Copacetic (episode #1441)

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

In 1927, an Austrian named Edward Haas III created a little flat candy that was flavored with peppermint oil.

Now, you may know, Grant, that the German word for peppermint is pfeffermints.

Oh, pfeffermints.

And it starts with a P, right, as in German.

And for the name of this little candy, he took the first letter in Pfeffermintz, P, the middle letter E, and the last letter Z.

And in German, that’s pronounced Petz.

But in English, we pronounce it Pez.

Pez.

Oh, I see.

It turns out that Haas was a big anti-smoking advocate, and he saw a market for smokers trying to quit.

And by 1948, he was selling these little mints in plastic dispensers that were designed to resemble cigarette lighters.

Isn’t that cool?

Oh, I see.

And then, yeah, selling them to smokers who were trying to kick the habit.

Eventually, he moved to New York City and decided to reach out to the children’s market.

He realized there were lots of kids who would like this candy.

And so the dispensers, over time, evolved into these little cartoon characters.

And the stuff that we now appreciate is Pez candy.

So it’s a sugar shaped as a rectangle or long box, right?

And the best thing about it is the way the little head spits it out.

Yeah, they snap it.

Yeah.

That’s the meanest.

I mean, how many times did you refill your Pez dispenser just to get those?

Oh, I know.

I know.

And you can collect them all.

There’s actually, you know, there’s a worldwide Pez collectors group.

They call themselves Pez Heads.

Pez Heads, of course.

Every year they have Pez-a-mania, which is a collector’s convention.

I think the next one is in Cleveland.

Right?

But an origin story for a thing that seems so ordinary is pretty interesting, right?

Yeah, yeah.

I like this.

So Haas, H-O-S-S?

H-A-A-S.

Okay, Haas.

H-A-A-S.

And it’s from the German word for peppermint.

Peppermint.

Pez.

Pez.

Nice.

I have some more stories like that.

I’ll show you later.

Later, though, right?

Yeah, later in the show.

This is a show about language and all things related to it.

Call us 877-929-9673 or email us words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Heather, originally from Georgia.

Now living in San Diego.

How are you?

We’re great.

Thank you for asking.

Hey, Heather, a transplanted southerner.

I love it.

Yeah, via Philly, too.

Oh, boy.

Via Philly, okay.

So you’re a linguistic mess.

Quite the journey.

What’s on your mind?

Well, I’ve had this question lingering.

When I was a little girl growing up, my dad, when we were driving,

He would, as we were, you know, coming up behind a car

And had to stop pretty quickly or something happened in the roadway

And we just had to kind of slam on the brakes.

If I was in the front seat, he’d kind of put his arm across me, and then he would say,

Hold her, Newt.

She smells alfalfa.

I say it now, and I have no idea what it means, and so I thought I would call you guys and

Ask you what it means.

Hold her, Newt.

She smells alfalfa.

Exactly.

And he grew up in Missouri, and he said his dad said it, and my grandpa said it, too.

But nobody knows where it came from.

So, Heather, your dad didn’t give you any idea who Newt was or who she is?

Nope.

None at all?

Nope.

But he used that universal parental gesture, right, of just sticking your arm across the seat to protect the kid.

That’s right.

Stop them from flying through the windshield.

So, Heather, what about your dad’s background?

Was he a farmer in the military?

No.

No.

He grew up in St. Louis.

St. Louis, okay.

He’s always worked in the shoe business.

And for different companies, and he’s never been much on the farm.

My mom was more so on the farm in Iowa, but not dad.

Okay.

Yeah, the reason I ask is because it is sort of a farmy kind of image.

The idea is that you’re telling somebody to hold a horse because she smells alfalfa,

And the image is of somebody like on a bucking horse

Or somebody who’s driving a horse-drawn carriage

And the horse somehow gets out of control.

And so the phrase has been around since at least World War I,

And there have been lots of versions of it, like hold her, Newt, she’s heading for the pea patch,

Or hold her, Newt, she’s a rarin’, or she’s headed for the barn.

The idea, again, is to hold that horse’s reins so that it gets back into control.

It sounds really interesting, even when you say it, because it has such a southern…

Yeah.

It’s often been used to represent rustic speech.

Sometimes it’s a part of jokes or anecdotes where people are trying to portray how they see rural folks.

Yeah, like a country bumpkin.

Yeah, it always comes with a certain tinge of country or southern or something like that.

It’s not the kind of thing that a city slicker would ever say.

Nucle is just like a stand-in name for any kind of like a generic farmer’s name?

