http://nyti.ms/chDUjO

Reading Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, an Indiana listener is stopped short by the sentence "She carried a tray of charlotte." Who or what is charlotte?

Someone who paints a negative or pessimistic picture is said to be hanging crepe. Martha has the origin.

The word rubric derives from a Latin word for "red." Originally, it referred to red letters used as section headings in religious texts and the like. Rubric has since become a term used in modern educational jargon, as in grading rubric. What's the connection?

Some of the world's greatest writers had to do their work while holding down a day job. William Faulkner and Anthony Trollope toiled as postal clerks. Zora Neal Hurston trained as an anthropologist. Vladimir Nabokov was a lepidopterist who curated a butterfly exhibit at Harvard. Literary historian Jack Lynch tells the stories of these and others in his new book, Don't Quit Your Day Job: What the Famous Did That Wasn't.

http://bit.ly/aT4oXe

An Indianapolis newspaperman complains about his colleagues' use of the phrase I'm efforting that.

A woman in Racine, Wis., says her father and his fellow bus drivers always pronounced the word schedule as "skeh-DOO-lee." Is that an accepted pronunciation?

Todd Purdum's recent Vanity Fair article on the presidency contains intriguing beltway slang, including gaggle and full lid.

http://bit.ly/cXgmIj

Quiz Guy John Chaneski has a game called "Word Search."
 
A woman of Puerto Rican descent wonders about limber, the name of the savory frozen treat popular in her homeland. Was it really named in honor of aviator Charles Lindbergh?

A man in Huntington Beach, Ca., ponders his teenager's frequent use of the words fail and epic fail. Grant explains what this has to do with linguistic bleaching, and discusses some funny fails on failblog.org.

http://failblog.org/

Martha has an example of a linguistic false friend: In Latvian, the word vista means "chicken."

On a recent episode of "Mad Men," a character said "keep me in the loop." Was that phrase really around in the 1960s?

Everyone knows old proverbs, but what about modern ones? Here's an aphorism attributed to William Gibson: "The future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed." The hosts discuss some others.

After a San Diego man used the term Eskimo kiss with his preschooler, they both wondered about its origin.

An Indiana woman is puzzled about a phrase in the old western song, "I Ride An Old Paint": "I'm goin' to Montana to throw the houlihan." What's a houlihan? You'll find one version of the lyrics here.

http://to.pbs.org/bmHyw2

Here are different interpretations of this cowboy classic by Johnny Cash and Woody Guthrie.

http://bit.ly/9h03hD

http://bit.ly/9cEqws

On an earlier show, Martha mentioned the popular detergent in the Middle East called Barf. Martha shares email from listeners who say that although the word spelled the same as English "barf," the Farsi pronunciation is somewhat different.

http://www.waywordradio.org/a-gazelle-on-the-lawn/

Ever hear anyone refer to a wooden dresser as a chester drawers? A woman who grew up in St. Louis only recently learned that not everyone uses this term.

Martha reports that, during her recent attempt at learning to surf, she picked up lots of surfing lingo in between wipeouts. Here's a handy glossary of such terms, including tombstoning and pearling, both of which she did quite a bit.

http://bit.ly/da7hqe

Thinking about a flyaway, or will you spend the weekend gazing out at the catio? Grant explains these new terms.

Is subscribing just for magazines and podcasts, or can you subscribe to an idea? A husband and wife disagree over whether the latter is grammatically correct.

The Swahili phrase nililala fofofo means "to sleep really well." Literally, though, it translates as "to sleep like a log." Are the English and Swahili idioms related?

In French, tenir la chandelle means "to act as a chaperone," though literally it's "to hold the candle." Another expression that means "to chaperone" is the antiquated English phrase "to play gooseberry."

License-plate bingo, anyone? Quiz Guy John Chaneski offers a radio version.

"Who is 'she'? The cat's mother?" A Davis, Ca., man remembers his mother's indignant use of this expression, and he's curious about the origin.

Should you pronounce the word coyote with two syllables or three?

A Northern California caller that discovers that in Britain, an invitation to share a joint doesn't mean what it does back home.

Eleemosynary is the title of a play by Lee Blessing. The play celebrates this and other unusual words, including sortilege, charivari, ungulate, favonian, and logodaedaly. Martha saw a production at San Diego's Moxie Theater, and takes the opportunity to discuss those words, plus the fizzy roots of moxie.

Guess what! Or would that be Guess what? A Honolulu listener asks about the right way to punctuate this interjection. Should you use an exclamation mark or a question mark? How about an interrobang or a pronequark?

A Texas listener says his family often describes a great meal as larrupin'. What does that mean, exactly?

Grant talks about FOIA ("pronounced FOY-uh"), a bit of journalists' jargon.

Cowpies, horse biscuits, buffalo chips, horse dumplings -- why do so many names for animal droppings have to do with food? A caller wonders this, and whether the term cowpie would be an anachronism in a Civil War novel.

We have collective nouns for animals, like "a gaggle of geese," "a pride of lions," and "an exaltation of larks." So why not collective nouns for plants? How about a "greasing of palms," or a "pursing of tulips"? Martha shares some others collected on the site of food writer Gary Allen.

http://bit.ly/bKG1yC

Reverend William Archibald Spooner was known for transposing sounds, like raising a glass "to our queer old dean" instead of "to our dear old queen." A caller shares some favorite Spoonerisms.

Boil up some pigs' neck bones, add some liver sausage and buckwheat, mold it in a loaf, then slice, fry, and serve with syrup. Some folks call that scrapple, but a Milwaukee woman's family calls it pannas.

A listener asks: "Does the phrase "snap, crackle, and pop" need a cereal comma?"

Quiz Guy John Chaneski has a puzzle about anagrams.

What did Shakespeare's plays sound like in his day? An acting teacher with an interest in dialects wants to know how researchers reconstruct Elizabethan speech.

A Pennsylvania college student remembers playing a game called "Whisper Down the Lane." She's surprised to learn that her fellow students call the same game "Telephone."

What's the difference between further and farther?

Martha shares more funny collective plant names, including a "mommy of poppies."

Pity the poor typeface designer, always seeing anachronisms in movies and TV. Imagine how painful it must be watching a World War II movie, only to see a document printed in Snell Roundhand Bold, a font invented in 1972.

Here's typeface expert Mark Simonson's analysis of the lettering on "Mad Men."

http://bit.ly/3L4a99

More about the life of font designers in the new book, Just My Type, by Simon Garfield:

http://bit.ly/as5o5a

Some speakers of American English use the word whenever to refer to a single event, as in "whenever Abraham Lincoln" died. This locution is a vestige of Scots-Irish speech.

A professional musician maintains that many people use the word crescendo incorrectly.

A father of two small children says his Indiana family referred to a child's runny nose as a "lamb's legs," as in "We need to wipe the lamb's legs off."

Amid the stacks of new titles at the library, Grant picks out The Wind in the Willows to read with his son. The hosts discuss the appeal of classic children's books.

A bi-coastal listener wonders about the terms West Coast and Eastern Seaboard. Why don't we say Californians live on the Western Seaboard?

Does an avid reader pore or pour over a book?

There is always a person greater or lesser than yourself. Grant shares this and other African-American proverbs.

Quiz Guy John Chaneski borrows a classic game from Joseph Shipley called Twin Ends.
 
The expression that smarts, meaning "that hurts," dates back over a thousand years.

Does sanction mean "a penalty" or "an approval"?  Well, both. Martha explains the nature of contranyms, also known as Janus words. Here's an article about them in the periodical Verbatim.

www.verbatimmag.com/27_2.pdf

Listeners share their suggestions for the game What Would You Serve?  Hosting a golfer for dinner? Tea and greens should be lovely!

William Faulkner used adjectives like shadowdabbled, Augusttremulous, and others that can only be described as, well, Faulknerian. Grant and Martha trade theories about why the great writer chose them.

The University of Virginia has an online audio archive of Faulkner's during his tenure as that school's Writer-in-Residence.

http://faulkner.lib.virginia.edu/

Here's a 1956 interview with Faulkner about the art of writing. It ran in The Paris Review.

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4954/the-art-of-fiction-no-12-william-faulkner

In a previous episode, we wondered how U-turn might translate in different languages. One listener explains that in Hebrew, drivers make a horseshoe or a hoof-turn.

The Century Dictionary contains a list of amended spellings from the late 1800s that only creates more of the confusion it set out to alleviate.
 
Which is correct: We appreciate your asking or We appreciate you're asking?

A new transplant to Dallas wants to assimilate into the Texan way of speaking without offending the locals or forcing any new vocabulary.

Ever hear a broadcast where the announcer enunciates a little too precisely?  Grant and Martha discuss the effect of softening syllables, such as "prolly" for "probably," and "wanna" for "want to."

If you're in Bangladesh, the expression that translates as "oiling your mustache in anticipation of the jackfruit tree bearing fruit" makes perfect sense. In English, it means "don't count your chickens."

A discussion thread on Reddit with this and many other examples has Martha and Grant talking about odd idioms in other languages.

http://bit.ly/ifBbAQ

A Marine stationed in California says that growing up in North Carolina, he understood the expression fixin' to mean "to be about to."

Some office workers say their word processor's spellchecker always flags the words overnighted and overnighting. Are those words acceptable in a business environment?

"You really love peeled potatoes." That's a translation of a Venezuelan idiom describing someone who's lazy. Grant and Martha share other idioms from South America.

Quiz Guy John Chaneski has a puzzle called "Blank My Blank."

A woman in Burlington, Vt., says her mother used to use the expression Land o' Goshen! to express surprise or amazement. Where is Goshen?

A Yankee transplant to the South says that restaurant servers are confused when he tells them, "I'm all set." Is he all set to continue his meal, or all set to leave?

A woman in Eau Claire, Wis., remembers a ditty she learned from her mother about "thirty purple birds," but with a distinctive pronunciation that sounds more like "Toidy poipel blackbirds / Sittin' on a coibstone / Choipin' and boipin' / And eatin' doity oithworms."

Here's the Red Hot Chili Peppers version:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fw8YywYatA

Martha offers excellent writing advice from the former editor of People magazine, Landon Y. Jones. His whole article is here:

http://bit.ly/gVRekI

A former Texan wonders if only Texans use the terms Mamaw and Papaw instead of Grandma and Grandpa.

Martha shares some Argentine idioms, including one that translates as "What a handrail!" for "What a bad smell!"

A West Point graduate says he and fellow members of the military use the expression He has seen the elephant to mean "He's seen combat." Grant explains that this expression originated outside the military.

Do you flesh out a plan or flush out a plan?

Another Argentine idiom goes arrugaste como frenada de gusano. It means "You were scared," but literally, it's "You wrinkled like a stopping worm."

Did you ever mispronounce the name "Sean"?  Martha confesses that in grade school, she assumed it was pronounced "Seen."  Grant says that the word "remuneration" still gives him trouble.

A Ft. Worth, Texas, caller confesses that for years she mispronounced "etc." as "ek cetera." It was only when she took Latin that she realized it's "et cetera," the Latin words that mean "and the rest."

An Indianapolis man admits he was recently surprised to learn he's been mispronouncing the name of the sweet Italian cheese "mascarpone" as "marscapone." Martha shares a trick for remembering how to spell and pronounce "mascarpone." He also has trouble with "chipotle," saying it as "chipolte." Grant explains the linguistic reason these words are so tricky. Can you say "metathesis"?

A Tacoma listener learned belatedly that the correct phrase is "all intensive purposes, not "all intents and purposes." She shares the story of the way she found out -- by making the mistake in front of her creative writing class.

NPR Puzzlemaster Will Shortz shares his own linguistic confession. He always has to stop and think about the word "enervate," which would seem to mean "energize," but actually means "to weaken."

Will gives Grant and Martha a quiz that involves removing the outer two letters of a word to form another word that fits Will's clues. For example, if Clue #1 is "a kind of conclusion," and Clue #2 is "a West Coast state," then the answers are "foregone" and "Oregon."

Martha confesses that as a child, she misunderstood the old hymn "Bringing in the Sheaves" as "Bringing in the Cheese." Grant says he heard the same hymn and misunderstood "sheaves" as "sheep." He also says that despite his best efforts, he often ends up pronouncing "remuneration" as "renumeration."

John Chaneski, the show's own Quiz Guy, calls from New York City with a funny story about a friend who thought until he was in his early 20's that the word "definitely" actually meant "maybe." The hosts venture theories as to why the poor fellow might confuse the two.

"Well, butter my buns and call me a biscuit!" Martha and Grant talk about great catch phrases from old-time radio comedies. Also, why do we speak of a meteoric rise? Don't meteors plummet? What do you keep in a Fibber McGee drawer? Plus, myriad vs. myriad of, enamored of vs. enamored with, autocorrected text messages. And Martha shares a trick for eliminating those annoying verbal fillers like "um" and you know" from one's speech.