It has been used in the past for dolt or idiot.

Yeah, it’s true.

Yeah.

Holder Newt.

Occasionally, it’s usually spelled N-E-W-T, but occasionally people have reinterpreted it as K-N-U-T or K-N-U-T-E.

But N-E-W-T is the original and the most common.

Wow.

Yeah?

What do you think?

So interesting.

But we don’t really have an origin story for it.

That’s the best that we’ve got.

We just know that it’s about 100 years old.

Okay.

Yeah, that’s great.

I just, one of those things that my dad and his dad would always say, and I was really curious about, and listening to your show, and I thought, you know, I’m going to call them and ask what this means.

So thanks for having me on the show.

Thanks for calling, Heather. We really appreciate it.

Thanks for joining us.

Take care, now.

Take care.

Bye.

By the way, it was common enough by the 1940s that Dr. Seuss, who you may not know, but he actually did political cartoons for a while, did a political cartoon in 1942 that included the expression Holder Newt.

Oh, really?

So it’s the kind of thing that you might at one point have expected people to understand if you put it in the newspaper.

-huh.

Yeah.

And I love the image of a Dr. Seuss illustration of that.

There it is.

It’s classic Seuss, right?

Oh, yes.

With this horse going wild and a strange-looking vehicle being pulled behind.

And they’re like soaring over a chimney in a house.

And she is definitely out of inflation.

Her in this story.

Oh, it’s inflation.

Yeah, so hold her new.

Oh, my gosh.

Holding inflation during World War II.

Yeah, that’s great.

That’s great.

We should put a link to that on our website.

Yeah, we’ll do that.

It’s actually in the library of the University of California, San Diego.

Excellent.

877-929-9673.

Here’s a quote from the romantic poet Lord Byron about words.

Words are things, and a small drop of ink, falling like dew upon a thought,

Produces that which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think.

I just like that notion of a small drop of ink falling like dew

And what a difference that can make.

Yeah, it reminds me a little bit of the butterfly flaps its wing idea in chaos theory.

No, but there are follow-on effects.

Like what is the one word that will hook you to a writer

Who you will then read all of their stuff

And then they will change your mind and then change your life?

It doesn’t take very much to hook you on to something, right?

Right.

I don’t know.

I feel like, because they don’t exist in a vacuum, somebody has put their words to print.

Some hundreds of years later, perhaps after they’re dead, are thousands.

Yes, yes.

You will read them.

Yes, his poem goes on to say that.

And your brain becomes, their brain becomes your brain.

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Email words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Brett Barbero.

I’m in San Diego, California.

Excellent.

So are we.

What’s up?

What can we help with?

Well, I had a question about the word neener, and I would spell that N-E-E-N-E-R.

I think the word would be mostly used with children taunting each other, saying like neener, neener, neener.

But that’s a word that I’ve heard my entire life, been called many times.

And actually, I was wondering if it had an origin or if, in fact, it even counted as a word.

Yeah, I would say it counts as a word.

I mean, it has some value anyway.

It carries a lot of meaning, I think.

I don’t know that it’s more of an interjection than it is an other kind of word.

It’s not a noun or an adjective.

But yeah, it’s definitely a word.

So this is something you learned as a child on the playgrounds.

Did you grow up in San Diego?

Southern California, yeah.

Southern California. And were there other variants of this?

Were there other things that you would say?

Not really. I mean, I guess you go

Na-na-na-na-na-na.

It was always associated with that tune also.

I don’t know what the origin of that

Little musical phrase is either.

So we can connect Neener Neener

To a lot of these other things that people say,

Like nya-nya-nya-nya-nya, or nanny-nanny-boo-boo,

And they do all have that song,

And that song, that melody,

Is the same in the old rhyme

By Baby Bunting.

Now, we don’t know if that’s where it came from.

It’s definitely shared.

And they all have this…

And they’re all corruptions of each other.

They have a kind of blend into each other.

The nyanya, usually spelled N-Y-A-H, that one is usually considered like the most common or like the head form of all of them.

The canonical nyanya.

The canonical form.

But these go back deeply, deeply into childhood lore.

The problem with this is we know they’re at least 100 years.

Is that lots of times people didn’t pay attention to the lore and the folklore of children.

So there’s not really good records until people start to notice,

Oh, hey, there are these things transmitted from kid to kid that never really seem to penetrate the adult world.

We should be putting this down.

And of course, Martha knows where I’m going with this.

The couple, Iona and Peter Opie, O-P-I-E, they did a lot of work in this field.