FULL DETAILS

They say it's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for an autocorrected text message to be, well, correct. Listeners like Arnold share their funny Autocorrected text messages. And by Arnold, we of course mean Brooke.

http://n.pr/fz6qI4

Well, shut my mouth and call me Shirley! Butter my buns and call me a biscuit! A listener shares several of these humorous imperatives. Grant explains that the roots of these phrases probably go back to the 1940s. Phil Harris, the bandleader on Jack Benny's radio comedy, was known for using such colorful catchphrases. An early version was Cut off my legs and call me Shorty!

http://bit.ly/exqCLY

Martha shares a childhood misunderstanding sent in by a listener. Seems her three-year-old daughter confused the phrase "exposed to the elements" with "exposed to the elephants."
 
What do you call an expert speller? A "Words With Friends" enthusiast wants to know. Martha tells her that a great speller is called an orthographer or orthographist, from the Latin roots ortho- meaning "straight" or "correct", and -graph meaning "to write". A bad speller, on the other hand, is a cacographer, or as it's known among them, a kakagrifar.

What is the term for that big inflatable play area you see at the park, or in your neighbor's yard? Is it a bouncy house? A jump? Grant asks listeners what they call this modern pumped-up playpen.

Our multi-talented Quiz Guy Greg Pliska, served as musical composer for the television documentary Flying Monsters 3-D.

http://www.flyingmonsters3dmovie.com/

That experience inspired him to create a puzzle using phrases that have the same letter appearing three times in a row. For example, where will you find trumpets and trombones? In the braSS Section.

What do you keep in your Fibber McGee drawer? That's what some people call a catchall container for household items. Grant traces the term for the drawer back to the old Fibber McGee and Molly radio comedy. Whenever Fibber had to fetch something from the closet, that meant a green light for the sound effects guy to let anything and everything come tumbling out. Classic Fibber!

http://bit.ly/igh3Hs

Why do we say someone whose career on the ascent is enjoying a meteoric rise? Don't meteors plummet? For that matter, a caller asks, why do we call "Heads up!" when a ball is coming towards us? Shouldn't it be "Heads down"? The hosts explain that "meteoric" in "meteoric rise" refers to the speedy, brightly streaking nature of a meteor. As for "Heads up," well, no language is perfect.

Grant shares a word he's been encountering at conferences: discussant. A discussant is someone who, after a series of papers are presented, takes the microphone to summarize the information given and offer opinions on the matter.

Should you use enamored of or enamored with? Grant explains that while North Americans use both, enamored of is the more common of the two. In Great Britain, it's enamored of, a construction similar to those in several Romance languages. Enamored by, on the other hand, should never be used. But then, love is always worth expressing, no matter the preposition.

A listener reports that when her cat starts whining, she tells it to shut its kibble-hole. If only cats understood wordplay--or English.

Ben Schott's language blog Schott's Vocab on the New York Times website held a contest for modern age greeting cards called Get Web Soon. Among the favorites: "Heartfelt condolences on the loss of your data" and "Congratulations on your relationship update".

http://nyti.ms/e0YbYe

A listener from Tennessee has a saying that doesn't quite land with his friends: "Is it any count?" Martha confirms that the phrase is most definitely Southern. It originates in the word "account," and the question of whether something "adds up."

What does hoot mean? You might describe someone as a real hoot. But is the hoot in the phrase not give a hoot a different kind of hoot? Grant explains that in the positive case, hoot is a shortening of hootenanny, a informal party with folksy music. In the negative sense, however, to hoot at somebody means to disapprove of something.

Is it really possible to change your style of speaking so that you stop using the verbal fillers "um" and "you know"? Yes, you can. Martha relates her experience with dialect-coach-to-the-stars Sam Chwat. He was adamant that by catching ourselves every time we use that conversational crutch, we can consciously train ourselves to avoid it.

http://n.pr/eoFauX

Should you use myriad or myriad of? Actually, either is fine. Here's what David Foster Wallace had to say about the question in his commentary for the Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus: "[A]ny reader who's bugged by a myriad of is both persnickety and wrong--and you can usually rebut sniffy teachers, copyeditors, et. al. by directing them to Coleridge's 'Myriad myriads of lives teemed forth.'"

http://bit.ly/bSX35G

What happens when you throw a yellow rock into a purple stream? It splashes. (Ba-dump-bum.) Grant and Martha share this and other favorite riddles, some with deceptively obvious answers.

Why do we pronounce bury like berry and not jury? The word originates in the Old English term byrgan, and the pronunciation apparently evolved differently in different parts of England. Grant explains why many terms go mispronounced if we read things without hearing them out loud.

What do you say when you answer the telephone? On the NPR science blog, "Krulwich Wonders," Robert Krulwich notes that hello did not become a standard greeting until the mid-19th Century, when the Edison Company recommended the word as a proper phone greeting. Before that, English speakers used a variety of phrases depending on the circumstance, from hail to how are you? One thing's certain: If we'd followed Alexander Graham Bell's recommendation, we'd all be greeting each other with "Ahoy!"

http://n.pr/gscLCA

A riddle, a riddle, I suppose, a thousand eyes and never a nose. Nothing shakes up the dinner table conversation like a good potato riddle!

Greg Pliska, musical director for the Broadway show War Horse and our very own Quiz Guy, has a puzzle about Animal Hybrid Phrases combining two common expressions involving animals. For example, what do you get when stuffed animal stocks go down? A Teddy Bear Market.

Here's a link to Greg's musical bio on the Lincoln Center website:

http://bit.ly/gt9h84

Ever had golden catheads for breakfast? A native of Tennessee wonders about the origin of this term meaning "biscuit"--specifically, ones that are light, fluffy, and about the size of, well, a cat's head. Martha explains how the names of many foods derive from their resemblance to other things--a head of cabbage, for example.

A listener has spent the last 30 years looking for the origin of the playful phrase "you're the berries." This affectionate expression first appears in literature in the 1908 book Sorrows of a Showgirl, then made its way into popular slang by the 1920s. However, it seems to disappear during the next decade, and it remains only as a relic heard in the vernacular of those who lived during the era.

http://bit.ly/gyF9TV

Should we use try and or try to? Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage says it's grammatically permissible to try and go to the store, or to ask someone to try and speak up. However, a fan of formality ought to stick with try to. Still, Grant warns against trying to force logic on the English language by creating rules that don't exist.

http://bit.ly/cQrxPx

http://bit.ly/eydxnN

Whoever makes it tells it not. Whoever takes it knows it not. Whoever knows it wants it not. What is it? Martha shares this old riddle.

The question of how children acquire language has long intrigued parents and scholars.  MIT cognitive scientist Deb Roy recently found a novel way to study what he calls "word birth."  He wired his home with cameras and microphones, and recorded his infant son's every utterance as he grew into toddlerhood. He then combined the 90,000 hours of video and 140,000 hours of audio into some astonishing montages. Dr. Roy shared his findings at a TED conference.

http://bit.ly/eaKVBS

More visuals and audio from the study in this article from Fast Company:

http://bit.ly/hOOf3Z

If you're fair to middling, you're doing just fine. A native of the Tennessee mountains wonders about the origin of this phrase her good-humored grandfather used. As it turns out, fair to middling was one of the many gradations a farmer would hear in the 19th Century when they'd bring in their crop--usually cotton-- to be priced and purchased.

Is the phrase whether or not redundant? Well, take this sentence: "Whether or not you like it, Martha is dressing as a ballerina." Would that sound right without the or not? Now, the or not is technically redundant, but depending on the case, it's best to pick the wording that won’t distract the reader or listener.

http://bit.ly/91hA3J

Only the grass dies when elephants fight. This Liberian proverb is a reminder that it's the powerless who suffer when governments or factions fight.

If Sam and them are going to be here after while, can the "and them" mean just one additional person? In some parts of the country, it could be Sam's wife, or Sam's entire softball team. A listener from Texas shares this charming colloquialism.

What goes 99, clump? If you woke up at night and scratched your head, what time would it be? Grant has the answers to those riddles.

What happens when you throw a yellow rock into a purple stream? It splashes. (Ba-dump-bum.) Grant and Martha share this and other favorite riddles, some with deceptively obvious answers.

Why do we pronounce bury like berry and not jury? The word originates in the Old English term byrgan, and the pronunciation apparently evolved differently in different parts of England. Grant explains why many terms go mispronounced if we read things without hearing them out loud.

What do you say when you answer the telephone? On the NPR science blog, "Krulwich Wonders," Robert Krulwich notes that hello did not become a standard greeting until the mid-19th Century, when the Edison Company recommended the word as a proper phone greeting. Before that, English speakers used a variety of phrases depending on the circumstance, from hail to how are you? One thing's certain: If we'd followed Alexander Graham Bell's recommendation, we'd all be greeting each other with "Ahoy!"

http://n.pr/gscLCA

A riddle, a riddle, I suppose, a thousand eyes and never a nose. Nothing shakes up the dinner table conversation like a good potato riddle!

Greg Pliska, musical director for the Broadway show War Horse and our very own Quiz Guy, has a puzzle about Animal Hybrid Phrases combining two common expressions involving animals. For example, what do you get when stuffed animal stocks go down? A Teddy Bear Market.

Here's a link to Greg's musical bio on the Lincoln Center website:

http://bit.ly/gt9h84

Ever had golden catheads for breakfast? A native of Tennessee wonders about the origin of this term meaning "biscuit"--specifically, ones that are light, fluffy, and about the size of, well, a cat's head. Martha explains how the names of many foods derive from their resemblance to other things--a head of cabbage, for example.

A listener has spent the last 30 years looking for the origin of the playful phrase "you're the berries." This affectionate expression first appears in literature in the 1908 book Sorrows of a Showgirl, then made its way into popular slang by the 1920s. However, it seems to disappear during the next decade, and it remains only as a relic heard in the vernacular of those who lived during the era.

http://bit.ly/gyF9TV

Should we use try and or try to? Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage says it's grammatically permissible to try and go to the store, or to ask someone to try and speak up. However, a fan of formality ought to stick with try to. Still, Grant warns against trying to force logic on the English language by creating rules that don't exist.

http://bit.ly/cQrxPx

http://bit.ly/eydxnN

Whoever makes it tells it not. Whoever takes it knows it not. Whoever knows it wants it not. What is it? Martha shares this old riddle.

The question of how children acquire language has long intrigued parents and scholars.  MIT cognitive scientist Deb Roy recently found a novel way to study what he calls "word birth."  He wired his home with cameras and microphones, and recorded his infant son's every utterance as he grew into toddlerhood. He then combined the 90,000 hours of video and 140,000 hours of audio into some astonishing montages. Dr. Roy shared his findings at a TED conference.

http://bit.ly/eaKVBS

More visuals and audio from the study in this article from Fast Company:

http://bit.ly/hOOf3Z

If you're fair to middling, you're doing just fine. A native of the Tennessee mountains wonders about the origin of this phrase her good-humored grandfather used. As it turns out, fair to middling was one of the many gradations a farmer would hear in the 19th Century when they'd bring in their crop--usually cotton-- to be priced and purchased.

Is the phrase whether or not redundant? Well, take this sentence: "Whether or not you like it, Martha is dressing as a ballerina." Would that sound right without the or not? Now, the or not is technically redundant, but depending on the case, it's best to pick the wording that won’t distract the reader or listener.

http://bit.ly/91hA3J

Only the grass dies when elephants fight. This Liberian proverb is a reminder that it's the powerless who suffer when governments or factions fight.

If Sam and them are going to be here after while, can the "and them" mean just one additional person? In some parts of the country, it could be Sam's wife, or Sam's entire softball team. A listener from Texas shares this charming colloquialism.

What goes 99, clump? If you woke up at night and scratched your head, what time would it be? Grant has the answers to those riddles.

Writers always seem to come up with brilliant quotes about writing, and why shouldn't they? Douglas Adams has noted, "I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." And Gloria Steinem once quipped: "I do not like to write. I like to have written."
 
What's the difference between hand grenades and pomegranates? Not much when you think about their shape and the fact that they're both packed tightly with small things, which is why both share a linguistic root with the word granular.

http://www.altalang.com/beyond-words/2009/07/13/pomegranates-and-hand-grenades/

Grant offers examples from his latest Words of the Year list, including Crankshaft (the code name for the Osama Bin Laden), and basketbrawl, referring to the fight that broke out between the Georgetown Hoyas and the Chinese National Team.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ClAM3zXx-I
 
Football, like most sports, brings its own set of idioms and jargon that ride the line between cleverness and cliche. The adjective multiple describes a player, an offense or defense, or even a whole team that has multiple threats or talents. And a pick six, one of the more exciting plays in football, is when a player makes an interception and scores a touchdown. For a more erudite take on the language of sports, David Foster Wallace's "Roger Federer as Religious Experience" never fails.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2011/10/writing-the-beautiful-game.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/20/sports/playmagazine/20federer.html?pagewanted=all

Writers will appreciate this quotation from Burton Roscoe: "What no wife of a writer can understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of a window."