And they have a really great line that I think describes the purpose of neener-neener in expressions like that.

And it’s not so much that it’s insulting.

It’s that you get a chance to have the last word.

The way they put it is, in any juvenile exchange of pleasantries, the esteemed feature seems to be not the quality of the wit, but the ability to have the last word.

And this is what this lets you do.

If you’re all out of things to say, you’re like…

Yeah, there’s something about the sound quality.

Well, because you’ve learned that that’s taunting.

Right?

If I did it to the tune of Jingle Bells…

It’s not as bad, right?

Right.

Or Bach or something.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, Brett, how does that serve you?

Do you think that’s all right?

Yeah.

I’m going to have to look up this By Baby Bunting thing now.

Yeah, go on YouTube.

There’s a bunch of versions.

Try to get the ones that are the least kind of orchestrated

Because you want a pure, simple version of it.

But it is the same song, but usually it’s faster when the kids do it.

Neener, neener, neener.

Cool.

All right.

Thanks so much for your call, Brett.

I really appreciate it.

All right.

Thanks a lot.

Cheers.

Okay.

Take care.

You too.

Call us with a word or phrase from your childhood.

The number is 877-929-9673,

Or you can send it an email to words@waywordradio.org or tweet us @wayword.

We got an email from Jeffrey Salzberg.

He’s in Essex Junction, Vermont.

And he writes, I’m a professional theater lighting designer and a sometime college teacher.

When explaining to students the need to be prepared for any and all reasonable possibilities,

I refer to Salzburg’s theory of pizza, which I devised many years ago as a college sophomore.

Would you like to know what it is?

Salzburg’s theory of pizza.

Yes, please.

It is better to have pizza you don’t want than to want pizza you don’t have.

In other words, any pizza is better than no pizza.

Yes, yes.

If you’re working late at night on the set.

It’s true.

Right?

It’s true.

I know.

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Or on Twitter @wayword.

Your questions and stories about language as A Way with Words continues.

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

And it’s time for that magical man of mystery, John Chaneski, our quiz guy.

Hello, John.

Hey, Grant.

I’m Martha.

How are you?

What’s up, dude?

Doing well.

What’s up?

I’m doing great.

I have a nice little puzzle for you today.

Yes, please.

You guys know movie makers.

They’re always taking something that works well.

And then they just add more and more and more to it.

They can never leave well enough alone.

And they’re so lazy.

They just add a letter to the title.

Remember that Melissa McCarthy movie from last year where she played a desk-bound CIA analyst who becomes a field agent?

Yeah, a spy.

They just added a letter to the title, and suddenly she’s playing the same character who’s become very old, but is still active, lively, and energetic.

Spry.

Spry, yes.

What’s the deal with that?

I thought you were going to say she became a veterinarian.

Oh, that would have been nice, too.

See, now, any ideas generated on the way with words, copyright, meat.

Now, last year’s crop of films was particularly fertile.

Here are movies inspired by 2015 films.

Take one.

In a post-apocalyptic wasteland, Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron run into a strange new tribe.

People who enjoy dressing up as anthropomorphic animals in…

Furry Road.

Mad Max Furry Road is correct.

Nice.

In this Disney sequel, young Riley isn’t so young anymore.

Instead of her emotions, we get to see what it’s like to have acute inflammatory arthritis.

Inside gout.

Inside gout.

I, for one, would not go see that movie.

No, the horrible failed sequel.

No, not good.

But before we get away from superheroes, the strangest Marvel superhero yet,

He can transform into his father’s sister.

Weird, but it’s very similar in sounding.

It’s…

Aunt Man.

It’s Aunt Man, yes.

Hello, dearie!

It’s like, what is up with this?

How about…

During the Cold War, Tom Hanks’ lawyer character

Negotiates the release of pilot Francis Gary Powers.

The sequel reimagines the prisoner exchange

On a very pointy overpass.

Watch your step in…

Something peak.

I don’t remember.

It’s not The Bridge.

Yeah.

Is it The Bridge?

The name of the movie is not The Bridge.

No.

It’s Bridge of…

Spies?

Bridge of…

Bridge of…

Spires.

Oh, that’s…

I’ll take that.

I was looking for Bridge of Spikes.

I like Bridge of Spires.

Bridge of Spires.

I probably would have gone with sort of a church thing there, but that’s very good.

Very good.

I think you’ll like this one.

The buildup of the housing and credit bubble during the early 2000s was fascinating.

But how did it affect Crossword editor of the New York Times, huh?

Watch Steve Carell as the title character in the sequel…

The Big Shorts.

The Big Shorts.

Now that one I’d go watch.

He’s looming over the Empire State Building, batting down airplanes.

Oh, what an image.

It’s terrible.

Sylvester Stallone and Michael B. Jordan return, but it’s not boxing.

This time it’s rowing.

Jordan’s character somehow recruits a ragtag bunch of oarsmen

To make up a team for the Yale Rowing Squad in…

Crude.

Crude.

C-R-E-W-E-D.

That’s right.

Making up a crew.

That was pretty good, you guys.

Congratulations.

You always say that, no matter how poorly we do.

And I appreciate that.

But I think we did earn it this time.

Yes, you did.

I’ll see you at the movies.

I’ll see you at the movies.

A big thumbs up to you, JC.

Two thumbs up.

Bye-bye.

Bye, John.

Bye.

This is a show about words and language

And lots of things that are connected to them

And a few things that aren’t.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, y’all.

This is Max from Dallas, Texas.

Hey, Max.

Hi, Max.

What’s up?

Hey, I’m asking about a word I heard my boyfriend use, copacetic.

Copacetic.

I’ve never really dated a black man before, and he uses some strange language.

And this is one in particular I couldn’t really look up.

He used it kind of like to mean everything is, you know, everything is cool or like that’s cool with me.

But he also wants us to know that it’s really not copacetic

Or it’s really not very cool to be talking about the definition of the word copacetic.

Oh, is that right?

Is that one of the rules of Fight Club, don’t talk about copacetic?

Well, it’s just not very copacetic to be looking it up in a dictionary like this.

I was immediately alerted to the way you phrased it, that you think this is connection to the fact that your boyfriend is African American.

Yes, absolutely.

Okay, because you’re not? You’re white?

No, no, no. I’m a white guy, yeah.

Okay. Okay. Okay, so that’s interesting right there. And so what else?

It just means fine, good, nice. What else does it mean?

It means like cool. Like he said people at a club can be like, you know, if they’re looking real cool, you can be like, well, that’s real copacetic how they’re hanging out.

Yeah. But then I also, I was primed for it, and I heard in a tall and quality lyric, he said copacetic.

Yeah. And he rhymed it with like open credit, you know, like, but he used it to mean like you don’t buy that stuff on open credit. Things aren’t all copacetic.

Copacetic, right. That’s super interesting, too. Really, really interesting stuff.

This word is a big, fat origin unknown, like firmly origin unknown. All of the proposed theories, and I’m not going to go into any of them, have almost no evidence to support them.

So I’m definitely not going to get into them because it will just distract you from the fact that it is firmly origin unknown.

There are a ton of spellings for it, including copasthetic. So there would be an S-T-H there in the middle.

And some people, assuming it’s Italian, have come up with spellings and pronunciations that look a little more Italian or sound a little more Italian.

Oh, really?

Yeah, but it’s not Italian as far as we can tell. It’s not Hebrew. It’s not French. It doesn’t come from New Orleans. It’s not Yiddish.

None of the theories that people propose, they’re all very bogus, usually based upon trying to claim it for their people, like a little bit of cultural pride, although my people came up with it.

We do find it, the very first use, in a book from 1919, in a book about Abraham Lincoln, of all things, where it’s fiction, there’s a character called Mrs. Peter Lukens. And she uses it three times.

And even in the book, they say it’s her favorite word. But before that, I don’t know of a single printed use of it.

And believe me, believe me, the word historians and the etymologists and the people who are into slang profession, like the people who write the dictionaries, have looked thoroughly, thoroughly into this word and found it just pops up.

And we don’t really know how or why it happened.

Well, that’s great. Yeah, the only big hint that we have is that it pops up in 1919, and World War I was a huge flowering of new language as English speakers from around the world met each other on the battlefield and, you know, shared tents and trenches and so forth and exchanged, swapped a ton of language and then brought it back to their home countries.

So that’s the, it’s a huge, huge time for new slang and new language.

You know, it may be marked as African-American now, but historically it hasn’t been particularly used by black English speakers at all.

Really? It’s been like normal for anyone to use anywhere.

It was maybe a little more used in the cities of the Northeast, but otherwise there’s no particular history of it being exclusively African-American at all.

Yeah, he’s from Houston. His family’s from Alabama. And he says he’s always heard it in the black neighborhood and that his father used the word.

And he says he’s always heard it in the black neighborhood.

Yeah, that’s really, really interesting.

Well, Max, thanks a bunch for calling.

Yeah, great stuff. Thanks, y’all, for looking up the word for me.