Our Quiz Guy John Chaneski offers a quiz called Take-Offs. For each clue, remove the first letter of a word to get the second (or third) word in the puzzle. For example, in the first chapter of Moby Dick, Ishmael had to screw up his courage and join the crew. Or, I've been in the barber chair for an hour, my hair looks great, but it's time to come up for air. Be sure to check out John's new NPR show, Ask Me Another.

http://twitter.com/#!/NPRAskMeAnother
http://www.facebook.com/pages/NPRs-Ask-Me-Another/263283727044159

What is an earwig? Those skinny brown insects with pinchers coming out their backsides have a reputation in folklore for crawling through people's ears and laying eggs in their skull. But really, earwigs are just simple insects that take their name from the Old English term wicga, meaning "insect." The males do have one interesting anatomical feature, though.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg17223183.200-lucky-earwigs-are-doubly-endowed.html

A professional auctioneer shares some techniques for creating his mesmerizing, melodious patter. He explains that auctioneers are known as colonels, because colonels in the civil war were assigned with auctioning off captured property. And he warns to beware of so-called chandelier bidding. His final tip: Remember, at an auction, it's cheaper to kiss somebody than to wave at them!
 
The 2011 Words of the Year list wouldn't be complete without occupy, as in the Occupy protests that sprang up in Manhattan's Zuccotti Park and elsewhere. And Zuccotti Lung? It's an illness that made its rounds among the camped-out protesters.

Have you ever been faced with a defugalty? This ironic misspelling and mispronunciation of difficulty popped up in a Dashiell Hammett novel, The Glass Key, in 1931. It's often said with a tongue in the cheek, but, as in the case of the Hammett novel, it refers to the mispronunciations of the uncouth or uneducated.

http://www.languagehat.com/archives/000630.php

Is the term ladies an offensive way to refer to a group of women? As a recent discussion on Ask Metafilter revealed, many interpret it as outdated, condescending, or patronizing. The hosts conclude it all depends on context.

http://ask.metafilter.com/200453/Why-are-some-women-offended-by-the-term-ladies

What does cheeky mean? How about the words twee and naff? A British ex-pat says she finds it hard to convey the nuances of these adjectives to her American friends.

What's Lady Macbeth talking about when she urges Macbeth to "screw your courage to the sticking point"? This image of mustering up bravery most likely has to do with tightening the strings of a crossbow.

If your iPhone's Siri thinks that two meetings in one day is not bad, does that make her an optimist? And by the way, since when did cellphones start making value judgments?

Nobody likes a humblebrag. That's when someone complains about, say, having to choose among their dozen college acceptance letters. Harris Wittles, a writer on television's Parks and Recreation, runs the Twitter handle @Humblebrag, where he retweets those ironic complaints akin to Arianna Huffington's tweet: "About to take off from Milan to Istanbul and none of my three blackberries are working."

https://twitter.com/#!/Humblebrag

Is that a winklehawk in your pants? A listener shares this word for those L-shaped rips in your trousers, from an old Dutch term for "a carpenter's L-shaped tool." And Grant has a new favorite term, motherwit, meaning "the natural ability to cope with everyday life." You could say a mark of wisdom is showing some motherwit in the face of life's winklehawks.

Ever heard a school bus called a school hack? Grant and Martha explain the etymology of hack, beginning with hackney horses in England, then referring to the drivers of the horse-drawn carriages, then the carriages themselves, and finally the automobiles that replaced them. A museum in Richmond, Indiana, has a vintage yellow school hack, once used in the 19th and early 20th centuries to bring rural children to their schoolhouse. Incidentally, the contemporary term hack, meaning a tired old journalist, comes directly from the original term for the tired old horse.

http://bit.ly/mfS08T

O heavy lightness! Serious vanity! Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms! A listener senses something awfully good about oxymorons, from the Greek for "pointedly foolish". Grant shares this favorite example from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, while Martha picks a modern classic: airline food. What are your favorites?

In the U.K., they don't count their seconds as one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi, because, well, they have no Mississippi. Instead, they say one-elephant, two-elephant. Lynne Murphy, author of the blog Separated by a Common Language, points out this difference between English speakers on opposite sides of the pond.

http://bit.ly/pZxYG

Our Quiz Guy Greg Pliska has a game called Welded Palindromes, with two-word phrases spelled the same forwards and backwards. What do you call your first appearance on TV? A tube debut. What kind of beer does a king drink? Why, a regal lager, of course.

A listener wonders about the origin of the phrase your father's mustache, akin to the phrase go jump in a lake, or your mamma wears combat boots. Grant explains that it may sound more familiar as your fadda's mustache, circa 1930s, Brooklyn. The borough's own jazz musician Woody Herman had a hit song in 1945 called Your Father's Mustache, but those in the know pronounced it "FAH-dah."

http://bit.ly/lCbNwL

A listener named Meagan from Wisconsin uses the term flustrated, combining flustered and frustrated--one of many mashed together words she deems Meaganisms. Though Grant applauds her innovation and creativity, Martha points out that flustrate actually does pop up in English texts as far back as the 18th Century. Though dictionaries with entries for flustrate note that it's usually a jocular term, a conversation could always use more Meaganisms.

Grant gives Martha a little Greek test with the word leucomelanous. Leuco, meaning "white," and melano, meaning "black," together refer to someone with a fair complexion and dark hair, like Snow White or Veronica from the Archie comics.

How do you say "not my problem"? A listener shares his go-to: Not my pig, not my farm. It means the same thing as I don't have a horse in that race, or I don't have a dog in that fight. Douglas Adams, in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, created the SEP Field, or the Somebody Else's Problem field. Though examples are boundless, there doesn't seem to be a standard or definite origin.

http://douglasadams.com/

A cowboy loves a ranch that's pecorous, meaning abundant with cattle. Just something worth knowing.

There's an old joke running around that goes as follows, "Lost: Bald, one-eyed ginger Tom, crippled in both back legs, recently castrated, answers to the name of 'Lucky.'" Nigel Rees of The Quote Unquote Newsletter has been tracking down this oft-quoted joke, and so far he's found it as far back as 1969. On another front, Fred Shapiro of the Yale Book of Quotations has made progress in tracing the origins of famous quotes, often to people other than those who made them famous. And the folks at quoteinvestigator.com are doing their share in researching the history of those quips and aphorisms that do so much to frame our essays and speeches.

http://bit.ly/dgveSD

http://bit.ly/lz1qRp

http://bit.ly/8nWlvi

A violin maker wonders about the origin of a practice in his trade known as purfling, where a black and white line is inlaid into a tiny channel along the edge of the instrument. Martha traces the word back to the Latin filum, meaning "line" or "thread." Purfling is also a practice in guitar-making, furniture-making, and embroidery, and it shares an etymological root with profile. A fun fact: purfling is also just "profiling" said with a mouth full of marshmallows.

When someone admiringly called a woman "outspoken," Dorothy Parker is said to have cynically replied, "Outspoken by whom?" Well, according to quoteinvestigator.com, the line pre-dates Parker's quip.
    
Why do we call our biceps guns? The slang lexicographer Jonathon Green suggests that the metaphor first pops up in baseball around the 1920s, when players referred to their throwing arms as guns. Believe it or not, the early baseball pitchers actually threw the ball intending for the batter to hit it. It wasn't until later that a strong arm, or gun, was needed to throw a pitch too fast to hit.

A listener shares a Russian saying that translates I am going there where the Tsar goes on foot, meaning "I am going to the bathroom." It's the equivalent of we all put our pants on one leg at a time, or we're all just human.

Who you calling a jabronie? And what exactly is a jabronie? Grant traces this playful insult, meaning a "rube" or "loser," to the 1920s, when Italian immigrants brought over a similar-sounding Milanese term for "ham." Jabronie is also commonly used in professional wrestling, referring to those guys set up to lose to the superstars.
 
A decade is ten years. A century is a hundred. But what do you call a period of five years? It's a lustrum, borrowed whole from Latin. So you might say a decade is two lustra.

What do you call those plastic shopping bags that litter the street? Some know them as witches' britches or witches' knickers. Others prefer urban tumbleweeds. In American Beauty, Ricky Fitts famously called one the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen. Either way, despite the effort to introduce reusable bags, the plastic variety continues to build up. Lori Robinson of Santa Barbara has even gone so far as to collect them from Tanzanian villages and distribute the more sustainable variety.

http://animprobablelife.com/2011/11/26/lori-robinson-bag-project-africa/

http://africainside.org/favorite-charities/one-wordplastics/

A clumsy person may be known as a bull in a china shop or a bull in a china closet. The former came into use first, in the early 1800s, but a bull in china closet is all the more evocative.  Plus, according to the MythBusters, a bull in a china shop is surprisingly nimble.

http://dsc.discovery.com/fansites/mythbusters/db/animals/bull-china-shop-cause-dish-carnage.html

When did the expression to have a crush on someone come into use? The television series Downton Abbey has dropped this and other fun bits of language, but no need to worry about its historical accuracy- crush has been around since the early 1880s. To mash on someone or crash on someone are idioms in the same vein, and may derive from the idea of an emotional collision between two prospective flames.

As they say in Wasika, Minnesota, "If I don't see you in the future, I'll see you in the pasture."

Our Quiz Guy John Chaneski has a new game entitled The Secrets of Nym. In AA, d.e.n.i.a.l. is said to stand for don't even notice I am lying, which is a backronym. An acoustic guitar could be considered a retronym. And an editor named Daily is an example of an aptronym.

When someone finds out where you're from, do they ask if you know so-and-so? The cynics out there may refer to this as the six degrees of stupid, but even urban dwellers can admit that the answer is yes more often than the odds would suggest. How do you respond in those cases, and is there a term for those questions?

The Spanish equivalent of our bull in a china shop analogy translates to "like an elephant in a pottery store."

Where does the meme like a boss come from? The original boss may be the rapper Slim Thug, whose 2005 track "Like A Boss", from the album Already Platinum (which never went platinum), lists the myriad tasks he performs like a boss (e.g. "When I floss/ like a boss"). In 2009, Andy Samberg of SNL and The Lonely Island made a video entitled "Like A Boss" featuring Seth Rogen, which describes further boss-like activities (e.g. "promote synergy/ like a boss").

A book of similes from the 1800s contains such gems as it's easy as peeling a hardboiled egg and it's as hard to shave as an egg.

Does evidence-based have a hyphen? Why, yes it does, because evidence-based often functions as an adjective. While style guides indicate that we're continuing to drop hyphens, evidence-based is an important one to keep intact, even when used after the verb (e.g. the research is evidence-based).
 
Here's another great simile: large as life and twice as natural. As in, did you really see Elvis? Yep, he was large as life and twice as natural.

It's been a puzzler tracking the origin of the saying good night, sleep tight, see you on the big drum. Perhaps it's an innocent mixup that takes from the Robert Burns poem "Tam o' Shanter", which reads, good night, sleep tight, I'll see you on the Brigadoon.

http://www.waywordradio.org/kit-caboodle/

http://www.robertburns.org.uk/Assets/Poems_Songs/tamoshanter.htm
 
You'd better behave, or I'll knock you from an amazing grace to a floating opportunity! This African-American saying, used as a motherly warning, first popped up in the 1930 play Mule Bone by Langston Hughes.

Infra dig, short for the Latin phrase infra dignitatum, means beneath one's dignity, or uncouth. Abbreviated Latin phrases like infra dig have become standard after old English schoolboys used to shorten them while studying classical texts.

Here are some easy similes: easy as winking, or easy as breathing. If you prefer a tough one, try as difficult to grasp as a shadow.

We all know the idiom slow as molasses, but slow as Moses does just as well. After all, he spent 40 years trekking to the Promised Land, and even described himself as slow of speech and of tongue.

The 19th Century French writer Adolphe de Lamartine said that written language is like a mirror, which it is necessary to have in order that man know himself and be sure that he exists.

In their song "The Old Apartment," The Barenaked Ladies sang, "crooked landing/ crooked landlord/ narrow laneway filled with crooks. This is an example of a polyseme, or one word that has multiple meanings. Similar to this is the syllepsis, wherein one word is applied to other words in different senses (e.g. Alanis Morissette: "you held your breath and the door for me").

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ggJS0p-QQc

http://rhetoric.byu.edu/figures/S/syllepsis.htm
 
Here's one that's sure to lull a restless child into sleep: night night chicken butt ham head yoo hoo!

You know those words whose meanings never seem to stick in your mind, no matter how many times you flip back to the dictionary? Martha wrestles with the term atavistic, meaning "the tendency to revert to ancestral characteristics." She now remembers it by the Latin root it shares with the Spanish word for "grandfather," abuelo. Grant, in turn, shares his revelation that upwards of actually means "more than," not "up to."

A unicycle enthusiast wonders if his unicycle can be properly called a bike. To avoid the four-syllable mouthful, the unicycle community (yes, there is one) sometimes calls it a uni, but for the general public, the term "bike" works. Martha reveals that she once spent a summer teaching herself to ride a unicycle, and doesn't mind calling it a bike. Grant notes the general rule that once a word has left its etymological root, it can be used for whatever we need it for.

http://www.unicyclist.com/forums/showthread.php?t=88860

Rihanna's hit "Umbrella" may not have had the same ring if she'd referred to being "under my bumbershoot." Nonetheless, bumbershoot, bumberell, brolly and bumbersol, among others, are all playful alternatives to umbrella that even Mary Poppins would appreciate. Grant explains that bumbershoot, itself an American slang term, derives from the Latin umbra, meaning "shadow," and chute, as in "parachute."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjXKk3AbgH8&feature=related

http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-bum2.htm

Twitter's 140-character format has made way for a whole new brand of comedy writing. See Judah Friedlander: "More than one company should be allowed to sell Monopoly," or Stephen Colbert: "It doesn't always pay to get up early. If you're a worm, you just get eaten by that early bird. So sleep in, worms."

http://twitter.com/#!/JUDAHWORLDCHAMP

http://twitter.com/#!/stephenathome

In the mood for a word puzzle? Our Quiz Guy Greg Pliska has an app for that. This week's quiz features solutions starting with the letters app. Someone afraid to take care of the bug problem in their apartment doesn't want to "app-roach" them!