Thank you. Bye-bye.

Sure thing. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673. Email words@waywordradio.org or hit us up on Twitter @wayword.

Grant, you know what a druplet is, don’t you?

No.

Is it safe to talk about on the air?

Of course it is.

Okay, what is it?

Well, a druplet is like a peach or a cherry. It has one single seed in the middle, and then it’s surrounded by all this pulpy stuff.

And a druplet is the little bitty seed-like things on, say, a raspberry or a blackberry.

Oh, I see. They’re like small fruit on the fruit.

Exactly. Oh, interesting.

Yeah, they go back. So the little round things on a blackberry that all together make up the berry itself.

That’s, yes. Those are druplets.

That’s exactly what I’m trying to say. I’ve never heard that word before.

I’m a drupe or druplet. Druplet, D-R-U-P-E. Learn something new every day.

Here I am learning things on the radio.

Well, here’s one other little thing. Did you realize that BlackBerry phones are so named because their keys look like druplets?

Yes, I did know that one.

I knew you knew that.

Yeah, the old array, I don’t know if they’re still like this, but they used to be staggered. So, like, they weren’t perfectly up and down above each.

The keyboard, yeah.

Yeah, there’s a long story involving the naming of that product where they were looking at all different kinds of fruits and vegetables that had a lot of seeds in them.

But BlackBerry makes perfect sense, and it does look like a BlackBerry with all its little druplets.

Simplets. 877-929-9673. Email words@waywordradio.org or talk to us on Twitter at Wayword.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Jerry Hendershot.

Hi, Jerry. Where are you calling from?

I’m calling from University Park, Maryland, a D.C. suburb.

All right. Well, welcome to the show. How can we help?

Well, I was a longtime worker for the federal government and before that with an academic career. And I retired in about 2000.

And so I attended a lot of meetings over those years. In the late 1990s, shortly before my retirement, I remember going to one of those meetings where a presentation was made.

And then there was a question-answer session following that. And the speaker, who was a new acquaintance of mine, when somebody asked the first question, said, that’s a great question.

And he continued to give that response to questions that were asked to him subsequently in that meeting.

And that was something that I hadn’t encountered before. And since then it’s become very common.

I hardly hear a public interview anymore that doesn’t have the interviewee using that expression in responding to questions.

It kind of annoyed me and continues to annoy me. My question was, where did this practice get started? How did it grow? Why is it used so widely now?

And is it your feeling that it’s insincere when people use it?

That’s my suspicion. That’s why it annoys me. It seems to me a way that speakers use to ingratiate themselves to their audience and thereby deflect any difficult questions that might be put to them.

Yeah, I suspect that I am really guilty of this, but I think that a lot of questions are great.

I mean, for me, it’s like choosing a favorite star or something or choosing a favorite word. Maybe it would help if I would find different ways to say the same thing.

I think I use that as a crutch.

Jerry, I would agree that I think it is incredibly common. And it’s one of those many, there’s a huge list of these things that kind of get passed along.

They’re almost like infections where we all take them on and begin to say them. And they’re kind of the glue between what we really mean to say and a natural part of discourse as well.

I wouldn’t say that it calls into question anything that the speaker has to say when they say that’s a great question.

But I think what I have seen is that sometimes they mean that the answer is difficult to come by.

So if you say something that’s really difficult, like, you know, how many grains of sand are there on Earth? I’d be like, that’s a great question. Great meaning magnitude.

Yeah, and the other one is it’s when they’re especially prepared to answer your question.

I hear this a lot where an interviewer, particularly a book author who knows the topic incredibly well, the interviewer will say, you know, here’s a, what do you think he was doing in 1872 when he was on vacation with his family?

And the guest will say, that’s a great question, and then we’ll tell them exactly what they had for lunch, you know?

And so both of these are a kind of affirmation that you did the right thing.

And that’s an important part of any kind of discourse, where you provide a little bit of lubrication to the conversation so it doesn’t stop dead.

I hear what you’re saying, and I can agree with all that you say. But my having lived through a transition from a time when that phrase was not used to a time when it’s ubiquitous.

Were there similar terms in use before that, which I just no longer remember or were so common to me that I didn’t notice them? What happened at around the end of the last century that people started using this so frequently?

Well, I don’t doubt that you were there and noticed it more, but it happened a lot earlier than you think it did. At least by 1975, using “that’s a great question” was already well entrenched.

There’s an interesting interview by Tom Shales in the Washington Post where he’s talking to a filmmaker who’s made one of the first films about what it’s like to be a homosexual. And there’s a point in the interview where Shales asks the guest, the filmmaker, he says, “How far have homosexuals come in bettering their lot in society?” And the guest says, “That’s a great question.” And then Shales notes, but as he does for most questions, he has no great answer.

It is literally what you’re talking about. It’s this classic deflection where the filmmaker just refuses, says it’s a great question, but then doesn’t answer it no matter how great it is. And there’s also a couple examples that can come up in the printed press from the 1940s that seem very similar.

So it looks like to me, if we were to try to guess at an origin for this, it’s when the popular press started doing these kinds of back and forth interviews, either in print or on the air. So we’re probably looking at the rise of pop culture and the rise of radio.

And thinking about this, I thought it might be related, and this is consistent, I think, with what you’re saying. It might be related to sort of a general leveling of society, a de-emphasis of distinctions of rank and privilege. People speaking in public and answering questions wanted their audience to understand that they didn’t feel that they were superior to them. So that kind of democratization of the interview process.

Yeah, I like that a lot. It’s no longer the authority up front who cannot be challenged or accosted, right? Right. That’s the idea.

Well, Jerry, that’s my best guess on the origin for that. So I would say that Tom Shales mentioned in the Washington Post, which by no means is the only one from that period, sets at least the 1970s as a really strong point where it was already underway.

Huh. That’s interesting. Very interesting. All right. Thanks so much for your call.

Well, thanks for giving me the opportunity to talk with you. I enjoyed it. Take care now. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

877-929-9673. Hello, you have A Way with Words. Greetings. Hi, Chris Carlisle here. Greetings, Chris. How are you doing?

I’m doing wonderful. I’m Chris Carlisle from Sebastian, Florida. And I listened to your show, and I’ve had this question I’ve wanted to ask you for quite some time.

All right, let it out. What is it? All right. When you have little children, sometimes you count their toes, and you go, “This little piggy went to market. This little piggy stayed home.” In my family, it was “This little piggy who had corned beef and cabbage. This little piggy had none. We were all the way home.”

Well, we had children. I did this one day in front of my wife, and she’s going, “What in the world are you talking about? It’s not corned beef and cabbage. It’s roast beef. You’re out of your mind. You’re English. That’s an English problem. It’s corned beef and cabbage for sure.”

Well, over the years, I asked a number of people, patients I’ll be working with, people I’d meet in a casual situation. I said, “Oh, by the way, on the three little piggies, I mean, the little piggies thing, how do you do it?” And invariably, everybody said roast beef. So I was totally devastated. And what I want to find out is, is this something that is unique to my family or to my Irish-Italian heritage, or are we isolated and my family is doing this in an oddball way? Is your wife English-English or English-Heritage?

Well, no, she’s not English English. She’s, you know, English and Swedish and some other varieties, too. And I’m more of an Irish-Italian background.

Okay. And does the Italian side of your family say corned beef and cabbage or whatever the equivalent is in Italian? I don’t know. I really don’t know. I just know from my mother, and she’s more leaning towards the Irish side.

Well, seriously, I don’t know of anybody else who says corned beef and cabbage, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t happen. No. Over the history of the hundreds of years, the variance of the three little piggies rhyme has been around. And by the way, it wasn’t always done on the toes. People do things like bread and jam. What are the other ones, Martha?

Let’s see. Jam and bread, bread and butter, roast beef, clam chowder. Clam chowder comes up, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it’s one of those things you can riff on and throw in all different kinds of foods. But I’m sure that if we have a listener out there who has used corned beef and cabbage in this, we’ll hear about it.

So this little piggy went to market. This little piggy stayed home. This little piggy had corned beef and cabbage. This little piggy had none. That’s your rhyme. Doesn’t that just roll? I mean, it just rolls. Nice, right? Yeah. Yeah. And corned beef is kind of hard to beat for a good meal, so that’s a plus, too.

Well, let’s put the word out formally lighting up the do-you-know-this bright, shiny spotlights that are flashing across the horizon. Yeah, don’t leave Chris hanging here. This sounds like it really gets to you.

Yeah. No, I think it was just kind of a curiosity. I wanted to share it with you folks. Yeah, sure. Thanks. Really appreciate it. And we’ll find out if somebody else says corned beef, and I’m sure we’ll hear about their other variants as well.

Well, thank you so much, and I love your show. Thanks, Chris. Bye-bye. Thanks, Chris. Bye-bye. You have a great day. Bye-bye.

Call us if you’ve got a variation on this, 877-929-9673, or send it to us in email to words@waywordradio.org. And if you’ve got theories about why adults like to eat baby toes, we’d like to hear those too.