Is it worth using proper pronunciation if it makes you sound ignorant or misinformed? Contrary to the common understanding, the word forte is actually pronounced "fort." Grant describes forte as a skunked word; it's a losing situation no matter how you use it. For the sake of clarity and conversational flow, it's best instead to say that something is a "strength," a "strong suit," or is "in one's wheelhouse."

Do you ever spend your off-time doing something work related? This is known as a busman's holiday or a postman's holiday, as in the British understanding of holiday as a vacation or time off work. Research for a dictionary entry on postman's holiday led Grant to an old French ragtime song called "Le Facteur en Balade," or "The Postman on a Walk". In the proper sense, a postman's holiday might consist of a leisurely walk along the same route whereon he delivers the mail. Let's just hope it doesn't involve getting chased by dogs.

http://bit.ly/jruSKk

Some listeners are madly in love with oxymorons, and they continue to share their favorites. One listener has a great T-shirt that reads "An oxymoron a day keeps reality away." Another says his favorite oxymoron is "Dodge Ram."

A listener from Richmond, Virginia, remembers an old game called buckeye that consists of metaphorically pulling someone's leg, then calling Buckeye! and tugging one's own lower eyelid. Martha suggests that it may be related to a 19th-century use of buckeye that refers to "something or someone inferior," like a country bumpkin or a rube. Thus, calling "Buckeye!" may be  equivalent to calling someone a sucker for getting tricked, or punk'd. Still, any explanation for the eyelid exposure is still pending.

Grant is pleased as punch about BYU Professor Mark Davies' new Google Books Corpus, which contains entries for every word ever in the entire Google Books database. In addition to parts of speech and definitions, the site provides contextual examples for each word. For example, the database has revealed that the word suitcase is often preceded by the adjective battered. Writers, teachers, English learners and language enthusiasts will love prospecting in this lexical goldmine.

http://googlebooks.byu.edu/
 
Home again, home again, jiggity-jig! A listener wonders about the origin of this phrase her Mother often used. Grant and Martha trace it back to another mother: Mother Goose. The full line goes, "To market, to market, to buy a fat pig, home again, home again, jiggity-jig." It does not, contrary to a highly visited Google result, originate from the movie Blade Runner (though it's a cute scene nonetheless).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpK6GcViC88

Listeners have been sharing some of their personal Scrabble rules, including new uses for the blank tile. For example, one variation allows for the tile to be removed and reused, so if Grant were to play the blank tile as an "E" and Martha has an "E" in her tray, she can swap the tiles and then use the blank for her own play. Just be sure to use it, because nobody likes someone who bogarts the blank tile!

Downton Abbey, a program featured on Masterpiece Theater, provided a handful of colorful expressions that date surprisingly far back. Like it or lump it, meaning "deal with it," is found at least as early as 1830 and takes from the old verb lump meaning "to look sulky or disagreeable." Put that in your pipe and smoke it, a contemporary favorite meaning "Take that!" actually shows up around 1820. As for the phrase you're sailing perilously close to the wind, meaning "be careful not to overstep"--well, we haven't caught wind of the origin of that one.

Databases like the Google Books Corpus can also be used to follow text over time. For example, as the women's suffrage movement grew around 1910, words relating to women's rights grew in popularity and frequency of usage.

What came first, the color orange or the fruit? The original term is Sanskrit and refers to the fruit. As the fruit traveled west, the word came with it. Grant notes that, like the terms for parts of the body, the names of colors travel very well in language because we're constantly speaking and writing about them. The term "orange" became what it is in English after the fruit made it to the French town Orange.

Martha shares a quip that's all too true: "I don't find it hard to meet expenses. They're everywhere!"

What would you wear to an ABC party? Hint: the letters stand for "Anything But Clothes." Any guesses what you'd wear to a tight-and-bright party? Martha gives a taste of the college party terminology from a slang collection compiled by Penn State student Emily Grier.

http://bit.ly/qpxAB0

Are you left hanging by the invitation Do you want to come with?  A Milwaukee native is proud of this regionalism, which means "Do you want to come along?" Grant explains that it may derive from the German verb mitkommen, a single word that literally means to "come with."

If what you're going to say isn't more beautiful than silence, don't say it. Martha shares this proverb, translated from the original Arabic.

If you suffer from restless nights of tossing and turning, you may have a case of the mollycobwobbles. A listener shares this hand-me-down term from her grandmother. Grant explains she may well have combined two English terms dating about 150 years back: mulligrubs and collywobbles. The aptly named affliction usually consisted of the jitters, the shakes, or even the yips.

http://bit.ly/p4RNrX

That little basket that your strawberries and blueberries come in? It's called a punnet. Just so you know.

Quiz Guy Greg Pliska addles our brains with a puzzle called Odd Couples. See if you can figure out these strange celebrity pairings who share last names. "Anyone? Bueller, Bueller, Bueller" and "Bueller is Bueller is Bueller," for example, forms the odd couple of Ben and Gertrude Stein. And who else could hit home runs in the bedroom like Babe and Dr. Ruth?

Looking for something that curls your hair, cleans your teeth, and makes childbirth a pleasure? A listener's mother used that saying in reference to every miracle potion from WD-40 to vinegar. Grant explains that the first known version of this in print dates back to 1919 in Mrs. Lucretia Graves' Exits from the Pearly Gates, where the advertisements for opium-type substances had less cheek and more sincerity. Grant notes that Google Books has a wealth of examples of old ads that took the saying and used even more elaborate versions to promote everything from tequila to hypnosis.

http://bit.ly/p41EsZ

Is boughten a past tense form of to buy? Grant gives his blessing to its use in informal conversation, but when it comes to formal writing, the word you want is bought.

What are the college kids up to these days? Apparently, they're busy at darties, or "day parties." Martha shares this collegiate portmanteau from Emily Grier's list.

Can sentences end with a preposition? Yes! Grant assures a listener that all experts, including the most conservative of linguists and lexicographers, agree that a preposition as the last word in a sentence is something up with which we shall put.

http://bit.ly/dWii20

Tell your Mom the sterling silver stud above your lip isn't "that dumb thing." It's called a Monroe piercing, in honor of Marilyn's famed beauty mark.

Though the Spanish language, among others, has its quirks and foreignisms, the English language really can't be touched when it comes to complicated and irregular spelling. Thus, spelling bees are primarily an English-language phenomenon. Grant mentions a few "where are they now?" stories about past Scripps Bee winners. The common thread? If these kids had the discipline to compete in such a high-pressure event, they tend to carry those traits beyond the spelling arena and into their successes later in life.

http://abcn.ws/mlEtro

http://ti.me/oz9OjK

If something is mathematical, is it cool? According to a mother of two middle-schoolers, that's exactly what it's come to mean among the younger set. Then again, irony is also pretty hip. But could her kids be using a piece of ironic slang with confused sincerity? Ahh! Meta-irony! So cool!

http://bit.ly/n1V8Ff

If someone's balloon has lost its string, it means "they've come unmoored". Something unusual or odd has come about in their character. Patrice Evans used the illustration in his description of Tracy Morgan in an article for Grantland (no relation to our show's co-host).

http://es.pn/jyvuej

He thinks he's a wit, and he's half right. Though some might attribute the quote to Shakespeare, it's nowhere to be found in the concordances. Grant explains how many of these witticisms have been tumbled about by old newspaper columnists, humorists, and vaudeville performers. Though their origins are muddled, they're still a joy to hear and say.

So, can a sentence begin with the word so? Which ones? So is oftentimes used in place of therefore to conclude an explanation, but more people are using it as a general sentence-starter, in the same vein as well. Grant notes that while seemingly misused language may be grating to the ear, it's more productive not to peeve about it, but instead to record it and add it to the rest of the data we collect about our language. Ultimately, we learn about each other by doing so.

http://bit.ly/o2rtSQ

Martha shares a British article that begins, "Boffins have discovered a strange new type of spongy mushroom." But what, you may ask, is a boffin? The word boffin denotes an intellectual with a specific expertise and general lack of social aptitude. Grant adds anorak to the list of terms for nerds with minimal aptitude for cocktail-party conversations. Here's to you, boffins and anoraks!

http://bit.ly/iyly1W

....

Support for A Way with Words comes from National University, which invites you to change your future today. Learn more at nu.edu. http://nu.edu

We're also grateful for support from The University of San Diego. Since 1949, USD has been on a mission not only to prepare students for the world, but also to change it. Learn more about the college and five schools of this nationally ranked, independent Catholic university at sandiego.edu. http://sandiego.edu

What would you wear to an ABC party? Hint: the letters stand for "Anything But Clothes." Any guesses what you'd wear to a tight-and-bright party? Martha gives a taste of the college party terminology from a slang collection compiled by Penn State student Emily Grier.

http://bit.ly/qpxAB0

Are you left hanging by the invitation Do you want to come with?  A Milwaukee native is proud of this regionalism, which means "Do you want to come along?" Grant explains that it may derive from the German verb mitkommen, a single word that literally means to "come with."

If what you're going to say isn't more beautiful than silence, don't say it. Martha shares this proverb, translated from the original Arabic.

If you suffer from restless nights of tossing and turning, you may have a case of the mollycobwobbles. A listener shares this hand-me-down term from her grandmother. Grant explains she may well have combined two English terms dating about 150 years back: mulligrubs and collywobbles. The aptly named affliction usually consisted of the jitters, the shakes, or even the yips.

http://bit.ly/p4RNrX

That little basket that your strawberries and blueberries come in? It's called a punnet. Just so you know.

Quiz Guy Greg Pliska addles our brains with a puzzle called Odd Couples. See if you can figure out these strange celebrity pairings who share last names. "Anyone? Bueller, Bueller, Bueller" and "Bueller is Bueller is Bueller," for example, forms the odd couple of Ben and Gertrude Stein. And who else could hit home runs in the bedroom like Babe and Dr. Ruth?

Looking for something that curls your hair, cleans your teeth, and makes childbirth a pleasure? A listener's mother used that saying in reference to every miracle potion from WD-40 to vinegar. Grant explains that the first known version of this in print dates back to 1919 in Mrs. Lucretia Graves' Exits from the Pearly Gates, where the advertisements for opium-type substances had less cheek and more sincerity. Grant notes that Google Books has a wealth of examples of old ads that took the saying and used even more elaborate versions to promote everything from tequila to hypnosis.

http://bit.ly/p41EsZ

Is boughten a past tense form of to buy? Grant gives his blessing to its use in informal conversation, but when it comes to formal writing, the word you want is bought.

What are the college kids up to these days? Apparently, they're busy at darties, or "day parties." Martha shares this collegiate portmanteau from Emily Grier's list.

Can sentences end with a preposition? Yes! Grant assures a listener that all experts, including the most conservative of linguists and lexicographers, agree that a preposition as the last word in a sentence is something up with which we shall put.

http://bit.ly/dWii20

Tell your Mom the sterling silver stud above your lip isn't "that dumb thing." It's called a Monroe piercing, in honor of Marilyn's famed beauty mark.

Though the Spanish language, among others, has its quirks and foreignisms, the English language really can't be touched when it comes to complicated and irregular spelling. Thus, spelling bees are primarily an English-language phenomenon. Grant mentions a few "where are they now?" stories about past Scripps Bee winners. The common thread? If these kids had the discipline to compete in such a high-pressure event, they tend to carry those traits beyond the spelling arena and into their successes later in life.

http://abcn.ws/mlEtro

http://ti.me/oz9OjK

If something is mathematical, is it cool? According to a mother of two middle-schoolers, that's exactly what it's come to mean among the younger set. Then again, irony is also pretty hip. But could her kids be using a piece of ironic slang with confused sincerity? Ahh! Meta-irony! So cool!

http://bit.ly/n1V8Ff

If someone's balloon has lost its string, it means "they've come unmoored". Something unusual or odd has come about in their character. Patrice Evans used the illustration in his description of Tracy Morgan in an article for Grantland (no relation to our show's co-host).

http://es.pn/jyvuej

He thinks he's a wit, and he's half right. Though some might attribute the quote to Shakespeare, it's nowhere to be found in the concordances. Grant explains how many of these witticisms have been tumbled about by old newspaper columnists, humorists, and vaudeville performers. Though their origins are muddled, they're still a joy to hear and say.