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett. And I’m Martha Barnette.

In the early 1930s, the market for high-end 35mm cameras was dominated by the German manufacturers. And then a movie camera repairman in Tokyo named Goro Yoshida took apart one of those expensive German models to see how it worked. And he realized that he could build a much less expensive version. So he built a prototype.

As it happens, Yoshida was a devout Buddhist, and he actually named this camera prototype after the Buddhist goddess of mercy. And in Japanese, the name of that benevolent spirit was Kwanon. Spelled in English, it’s K-W-A-N-O-N. Kwanon. And the name derives from these words that mean perceiving the sounds or the cries of the world.

Isn’t that something? So did that become what I think it became? Are you? Did it become canon? Yeah. Oh, did it? Yeah? Yeah. Yes, it did. Oh. It did.

Yeah, the Japanese company originally advertised it as Quanon, and the camera’s logo featured this image of that merciful deity with lots of arms surrounded by a ring of fire. As they started to produce the cameras on a larger scale, they decided to tweak the name, and they changed it from Quanon to Canon.

Canon, right, and they get a lot of different associations with that in English and similar languages. Right, Canon meaning a standard or, you know. That’s cool.

Yeah, I always thought they were called Canon cameras because they had those long lenses. But isn’t that a trip that a Buddhist goddess of mercy would? Yeah, she’s looking over our photos, making sure that they’re good, making sure that nobody’s eyes are closed. Swiping through. I love these brand name stories.

This is a show about language and all things connected to it, 877-929-9673. Hit us up on Twitter @wayword or pop us an email to words@waywordradio.org. Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Selden Bradley.

I’m calling you from Zionsville, Indiana.

Zionsville, Indiana.

Well, welcome to the show.

How can we help you?

Well, we were talking about a phrase that my mother used.

If you do X, X will happen.

And that was appended with an ultimatum.

And that’s the word with the bark on it.

So if you steal cookies out of the cookie jar without permission, then you’ll be punished, and that’s the word with the bark on it?

Yes.

That would paraphrase.

The big dog has barked, and you, little puppy, had better pay attention.

Oh, so you connect it to dogs.

Oh, yes.

That’s kind of.

Oh, definitely.

Oh, really?

Oh, interesting, because it doesn’t actually come from dogs.

It actually comes from trees and wood, that kind of bark.

The earliest use that we know of is from 1836, and actually, the word is wood, W-O-O-D, although almost all other examples I can find of it is that’s the word, W-O-R-D, with the bark on it, not that’s the wood with the bark on it.

And basically, it meant unadorned, unshapened wood, where it’s just like the log.

You haven’t taken a tool or a file or an axe to it to trim off the branches of the bark or anything.

It’s just like the actual natural state of the purest form of expression of that thing.

Seldon, you’ve been given the word with the bark on it from Grant himself.

And I will take it very seriously.

Thank you very much, people.

All right.

Thank you so much for calling.

Cheers.

Yep.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

That’s the word with the bark on it.

Not that common anymore.

No.

Basically an American expression as far as I can tell.

The word with the bark on it.

But it’s always nice when you can show that there’s a solid 175-plus-a-year history for a word, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Quite a visual.

Quite a visual.

Yeah, but think about if you’ve ever done any kind of forestry.

No, no, I haven’t done any kind of forestry, but I’ve thrown logs into the fire.

But you think about the shaped wood, which is going to be used for, say, build something, versus the unshaped wood.

Right, this is the raw stuff, the real stuff.

I’m not adorning this with any kind of falsehoods and lies.

I’m telling you the pure natural truth.

And we will do that if you call us with your language question.

The number is 877-929-9673 or send it an email.

That address is words@waywordradio.org.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Joe from Seattle, Washington.

Hey, Joe.

Hi, Joe. What’s up?

I’m living the dream. How are you?

Living the dream? Me too.

Me too.

How can we help? What’s on your mind?

So I talk to a lot of people on the phone for work pretty regularly, and I’ve noticed over the last year or so, whenever the phone call’s over, it takes us like three times to say goodbye.

Phone calls sort of end up with, well, thanks a lot.

Thank you.

Take care.

Take care.

Okay, bye now.

Okay, bye.

And I was wondering if there was a name for this or if this was common.

It seems sort of like a conditional goodbye as we’re asking permission to end the conversation.

So much to unpack here.

Let me ask first, what kind of phone work do you do?

Are you customer service or a receptionist somewhere?