So, can a sentence begin with the word so? Which ones? So is oftentimes used in place of therefore to conclude an explanation, but more people are using it as a general sentence-starter, in the same vein as well. Grant notes that while seemingly misused language may be grating to the ear, it's more productive not to peeve about it, but instead to record it and add it to the rest of the data we collect about our language. Ultimately, we learn about each other by doing so.

http://bit.ly/o2rtSQ

Martha shares a British article that begins, "Boffins have discovered a strange new type of spongy mushroom." But what, you may ask, is a boffin? The word boffin denotes an intellectual with a specific expertise and general lack of social aptitude. Grant adds anorak to the list of terms for nerds with minimal aptitude for cocktail-party conversations. Here's to you, boffins and anoraks!

http://bit.ly/iyly1W

....

Support for A Way with Words comes from National University, which invites you to change your future today. Learn more at nu.edu. http://nu.edu

We're also grateful for support from The University of San Diego. Since 1949, USD has been on a mission not only to prepare students for the world, but also to change it. Learn more about the college and five schools of this nationally ranked, independent Catholic university at sandiego.edu. http://sandiego.edu

Hate it when a software upgrade is worse than the previous version? We call that a flupgrade, or a new-coke. As in, Skype really new-coked it with version 5.3.0. Come on, Skype!

What is a hooptie? Though it started in the 1960s as a term for a sweet new car, it became the common moniker for a beater, or a jalopy. Maybe Sir Mix-A-Lot said it best: "My hooptie rollin', tailpipe draggin'/ heat don't work, and my girl keeps nagging.'" 

http://bit.ly/1WCYn

If a lady is no better than she ought to be, her sexual morals may be in question. The saying, recently popularized by the BBC program Downton Abbey, is what's known as a charientism, or a bit of sugar-coated snark. By the way, if you'd like to hear more about such thinly veiled insults, check out this episode.

http://www.waywordradio.org/bless-your-heart/
 
If someone's in a swivet, they're flustered or in distress. You might be in a swivel, for example, if you're late for a meeting or you've shown up to the SAT without a No. 2 pencil.

Our Quiz Guy Greg Pliska has a game based on Google searches, or at least what Google thinks you're searching. For example, what do Elmo, pink, and plant all have in common? Google suggests them, in that order, after you've entered the words "tickle me."

Did the movie Avatar make you imagine creating an entirely new language, like Na'vi?  Conlang.org and the Language Creation Society have plenty of information on how to go about it and what others, including J.R.R. Tolkein have tried. Mark Rosenfelder's book, The Language Construction Kit, is a great resource for getting started.

http://tinyurl.com/yabd9br

http://bit.ly/7qxTuV

http://amzn.to/qES5lw

What does it mean to call for tender? This British phrase for soliciting a job is rarely seen in the United States, though tender, from the Latin for "to stretch or hold forth," is used in North America in two different senses: to tender, as in to offer, as well as the noun tender for something that's been issued, such as a dollar bill, hence legal tender.

What do you call an upgrade gone wrong? Perhaps the 'Puter Principle could be the software equivalent of the Peter Principle, which in business means that every employee in a hierarchy tends to rise to his or her level of incompetence.

If something's right on, it suits you to a tee. But why a tee? Tee, or the letter T, is short for tittle, or something really tiny. So if something's exactly perfect, it's right on point, with no room to spare. Or, simply, it suits you to a tee.

Why is pink a girl color and blue a boy color? Actually, in the 19th Century, pink used to be associated with boys, since it was a stronger, more decided color. Blue, on the other hand, was regarded as a girls' color, because it was considered dainty. It wasn't until the 1940s that marketers started to switch it around. Jeanne Maglaty has a great article about this in Smithsonian Magazine, called "When did Girls Start Wearing Pink?"

http://bit.ly/eDOeYg

To slake your thirst is to quench your thirst. But some people have been switching it to slate your thirst or other variants. It's a classic case of an eggcorn, or one of those words that people mishear, and then start pronouncing incorrectly; for example, when misheard, acorn can become eggcorn.

http://bit.ly/HG4m

What does it mean to gazump someone? This phrase, specifically meaning "to swindle a customer in a real estate deal," came about in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s before disappearing and then popping up again in England in the 1970s. Whether or not the term is in vogue, the practice seems to be a mainstay.

How do you indicate sarcasm in a text message or an email? If winky emoticons aren't your thing, try left-leaning italics, as recommended by sartalics.com.

http://bit.ly/reQ86l

The Arabic idiom in the apricot season translates to "in your dreams," presumably because the growing season for this fruit is so brief. Incidentally, the etymological root of "apricot," which means "to ripen early," is shared with the word precocious.

The Egyptian Arabic saying, ate the camel and all it carried, is the equivalent of "to eat someone out of house and home."

...

Support for A Way with Words comes from National University http://www.nu.edu/, which invites you to change your future today. More at nu.edu.

We’re also grateful for support from the University of San Diego http://www.sandiego.edu. Since 1949, USD has been on a mission not only to prepare students for the world, but also to change it. Learn more about the college and five schools of this nationally ranked, independent Catholic university at sandiego.edu.

Always remember: Martha never ever makes ornery noises in church. That is, of course, a mnemonic for the spelling of "mnemonic."

When would you give a pounding to someone in need? When you're talking about a community coming together to give staples such as canned goods to, say, a newly arrived family or a new bride and groom. The term pounding, also known as a pound party, derives from the early practice of bringing foodstuffs by the pound. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, author of "The Yearling," once wrote about a pound party, albeit one with a surprise ending.  http://books.google.com/books?id=ea_MLwfaoMwC&pg=PA48&dq=%22marjorie+kinnan+rawlings%22+pound+party&hl=en&sa=X&ei=C-bLT8P-D4fY2QWqqJ3aCw&ved=0CDwQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false

What slang do you use for "getting drunk"? Paul Dickson http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=113212271 has collected his share of terms for being drunk, as have, surprisingly enough, college students. How about slizzered, schwasted, or riding in the Tour de Franzia http://wesleyanargus.com/2012/04/09/administration-hopes-to-prevent-tour-de-franzia/?

If it's cold as all get-out, you'll probably want to get to someplace warmer. The "get-out" in this informal expression might refer to being out in front, as in "the winner of all cold days," or it could be a mashup of "Doesn't that beat all!" and "Get out!" It's just one of many terms we use to describe cold temperatures http://www.blindpigandtheacorn.com/blind_pig_the_acorn/2009/01/cold-as-whiz.html.

You don't want Dorothy Parker reviewing your novel -- at least not when she's dropping zingers like "This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly, it should be thrown with great force." Parker did have a way with words. How about this description of another birthday rolling around: "This wasn't just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible, it was terrible with raisins in it http://books.google.com/books?id=HMxxespYaHAC&pg=PA250&dq=dorothy+parker+terrible+with+raisins&hl=en&sa=X&ei=zu_LT5niIsfe2AWeoajaCw&ved=0CDwQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=dorothy%20parker%20terrible%20with%20raisins&f=false."

Our Quiz Guy John Chaneski has a game about words with a silent "e" and their "e"-sound counterparts. For example, a walking stick and someone good at judging situations might be a canny guy with a cane. Or a guy with a noble title playing with a bathtub water fowl would be a duke with a ducky.

A Tacoma, Wa., police report from 1946 is chock-full of showy slang, from the punk on the stem to the handle of the beefer. Read the whole thing here http://tacomastories.com/2005/05/20/cop-talk/.

Can a child adopted from a foreign country at the age of eight relearn her native language easily as an adult? It seems so. Terri Kit-fong Au's study http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2390909/ describes a group of Korean students in Australia who pick up Korean with ease.

What do you call the sign used in long division that looks a bit like an awning separating dividend and the divisor? How about a gazinta? As in, two gazinta four twice. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8S-a_jHxU74 Otherwise, you're stuck with boring terms like long division sign or division bracket.

Grant and Martha have summer reading suggestions. Grant's going through books by great women in show business—Tallulah Bankhead http://www.amazon.com/Tallulah-My-Autobiography-Southern-Icons/dp/1578066352, Mindy Kaling http://theconcernsofmindykaling.com/, and Tina Fey http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/04/books/bossypants-by-tina-fey-review.html. Martha finally got a Kindle, and is starting with Herman Melville's classic, Moby-Dick http://www.amazon.com/Moby-Dick-whale-ebook/dp/B002RKRU9A! A bit wary of tackling this leviathan of a novel? Nathaniel Philbrick http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2011/11/moby-dick-201111 makes an excellent case for why you ought to read Moby-Dick.

Do you call your cart at the grocery store a shopping cart, a shopping carriage, a grocery cart, or a buggy? The term buggy seems to be particularly widespread in the South. http://www4.uwm.edu/FLL/linguistics/dialect/staticmaps/q_75.html

What's a money cat? It's a regional term for "calico cat," and it's particularly common in Maine. The idea goes back to a bit of folklore that calicos bring you good luck.

To hox, or hocks, means to call dibs on something, as in "You better hox shotgun if you want to sit up front for the eight-hour drive to Grandma's!" http://www4.uwm.edu/FLL/linguistics/dialect/staticmaps/q_120.html

Here's a sly Southernism for Sundays: Each one of his sermons is better than the next.

What do you say when you're frustrated? There's always I'll be jumped up and down, bowlegged, and Johnny Busheart! Or For cryin' out loud and weepin' in public!

What does it mean to be lousy with, as in "She was lousy with diamonds"? Lousy comes from the English word louse, as in lice. To be lousy with means "to have lots of something."
....

Support for A Way with Words also comes from National University, which invites you to change your future today. More at http://www.nu.edu/.

We're also grateful for support from the University of San Diego. Since 1949, USD has been on a mission not only to prepare students for the world, but also to change it. Learn more about the college and five schools of this nationally ranked, independent Catholic university at http://sandiego.edu.

What do you call those little gray bugs that roll up into a ball? They go by lots of names: roly poly bugs, potato bugs, sow bugs, chiggypigs, dillo seeds, basketball bugs, bowling-ball bugs, and wood lice, to name a few.

If you're wondering why we capitalize the letter "I" when we don't capitalize the first letters of other pronouns, the answer's simple. It's easier to read. Martha recommends a book offering a detailed history of every letter of the alphabet. It's Language Visible: Unraveling the Mystery of the Alphabet from A to Z, by David Sacks.

http://www.alphabet-history.com/work1.htm

Why do auctioneers talk so fast? The hosts say it's partly to put you into a trance, partly to increase the sense of urgency, and partly to sell off lots of items in a short amount of time. More details in an article in Slate magazine. You can learn some of the basics of auctioneering from videos on YouTube.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2010/11/why_do_auctioneers_talk_like_that.html

http://www.aristocratservices.com/The_Auctioneers_Chant.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCr96VtvS80

Over on wordorigins.org, etymologist Dave Wilton is going through the Oxford English Dictionary year by year to find the earliest citations for various words, which offer an unusual linguistic glimpse into that particular year. The year 1937, for example, is the first in which we see the terms four-by-four, cliffhanger, and iffy.

http://www.wordorigins.org/index.php/more/1739/

Quiz Guy John Chaneski has a puzzle called "Double Dog Dare."

Why are book titles so incredibly long these days? A caller complains about book title inflation, usually consisting of a shorter title, followed by a colon and a longer subtitle that seems to sound important and ends with the words "and What To Do About It." Grant explains that such extra-long book titles are one form of search optimization by publishers and marketing departments. The more searchable keywords in the title, the more copies sold.

Which is correct: different from or different than. Martha explains that the grammatically correct choice is almost always different from.

Martha plays another round of the Books With A Letter Missing game.

http://www.waywordradio.org/missing-letter/

A caller in Hamburg, Germany wants to know where we got the term laundry list. Grant explains that it derives from a time when people of a certain class sent their laundry out to be cleaned. It's usually associated with a collection of things that are routine or involve drudgery or something negative. Funny how no one ever offers a laundry list of compliments.

More words that entered the language around 1937: spam, telecast, and oops.

http://www.wordorigins.org/index.php/more/1739/

The Phantom Tollbooth, the beloved children's book by Norman Juster and illustrated by Jules Feiffer, turns 50 this year. There are two new 50th anniversary editions of the book. As Adam Gopnik notes in a New Yorker magazine article, the book is the closest thing American literature has to Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/10/17/111017fa_fact_gopnik#ixzz1bCiS90OL

Martha shares her favorite passage from the book, a description of various kinds of silence.

http://books.google.com/books?id=T_0EtTjFHRIC&pg=PA152&dq=phantom+tollbooth+silence++or,+most+beautiful+of+all.+the+moment+utter+the+door+closes+and+you're+all+alone+in+the+whole+house?&hl=en&ei=NeCuTsa_GumYiQKliPGLCw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CC0Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=phantom%20tollbooth%20silence%20%20or%2C%20most%20beautiful%20of%20all.%20&f=false

Care for another helping of sonker? That's another name for deep-dish cobbler.
 
http://homepage.mac.com/ezzellk/Recipes/Pies/North_Carolina_Sonker-1550.html

There's a Sonker Festival each year in Surry County, North Carolina, one of the few places where you'll hear this regional term.

http://www.verysurry.com/blog/sonker-festival-2011/

More words that entered the lexicon around 1937: Yiddish bupkes, meaning "nothing," and "zaftig" meaning "plump," "soft," or "juicy."

What does the term suss out mean? It's often heard in police and journalistic jargon, and means to "take a forensic approach to finding out an answer." It probably derives from the verb "suspect."

Quisquillious describes something that's trashy or worthless. It derives from the Latin for "rubbish."

In the movie Avatar, the characters battle over a rare and valuable mineral called unobtanium. A mechanical engineer says he had a hard time getting into the movie because in his world, the word unobtanium means something different.

Martha quotes Steve Martin's aphorism about language: "Some people have a way with words. Some people not have way."

Does your vocabulary mark you as old or outdated? Certain words really indicate generational gaps, like chronological shibboleths. For example, are thongs "sandals" or "panties"? And what do women carry around--a pocketbook, a purse, or a bag? Your answer likely depends on when you were born.

At what point is it inappropriate for parents to use the slang of their offspring? Can you call your son dude, or give your kids a beatdown in Scrabble? Living with children makes for a slang-filled home, so it becomes part of your regular speech. So long as your children aren't mortified, the hosts say, go for it.

Who is Yehudi, and what exactly does he do? In the 1930s on Bob Hope's radio show, there was a musical guest named Yehudi Menuhin. His name proved so catchy, along with sidekick Jerry Colonna's joking phrase, "Who's Yehudi?" that it entered the common vernacular, coming to refer to anyone, or anything, mysterious. Yehudi is, for example, the little man that turns on the light inside the refrigerator. He holds up strapless dresses. The Navy even had a secret project named Project Yehudi.

Charles Hodgson's Carnal Knowledge: A Naval Gazer's Dictionary of Anatomy is chock-full of great terms. It's best to keep the lipstick within the vermillion border, or that line where the lips meet the skin. And be careful when applying around the wick, or the corner of the mouth.

http://www.amazon.com/Carnal-Knowledge-Dictionary-Anatomy-Etymology/dp/B004E3XEJ8

Our Quizmaster John Chaneski has a puzzle based on clues with everything but the but. For example, when likening someone to a house, we say the lights are on, but nobody's home. Or regarding a noisy political contest, it's all over but the shouting.

If someone's being a bit lazy, or just moseying aimlessly, we say they're putzing around. But the word put derives from the Yiddish for "penis." Plenty of Yiddish words have made their way into the common vernacular, especially in the Northeast. But before you open your mouth, it's important to be mindful of context and whom you're speaking to.

A physician wants to know: Is it politically correct to use the phrase illegal alien? The Society of Professional Journalists have decided, collectively, to use illegal immigrant. But even words like illegal or undocumented can often be inaccurate. If, for example, doctors are talking about a patient, they want to recognize the patient as an individual person, not a statistic.

http://www.mediabistro.com/fishbowlla/society-of-professional-journalists-votes-to-end-use-of-term-illegal-alien_b40464

Speaking of those generational divides, did you know that Post-It notes haven't always been around? Martha shares a listener's funny email about that.
 
If you're having a tough time finding something, remember that even a blind pig can find an acorn once in a while. This encouraging idiom actually comes from Ancient Rome, where the concept of a blind animal turning something up lent itself to the Latin saying that a blind dove sometimes finds a pea. An 18th-century Friedrich Schiller play employed the blind-pig-and-acorn version, and the play's translation into English and French brought it into modern speech.

What event in life introduced you to a whole new vocabulary? Going away to college, having a child, renovating a home, or even getting diagnosed with a medical condition  often exposes us to huge bundles of new words. If you're renovating a house for example, suddenly a whole slew of new words muscles its way into your vocabulary, such as backsplash, shoe moulding, quarter-sawn oak, sconce, grout, and bullnose.

What does out of pocket mean? The answer actually splits down racial lines. Among many African-Americans, if someone's out of pocket, they're out of line or unruly. For most Caucasian speakers, out of pocket is primarily used in business settings, meaning that someone is either unavailable or out of the office, or they're paying for something with personal money, rather than charging it to a company.

What do you call those slobber marks that dogs leave on the inside of car windows? Some of our favorites are woofmarks, dog schmear, and snot kisses.

Is your name a conversation piece? A listener by the name of H. Christian Blood shares his story growing up with a colorful name. And for those of you with a comment to make, Christian Blood would remind you that he's heard plenty of it over the years, so unless it's really something sharp and original, it's best not to waste your breath. And yes, his name is for real.

http://www.scu.edu/cas/classics/faculty/blood.cfm?p=4834

What crawled over your liver? This Pennsylvania Dutch idiom means "What's the matter with you?"

If someone's getting long in the tooth, it means they're getting old, or too old for their behavior. The metaphor of long teeth comes from horses. If you look at a horse's teeth and the extent to which their gums have receded, you can tell pretty accurately how old they are. It's the same source as that old advice Don't look a gift horse in the mouth, which means "if someone gives you a gift, don't inspect it too closely."

What's your favorite -ology? Perhaps alethiology, the study of truth, from the Greek alethia? Theologians might concern themselves with naology, the study of holy buildings.

http://phrontistery.info/sciences.html

What are JoJo potatoes? Starting in the 1960s, fried potato wedges came to be known as JoJos, especially in the Northern states. JoJos were often served in restaurants that also made Flavor-Crisp Chicken, which requires a special type of deep fat fryer. JoJos are simply unpeeled potato wedges thrown in the fryer, but the name may derive from the idea of "junk," because the potato scraps were considered worthless until restaurateurs realized they could be marketed and sold.

http://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/jo_jo_potatoes_jojo_potatoes/

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=563558

We'll keep this short: Perissology is the superfluity of words.

Why is colonel pronounced like "kernel"? The original form comes from Italy, where a colonello was in charge of a column of soldiers. As it moved from Italian to French, it took on an r sound, but the English translators reverted to the more etymologically correct Italian spelling. That's why it looks one way but sounds another.

What do you get when you mix a Shelty and a Cocker? A Shocker! Or how about a Dachshund and a Border Collie? That'd make it a Dashboard. We don't want to know what you'd call a cross between a Pit Bull and Shih Tzu.

Hope you've been checking the headlines, because our Quiz Guy John Chaneski has a new set of current event limericks. What's been "occupied?" How long did the Kardashian marriage last? And who made ambiguous the definition of the word "winning"?

A thick blanket or stack of blankets is also called a pallet. The Dictionary of American Regional English says this term is most common in the South Midlands--such states as Tennessee, Kentucky, and Missouri. In the New American Standard Translation of the Bible (John 5:8) Jesus says to a man who's been incapacitated for nearly 40 years, "pick up your pallet and walk." The term actually comes from French, where a pallet was a thick, woven mat of hay to lie on.

The usage of the word me vs. I will always be a point of debate. Grant and Martha contend that language works in the service of culture, and thus, there will always be informal settings where the words me and I are slung around interchangeably. Then again, there will also be classrooms, job interviews and the like, where my colleague and I completed the project is the better choice than me and my colleague completed the project.

Aesthetes might go for kalology, or "the study of beauty."

What's the difference between a turnpike and a highway? In the 1700s, privately funded roads were constructed in the Northeast to connect commercial centers, but tolls were charged in order to pay for the wood planks that covered the road; this was well before gravel or pavement came about. A turnpike itself is the bar on a turnstile, much like you'd see in a subway station or an amusement park; one pays the toll, then moves through the turnpike. On the other hand, freeways were the dirt roads that didn't require a toll.

Anatomy is full of eponyms--that is, names inspired by the name of a person. In this case, there are the fallopian tubes, the Achilles heel, and the eustachian tubes. But there's a movement in anatomy to replace eponyms with more scientific, descriptive names. Thus, fallopian tubes are now uterine tubes, and eustachian tubes are auditory tubes.

The Spanglish term frajo, meaning "cigarette," evolved over a couple of generations of Mexican-American language. Primarily thanks to Pachucos, sometimes known as Zoot Suiters, the term developed from the verb fajar, meaning "to wrap up or roll."

A flock of starlings is called a murmuration, and a beautiful video of a murmuration of starlings flying about has been described by Martha as "nature's ornithological lava lamp."

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/11/starling-flock/

If you're looking for a clever way to straddle the glass-half-empty line, try using litotes, or understated slights turned positive. For example, the guy you met for a blind date was really not unattractive.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/glossary-term/Litotes

If you're into fungus among us, you might enjoy uredinology, the study of rust molds.

Why do we refer to people of questionable sanity as nuts, nutty, or nut-cases? In the early 1600s, a nut was considered something "pleasing" or "delightful." Its meaning then transferred to someone who liked something pleasing, and then someone obsessed with that thing to the point of eccentricity or weirdness.
 
Zymology? That's the study of joining or fastening.

Martha and Grant share some favorite unusual words. Omphaloskepsis is a fancy term for "navel-gazing," from the Greek omphalos, meaning "navel." The other is mumbleteenth, a handy substitute when a number is too embarrassing to mention, as in, "Socrates the omphaloskeptic questioned himself for the mumbleteenth time."   

Double-talk, or doublespeak, is a form of gibberish that involves adding "ib" or other syllables to existing words. This sort of wordplay may have originated among criminals using double-talk to communicate on the sly. 

You say pee-KAHN, I say PEE-can. Just how do you pronounce the name of the nut called a pecan? Actually, there are several correct pronunciations.

Window-shopping became popular pastime along New York's 5th Avenue back in the days when stores closed at 5 p.m. Passersby would stroll past, gazing at the window displays without intending to purchase anything. The French term for "window shopping," lecher les vitrines, literally translates as "window-licking."

The word plangent, which means "loud" and sometimes has a melancholy ring to it, is an apt descriptor for movie soundtracks.

Our Quiz Guy John Chaneski revives a classic game of word reversals called Get Back. What palindromic advice would you give to someone who ought to stay away from baked goods? How about shun buns? If, on the other hand, you've highlighted the pastries, then you've stressed desserts.

The word silly didn't always have its modern meaning. In the 1400s, silly meant happy or blessed. Eventually, silly came to mean weak or in need of protection. Other seemingly simple words have shifted meanings as the English language developed: the term girl used to denote either a boy or a girl, and the word nice once meant ignorant.

Is there an English language authority like the Royal Academy in Spain or the Academie Francaise? Dictionaries often have usage panels made up of expert linguists, but English is widely agreed to be a constantly shifting language. Even in France and Spain, the common vernacular often doesn't follow that of the authorities.

How do double rainbows form? Scientists at UCSD have explained that extra-large droplets, known as burgeroids because of their burger-like shape, have the effect of creating a double rainbow. Burgeroids, all the way!

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/12/science-shot-burgeroids-cause-do.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQSNhk5ICTI

The word bummer originates from the German bummler, meaning "loafer," as in a lazy person. In English, the word bum had a similar meaning, and by the late 1960s, phrases like bum deal or bum wrap lent themselves to the elongated bummer, referring to something that's disheartening or disappointing.

Many in the South know a pallet to be a stack of blankets or a makeshift bed. The classic blues song "Make Me a Pallet on Your Floor" gives a perfect illustration.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39RBm4tH9cA

The I vs. me grammatical rule isn't hard to remember. Just leave the other person out of the sentence. You wouldn't say me am going to a movie or Dad took I to a movie.

What's the difference between empathic and empathetic? Empathic is actually an older word, meaning that one has empathy for another, but the two are near-perfect synonyms, and thus interchangeable.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/12/rat-empathy/

Do you suffer from FOMO? That's an acronym fueled by Facebook and Twitter and other social networking sites. It stands for "fear of missing out."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/apr/17/hephzibah-anderson-fomo-new-acronym

http://wordspy.com/words/FOMO.asp

What does a piggyback ride have to do with pigs? Not much. In the 16th century, the word was pickaback, meaning to pitch or throw on one's back. It's changed spellings dozens of times over the past few centuries, but perhaps the word piggy has contributed to its popularity among children.

You know how it is when you encounter a word and then suddenly you start noticing it everywhere? One that's seemed to pop up is cray, or cray-cray, a slang variant of crazy.

http://www.doubletongued.org/index.php/dictionary/cray_cray/

Hold 'er Newt! This primarily Southern idiom means either "Hold on tight!" or "Giddy-up!" It apparently derives from the idea of a high-spirited horse. Variants of this expression include Hold 'er Newt! She's headed for the rhubarb and Hold 'er Newt! She's headed for the barn! Eric Partridge's 1922 Dictionary of Catch Phrases indicates that the name Newt was once jocularly used to mean an idiot.

Some classic advice for writers from Anton Chekhov: "Don't tell me the moon is shining, show me the glint of light on broken glass."

http://writershandbook.wordpress.com/2008/03/27/a-glint-of-light-on-broken-glass/

....

Support for A Way with Words comes from National University, which invites you to change your future today.

We're also grateful for support from the University of San Diego. Since 1949, USD has been on a mission not only to prepare students for the world, but also to change it. Learn more about the college and five schools of this nationally ranked, independent Catholic university at http://sandiego.edu.

What does your signature say about you? http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/01/signing-off-the-slow-death-of-the-signature-in-a-pin-code-world/251934/ In today's world of PIN-codes and electronic communication, maybe not so much.

What's a tasteful way to refer to one's rear end? Tushie and tush come from the Yiddish word tuchus. The Yiddish word tuchus, also spelled tochis and tochas, is venerated by some, but regarded by others, including The New York Times http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2010/06/words-that-the-new-york-times-will-not-print/57884/, as "insufficiently elegant."

Grant has a handful of alphabet riddles for the young ones. What did the alphabet's love note say? U R A Q T!

Ever play padiddle in the car? You know, that game where you slap the ceiling when someone's rear light is out? Padiddle, also known as perdiddle and padoodle, go back to the 1940s, and were traditionally kissing games. There's even more about such games, including slug bug, in an earlier episode. http://www.waywordradio.org/road-trip/

Next time you're in Texas, be on the lookout for instances to drop this colloquialism: He didn't have enough hair on his chest to make a wig for a grape!

Our Quiz Guy John Chaneski has a game called Word Scouts. In order to earn your badge, you'll have to know the architectural term Bauhaus, and the flower that's also a past tense verb.

The phrases Who let the hawk out? and The hawk is flying tonight, both mean "there's a chilly wind blowing." This saying is almost exclusive to the African-American community, and is associated with that Windy City, Chicago.

What's the difference between a lawyer and an attorney? None, really. In the past, though, the word attorney could also refer more generally to a person you "turned to" to represent you, regardless of whether that person had legal training.

How would you fare in a quiz of idiom meanings? If you're looking to bone up on these colloquial expressions, the American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms http://www.amazon.com/American-Heritage-Dictionary-Idioms/dp/039572774X is a good place to start.

What do you call the last appetizer on a plate--the one everyone's too embarrassed to reach for? That last piece has been variously known as the manners bit or manners piece, a reference to the fact that it's considered polite to not empty a plate, assuring the hosts that they provided sufficient fare. In Spanish, the last remaining morsel that everyone's too bashful to take is called la verguenza, or "the embarrassment."

What was your favorite camp song? If it sounds like nonsensical scat singing, it may date back to a radio character named Buddy Bear who sang in scat on the Buddy Bear show in 1946.

How does the alphabet get to work? Why, the L, of course!

Among some African-Americans, the term "Hannah" means "the sun." This sense is memorialized in the lyrics of "Go Down Old Hannah," a work song from the 1930s. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sv3Qt_ZCsu4 One writer said of this haunting melody: "About 3 o'clock on a long summer day, the sun forgets to move and stops, so then the men sing this song." The great folklorist Alan Lomax http://www.loc.gov/folklife/lomax/ also made recordings of prison workers singing this song.

Twitter is a great way to discover new words. Just search with #newword, and you'll find gems like holus-bolus http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/holus-bolus, meaning the whole thing (e.g. he ate the whole turkey, or he ate the turkey holus-bolus).

If something is described as soup to nuts, it's "the whole thing" or it "runs the gamut." The phrase refers to an old-fashioned way of dining, beginning with soup and ending with nuts for dessert. The old Laurel and Hardy The ancient Romans used an analogous expression in Latin: ab ovo usque ad malum, literally, "from the egg to the apple."

Martha reads a poem by former U.S. Poet Laureate Kay Ryan called "The Long Up." http://archives.newyorker.com/default.aspx?iid=46998&startpage=page0000031

Nancy Friedman's blog Fritinancy is a great source of information about how products get their names. For example, the names Twitch and Jitter were rejected before the creators of Twitter finally settled on the famous moniker.

The idiom I've got a wild hair, which dates to the 50’s, means you're itching to do something. It's pretty literal: just think about those itchy stray hairs under your collar after a haircut.

Is it fussy and pretentious to use the word whom instead of who? If you think so, you'll  be heartened by writer Calvin Trillin's observation on the difference between whom and who: "As far as I'm concerned, whom is a word that was invented to make everyone sound like a butler."

Which is correct: use or utilize? The answer depends on the context. The word utilize carries an additional shade of meaning, suggesting that you’re using something in a way it’s not ordinarily employed. For example, you would use a stapler to staple, but you might utilize a stapler as a paperweight. In any case, if you want to be grammatically correct, use is your safest bet.

One of comedian Megan Amram’s hilarious tweets made Martha wonder about how M&M's got their name. In 1940, Forrest Mars and an heir to the Hershey fortune, Bruce Murrie, created a candy similar to the European chocolates called Smarties. The American version takes its name from the initials of the candymakers' last names, Mars and Murrie.

Quiz Guy John Chaneski has a word game full of Colbertisms, in honor of how comedian Stephen Colbert pronounces his own name, with a silent "T" at the end. Why not drop the "T" off all words ending in "RT"?

Why do newspaper reporters end articles with the number "30"or the three-pound-sign symbol "###"? No one knows for sure, although that never stopped journalists from debating the origin of this way of ending a story. We do know that this practice arose in a bygone era when reporters typed their copy directly onto paper and handed it over to copyboys, and needed a way to indicate the last page. In 2007, a vestige of this old practice figured in an amusing correction in the New York Times.

What is the best way to write an apology to a customer, especially if you’re handling complaints for a corporation. Some tips: be sincere, and make sure your wording makes clear that you understand the consumer's complaint and that your company takes responsibility for the mistake and wants to make things right.

Aspirin is now a generic drug, but it was once a brand-name product made by Bayer. It's just one of many genericized trademarks, also known as proprietary eponyms, which includes not only aspirin, but kerosene, dry ice, and cellophane.

What is juju? Is there such a thing as good juju, or is it only possible to have bad juju? This African term for a "charm" or "spell" took off during the Back-To-Africa movement in the 1960's, and has been mentioned in connection with international soccer matches.

Is it true that the drug heroin was once marketed to families? Yes! In the 1890’s, heroin, a substitute for morphine, was hailed as a tremendous help to patients with tuberculosis, a leading cause of death at the time. Heroin eased the terrible suffering of tuberculosis by suppressing the respiratory system and thus the painful coughing fits associated with the disease. Nineteenth-century German doctors used the term heroisch ("heroic") to describe powerful drugs, and the German company that would later make Bayer aspirin dubbed this promising new drug Heroin. Before the drug's addictive nature and damaging effects were known, heroin was marketed specifically for children, resulting in some rather astonishing Spanish-language ads.

If a waiter needs a table for two, they might call for a two-top. This restaurant lingo, referring to the amount of place-settings needed, comes from a larger body of terms. Anthony Bourdain’s book Kitchen Confidential is a good source of additional slang from kitchens around the world.

If you cut something to the quick, it means you're getting at its very essence. It comes from the Old English word, cwicu, meaning alive. It the source of the quick in the phrase the quick and the dead, as well as the words quicksilver ("living silver"), and quicksand ("living sand"), and the quick of your finger, the tender part under the fingernail.

Hallmark Cards got its name from Joyce C. Hall, who bought an engraving shop along with his brothers in 1910. Would it have taken off had they just called it Hall Cards?

Why do we say that we have a doctor’s appointment instead of an appointment with a doctor? After all, we don’t say we have accountant’s appointments or attorney’s appointments. It seems that the possessive term has become lexicalized after many years of common use.

When you're playing Scrabble or Words with Friends, do you ever try random letters and hope they stick? One listener scored a few points when he managed to play the word haverels that way. Turns out it's an old term from Scotland and Northern England meaning "those who talk foolishly or without sense."

Why are elementary schools sometimes called grammar schools? The earliest schools, called scolae grammaticales, were connected to monasteries. They were meant for teaching Latin grammar. The term declined in popularity during the 1960's.

What's the plural of cyclops? If you have a group of those one-eyed mythical monsters, your best bet is cyclopes, pronounced "sye-KLOH-peez."

If something's gaudy and excessive, Filipinos might call it imeldific. It's a slang term inspired by Imelda Marcos and her legendary shoe collection.

What's the difference between borrow and lend, or between borrow and loan? The real difference between these verbs is which direction the thing is traveling. Something similar happens with teach vs. learn and bring vs. take.

Quiz Guy John Chaneski has a puzzle called "I Don't Think So, M-W." The name is a nod to Merriam-Webster's word of the day email, which often uses puzzling example sentences, like this one: "Lying in my tent that night, I could hear the campfire crackling and the crickets __________ and none of the city sounds I was accustomed to." Good luck filling in that blank.

If a command begins or ends with the word please, does that make the order optional? The hosts agree that generally it's polite to honor such a request despite the phrasing.

How did the word gay come to mean both "happy" and "homosexual"? In the late 1800's, the term gaycat was used in hobo culture to refer to an inexperienced hobo who might take on an older mentor for help, often another male. Over time, there was a convergence between gay as slang for "homosexual" and "gay" from the French term for "happy."

Paronomasia's just another word for pun, and Martha can't resist offering an example.

What is a road warrior? This term for someone who travels a lot or commutes a long distance is also used by some to refer to military personnel who are retired on active duty, also known as r.o.a.d.

Grant pops a riddles from an 1835 collection titled The Choice Collection of Riddles, Charades, and Connundrums by Peter Puzzlewell. Hmmmm.

Step into a traditional English pub, it'll be a while before everyone knows your name. A long while, in fact. The rules of conversational engagement are different in the UK from what you'd find in a place like Cheers. Kate Fox's Passport to the Pub: The Tourist's Guide to Pub Etiquette spells out many of the customs. For example, at English pubs, it's better not to go for a handshake when a simple "Hi" will do. Lynne Murphy, an American linguist living in the UK addresses these differences in her blog Separated By a Common Language.

If someone's gone pecan, they're doomed, defeated, and down on their luck. This idiom, common in New Orleans, probably caught on because of its rhyme.

Here's a slang word for being drunk you might not have heard of: high-lonesome.

When someone talks about Hollywood or Wall Street, they're probably not talking about a California city or a Manhattan street. It's an example of what rhetoricians call metonymy. Metonyms like The White House or Downing Street are often used as substitutes for a group of people or an industry.

What is a bingo? If you're a taxi driver, a bingo is someone you don't pick up because your cab is already occupied. Another bit of cabbie slang is bunco. That's when they arrive at an agreed-upon address but no passenger shows up.

The term dried plums has come into vogue since prune seems to have some negative connotations.

Why do some town names end in ham? Effingham, Illinois; Birmingham, Alabama; Gotham City, U.S.A. They all derive from the Old English ham meaning "home" or "homestead."

Having trouble sneezing? You may be suffering from arrested sternutation, also known as a sneeze freeze!

Is it still cleaning if you just throw things in a closet? Terms for this practice include making a lasagna, shame cleaning, or stuffing the comedy closet. Just be careful not to end up with a Fibber McGee catastrophe.

Is there a connection between the ancient Greek muse and the word amused? No. The muses were mythological figures who inspired the likes of Homer, while amuse comes from the Latin word for "staring stupidly," as in, "to be distracted by mindless entertainment."

Why do we sneeze when we go from a dark theater to the bright outdoors? The photic sneeze reflex is a genetic trait many of us have, as part of the Autosomal Dominant Compelling Helo-Ophthalmic Outburst Syndrome, the backronym for ACHOO!

You don't know siccum, meaning "you don't know anything," is an idiom common in the Northwest. It's a shortened form of he doesn't know come here from sic 'em, as in a dog that doesn't know how to obey commands.

Our Quiz Guy John Chaneski has a game for all of us who fancy the blank tiles in Words With Friends. Given a word and two blank tiles, place one on either end to form a new word. For example, at least two new words can be made by adding a letter to either end of the word eight.

If someone's a hoopie, it means they're less than sophisticated. This term was used in the Ohio River Valley to refer to the bumpkins from West Virginia who performed menial work with barrels, hammering their hoops into place.

How should news organizations refer to elected officials, past and present? There's not much consensus among print and broadcast companies, but most organizations have their own set of rules. For example, NPR's policy is to refer to the current president as President Barack Obama the first time he's mentioned in a news story, and thereafter as Mr. Obama.

Here's a proverb about the days on which you sneeze. "Sneeze on a Monday, you sneeze for danger. Sneeze on a Tuesday, kiss a stranger..." But wait, there's more!

What kind of slang will you find at the gym? The old standby, jacked, meaning "muscular," may derive from the lifting motion of a car jack. January joiners are those well-meaning souls who make new year's resolutions to get in shape, and stop showing up a week later. Cardio queens are the ladies in fancy sweatsuits taking a leisurely stroll on the treadmill while reading a magazine.

What's it called when a fit of sneezing takes hold? Try ptarmosis, from the Greek ptarmos for "sneeze." Or sternutamentum, meaning rapid, spasmodic sneezing.

Forensic linguistics, the subject of a recent New Yorker piece by Jack Hitt, is a useful tool in the courtroom. Linguists like Roger Shuy, who's written a handful of books on the subject, have managed to solve criminal cases by identifying personal and regional distinctions in a suspect's language. Though far from a silver bullet, the practice seems to have a solid place in the future of law enforcement.

If someone still has their blueberry money, chances are they're a bit stingy. This term from the Northeast refers to those who've held onto the change they made picking and selling blueberries as a kid.

What's the origin of the warning phrase “down goes your shanty!”? This bit of menacing slang pops up in letters written by Civil War soldiers. One wrote, "If I ever get a chance to draw sight on a rebel, down goes his shanty." It has a similar meaning to a phrase heard in Oklahoma: down goes your meat house!

If you sneeze at the end of a meal, you may be afflicted with snatiation. It's that tickle in the nose you feel when you're full.

Why do people use the phrase going forward when talking about the future? Although it sometimes carries legitimate meaning, the expression is often just a pleonastic bit of business jargon that ends up on plenty of lists of people's pet peeves.

Is the synonym for pamphlet spelled f-l-y-e-r or f-l-i-e-r? Both. In the UK, it’s flyer, and in the US, flier is preferred.

Quiz time! Does pungle mean a) a baby platypus, or b) a verb meaning "to put down money."  It's the latter. The term pungle is most common in the Western United States. It comes from the Spanish pongale, an imperative meaning "put it down." For example, you might pungle down cash at a poker table or a checkout counter.

Michelle, a middle school teacher in Atlanta, Georgia, says her students believe they've invented a new word for "an injury received from a fist bump or dap." They say they created fistumba as a combination of fist and Zumba, the popular dance exercise. They're wondering how to improve their chances of spreading this new word, and they've been discussing the children's book Frindle, by Andrew Clements, which is about inventing and trying to popularize a new term.

"We don't want to dwell on the need for your donations, so we'll stop talking about how important they are." Rhetorical statements like this one, where the point is actually made by pretending to avoid it, is often called paralipsis or paraleipsis. The terms come from the Greek word meaning "to leave aside."

In truck driver slang, a bedbugger is "a moving van that hauls furniture." That's one example of trucker lingo that Martha picked up during her appearance on Wisconsin Public Radio's call-in program, The Ben Merens Show.

Kathleen from Hebron, Connecticut, is curious about the term hashtag. She associates it with the symbol #, which she calls a pound sign. When that symbol, also known as a hash mark, pound sign, doublecross, hatch mark, octothorpe, or number sign, is appended to clickable keywords, the whole thing is known as a hashtag. It's used on Twitter, among other places, to help label a message on a particular topic.

If you're a fan of yard sales, you'll love this game from Puzzle Guy John Chaneski. Suppose you go yard-saling, but only at the homes of famous people. The items you find there are all two-word rhymes. At the house of one powerful politician, for example, you find he's selling his flannel nightclothes. Can you guess what they're called?

Richard from San Diego, California, has a hard time believe that the term cockamamie doesn't derive from Yiddish. Although the word was adapted by Jewish immigrants in New York City to refer to transferable decals, it comes from French decalcomania. Cockamamie, or cockamamy, is now used to describe something wacky or ridiculous, and it's often heard among those familiar with Yiddish.

What film, when translated from its Spanish version, is known as An Expert in Fun? It's Ferris Bueller's Day Off! Now take a crack at decoding these two: Love without Stopovers, and Very Important Perros.

Suzie, who works at the Dallas Public Library, is wondering why librarians are being asked to refer to their patrons as customers. Does the word customer make consulting a library and borrowing books feel too much like a transaction? Eric Patridge, in his 1955 book The Concise Usage and Abusage, explains that you can have a patron of the arts, but not of a greengrocer or a bookmaker. What do you think people who use a library should be called?

Back in 1867 a newspaper in Nevada used the verb pungle to lovely effect: "All night the clouds pungled their fleecy treasure."

The modifier lamming or lammin', is used as an intensifier, as in "That container is lammin' full," meaning "That container is extremely full." There's a whole class of intensifying words like this in English, which have to do with the idea of hitting, banging, thumping, or striking. Another example: larrupin'.  The word lammin' in particular popped up in a bunch of cowboy novels after Zane Grey popularized the term in his books.

Do you listen to our show on an alligator radio? We're guessing not, since this bit of trucker slang refers to the CB radios that transmit a strong signal but are terrible for receiving. Like an alligator, they're all mouth and no ears.

Voice recording technology is making it easier than ever to dictate text rather than write it. Richard Powers, author of the 2006 National Book Award winner The Echo Maker, wrote most of that book by dictating it into a computer program. Of course, dictating to humans has been happening for centuries. John Milton is said to have dictated Paradise Lost to his daughters, and Mark Twain supposedly dictated much of his Autobiography. But as Powers explained in an essay, dictating to a computer changes the way one puts words on the page.

Every elementary school student is taught never to start a sentence with "But." But why? Teachers of young students often warn against beginning with "But" or "And" simply as a way of avoiding a verbal crutch. All mature writers develop an instinct for what tone they're going for, who their audience is, and what kind of style their content demands. But there's no universal rule against starting a sentence with the word "but."

David, a lawyer from Cape Cod, Massachusetts, subscribes to the Lexis Legal News Brief, and wonders about the connection between lex meaning "law," and the lex which refers to "words." While lexis refers to the total stock of words in a language, lexicon means the vocabulary of an individual or a specific branch of knowledge. They all come from an ancient root leg-, having to do with the idea of "collecting" or "gathering," which also gives us the suffix -logy, as in the study of something.

If you're driving an 18-wheeler and want to warn fellow truckers about a piece of blown tire lying in the middle of the road, you'd tell them to watch out for the alligator. Come to think of it, the crocodilian reptile and the rubber remnant do share a passing resemblance.

Kids often imitate French or Chinese speakers without knowing the language,. But have you ever tried to imitate the English language, or speak fake English? There are lots of YouTube videos that give an idea of what English sounds like to native speakers of foreign languages.

This episode was hosted by Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett and produced by Stefanie Levine.

Would some Hollywood classics still have been box-office hits if they'd stuck with their original names? Take Anhedonia, which later became Annie Hall. Or $3000, which became Pretty Woman. And can you guess the eventual title of the movie originally called Harry, This is Sally?

Here's a puzzler: try to explain what malt tastes like without using the word malty. Or, for that matter, describe the color red. Defining sensory things is one of the great challenges that dictionary editors confront.

If she'll make a train take a dirt road, does that mean she's pretty or ugly? Nicole from Plano, Texas, overheard the idiom in the Zach Brown Band's song "Different Kind of Fine." The idea is an ugliness is so powerful it can derail a train. But as Zach Brown sings, looks aren't all that makes a lady fine.

Sometimes a couple may be paired, but they're just not connected. As this cartoon suggests, you might say they're bluetoothy.

Our Quiz Master John Chaneski has a game about aptronyms for famous folks, or shall we say folks who were Almost Amous. In this puzzle, you drop the first letter of a famous person's last name in order to give them a fitting new occupation. For example, a legendary bank robber might become an archer by losing the first letter of his last name. See if you can come up with others!

If you spend any time on Facebook, then you've probably had the experience of knowing a whole lot about someone, even though they're just a friend or relative of a friend. And meeting them can be a little weird, or even a slightly creepy. There's a word for that odd connection: foafiness, as in friend-of-a-friend, or foaf.

Remember Jack Nicholson and Helen Hunt in James L. Brooks' classic Old Friends? No? That's because they changed the title to As Good As It Gets.

If John Wayne asked you to fetch his possibles, what would you go looking for? This term simply means one's personal belongings, and was used often among frontiersmen and cowboys.

In Argentina, a certain cinematic cult classic is known as Very Important Perros. But in the United States, the film was first titled Dogumentary, then later Best In Show.

A grandmother in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, is curious about the advice Don't teach your grandmother to suck eggs. This idiom is used as a warning not to presume that you know more than your elders, and may be connected with the old practice of henhouse thieves poking holes in an eggshell and sucking out the yolk. Variants of this expression include Don't teach your grandmother how to milk ducks or Don't teach your grandmother to steal sheep.

If you behave in a struthonian manner, then it means you're behaving like an ostrich. This play term comes from struthos, the ancient Greek word for ostrich. Actually, according to the American Ostrich Association, the old belief that an ostrich will stick its head in the sand is a myth.

Jeremy Dick, a listener from Victoria, Australia, grew up in Canada loving the movie The Mighty Ducks. But once he moved down under, he realized the Aussies call it Champions. What's that all about? Do Australians not think ducks are mighty? TV Tropes explains some reasons why titles change, like, for example, idioms that don't translate, even across English speaking countries.

What do you call the place you purchase adult beverages? Is it a liquor store, or a package store? Package store is common in the Northeast, while folks in Milwaukee know it as the beer depot, and Pennsylvanians might call it the ABC store. Tell us your preferred term!
 
Spanglish. What's it all about? Is it a real language, or just a funky amalgam? Ilan Stavans' book Spanglish: The Making of a New American Language traces the varieties of Spanglish that have sprung up around the country, and includes his controversial translation of the first chapter of Don Quixote into Spanglish. Still, by academic standards, Spanglish itself is not technically a language.

On a previous episode, we discussed the origins of doozy, and boy did we get some responses! Many of you called and wrote to say that the Duesenberg luxury car is the source of the term. While the car's reputation for automotive excellence may have reinforced the use of term, the problem is that the word doozy appears in print at least as early as 1903. The car, however, wasn't widely available until about 1920.

Would you be intimidated if someone tried to rob you while wearing a balaclava? What about a ski mask? Trick question: they're the same thing! The head covering recently made popular in the Pussy Riot protests is known as a balaclava. The name comes from the Port of Balaclava on the Black Sea, an important site in the Crimean War, and the headgear worn there to protect against the bitter cold.

Here's one to clear up this confusing rule: i before e, except when you run a feisty heist on a weird beige foreign neighbor. Got it?

This episode was hosted by Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett and produced by Stefanie Levine.

Why do we make a hand crank motion when asking someone to roll down their window? After all, in most cars these days, that's done with the press of a button. An outmoded gesture like this is similar to a skeuomorph, http://skeuomorphseverywhere.com/post/3242801306/velcro-tap-shoes-with-buckles a design element that still used even though it no longer has a function. For example, iPhones still use images of old handsets or tape recorders to indicate phone and voicemail functions.

What's your name? I'm Puddin Tame, ask me again and I'll tell you the same! This and other rhymes, such as "What's your number? Cucumber!" derive from French, English, and American children's folklore that dates to at least as early as the 17th century. Iona and Peter Opie have collected a bundle of these children's sayings. http://books.google.com/books?id=sdWwHbOf4oAC&pg=PA157&lpg=PA157&dq=iona+and+peter+opie+puddin+tane&source=bl&ots=HnFvI-mc4S&sig=6Yr0FO-iplK86ghakn5RXMK-b5s&hl=en&sa=X&ei=vaZbT-rGMMX20gGw69znDA&ved=0CB4Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false

What's it called when someone rolls through a stop sign without coming to a complete stop? People across the country have coined terms like California stop, New York stop, and Michigan stop as a way of expressing pride in their local delinquencies.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VVlTTqIgdY

Like the famous murmuration of starlings, http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/11/starling-flock/ a dole of doves is another beautiful collective noun from the aviary world. http://palomaraudubon.org/collective.html

Our Quiz Guy John Chaneski has a game of geographic and astrological portmanteaus. For example, if you're looking for something with a spongy-pointed marker in Pittsburgh, how about a Felt Tip Pennsylvania? Or if someone born in June is in putting on makeup, chances are they'd wear Geminishadow.

A Vermont kindergarten teacher discusses unusual vocabulary with his class. He's trying to revive apricity, which means the warmth of the sun in the winter. This term comes from the Latin meaning "to bask in the sun." This caller hopes people will warm to the idea.

If someone calls you a voracious reader, would you be flattered or insulted? And is it better to be a voracious reader of nonfiction rather than novels? The word voracious, which shares a root with devour and carnivore, might connote a lack of discernment when it comes to eating, but if one reads voraciously, it's typically a point of pride. What other gustatory tropes are there in the ways we talk about reading and eating?

El pez se muere por la boca is a wise and vivid Spanish proverb. It means "the fish dies by its mouth."

In the Navy and the Marines, if someone goes hermantile, they're engaging in crazy behavior. This slang expression is of uncertain origin. It goes back to World War I but has stayed almost exclusively within the military's lexicon and writings related to the Navy or the Marines.

Asafetida, the plant used in asafidity bags http://www.waywordradio.org/spelling-bee-words/ meant to ward off disease, is also a common ingredient in Indian cooking http://www.seriouseats.com/2010/06/spice-hunting-asafoetida-hing.html, and it's said to counterbalance heavy spices and relieve stomach cramps.

Why can't you tear the tag off a mattress? And why do old books say that the right of translation into foreign languages including the Scandinavian is reserved? These bits of jargon, not necessarily intended for the consumer, have seeped into our language because of nuanced copyright laws and the like.
 
How do you pronounce moot point? Does it sound like mute, or rhyme with toot? The correct answer is the latter.

Here's another fun skeuomorph: Martha's father bought an exercise bike for the den, but the pedals have reflectors on them.

Why do we speak to babies in high pitched voices? Often our eyes grow wide, we give big smiles, and we talk in exaggerated, singsongy voices because these are the things that infants respond to. Chances are this parental cooing has gone on since time immemorial.

This episode was hosted by Grant Barrett and Martha Barnette, and produced by Stefanie Levine.