Yeah, I work in customer service.

Oh, and you don’t have a script for that kind of thing?

No.

I work for an insurance company for pets, and they want us to be as authentic and upfront as possible.

Right.

Okay, that’s nice.

Well, congratulations to them for not just automatically doing the script.

You sound like a charming fellow, and wow, that’s a great business move on their part.

But let’s answer your question, which is, what is going on when somebody has these long goodbyes?

You know, in this little group of people who put this radio show together, we call that doorknobbing or door hanging because somebody just won’t hang up.

They just won’t go.

Yeah, we learned that from a doctor.

Yeah, we learned it from a doctor.

The doorknob hanging.

Right.

Well, he’d mentioned it’s when you’ve had the whole patient, you know, they’ve been in there, taken off their clothes, had the stethoscope.

The whole bit. And then right as they’re ready to go, they’ll go, oh, yeah, doctor, one more thing.

And it’s like Columbo. It’s the real big thing. It’s the thing they actually meant to talk to him about.

Yeah, while your hand is already on the doorknob.

You’re ready to move on. There is a study, there is a part of linguistics called discourse analysis that looks into what you’ve described.

And in that field, it’s usually called leave taking. You’re taking your leave.

And there’s a whole analysis that you can do of looking at the different roles that people play when they hang up or they part company.

And a lot of it is ritualistic with almost no real semantic content.

That is, it’s really about whose turn is next and not actually what they’re saying.

And it sounds like that’s what’s going on.

I would say your mention that you’ve noticed it in the last year is a little bit of a red herring because it isn’t new.

It’s as old as humankind or as old as human speech, at least.

But leave-taking is culturally associated.

Our leave-taking in the English-speaking North American part of the world would be different, say, than the leave-taking in the Russian-speaking Asian part of the world.

So, Joe, the leave-taking that we do, and we do a little bit of this on the show, but the leave-taking we do is a little bit, like you said, about asking permission.

Is it all right if I go?

And also trying not to do it too abruptly because even if the call was completely nice, and you sound like a nice guy, if you hang up too abruptly, they might automatically change their opinion of the whole conversation and go, oh, he’s mad at me.

Oh, he doesn’t like me. I did something wrong.

And so the slow, steady, all right now, see you there.

All right, take care now.

Talk to you next time.

All right, goodbye.

Bye.

That whole thing, we have to do it.

We have to do, at least in our culture.

So, Joe, I guess the best word we have for that to give you is leave-taking.

Okay.

Nothing fancier than that.

So now I’m going to watch how this goes.

Okay.

Joe, thank you so much for your call.

We really appreciate it.

I’m sorry. I went on and on there, but I had so much to say.

It’s great. Thank you guys so much.

I appreciate it.

And give us a call sometime.

I’m really interested in your work in customer service and what else happens when you have conversations with people.

Yeah, a lot of things happen when you have conversations with people.

The cool stuff, the interesting stuff, the weird stuff.

Take care now.

Okay, Joe. Take care. Bye-bye.

Thank you so much.

877-929-9673.

Grant, I have another story about a brand name that’s pretty cool.

This one involves a guy named Hayakawa Takuji, who was born in 1893.

And he was a very creative guy.

By the age of 19, he had invented a belt buckle that became very popular because you could fasten it to any length.

It was, you know, those kind of mesh belts and the buckle.

Yeah, yeah, I think I know.

That you can adjust with little rollers instead of the tongue.

He invented a belt buckle along those lines.

And then at the age of 20, he patented a special kind of water faucet.

And then at 21, he came up with the Hayakawa mechanical pencil.

And that was made out of metal, and it had a pencil lead inside.

I mean, you know, these had to come along sometime, right?

He called that one the Hayakawa Mechanical Pencil.

And then later he developed a version that was better that he called the Ever Ready Sharp Pencil.

This one had an ultra-thin lead.

And he went on to expand into all different kinds of products, including electronics.

And he kept that name from the Ever Ready Sharp Pencil and just applied it to the rest of his products.

So that became Sharp Electronics.

Oh, interesting.

It didn’t become ever ready.

No, good question.

But no, it became Sharp Electronics.

I always thought that had to do with the sharpness of a monitor because I know they make good monitors.

But it’s a nice association.

Again, here we are with a word for a product that has a lot to lend itself from the rest of the language.

Yeah, a lot of history.

And it takes all these twists and turns.

I mean, who knew that Sharp Electronics were originally, that the name comes from the name of a pencil?

That’s cool.

Yeah.

Give us a call, 877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Yes, this is Larry Biggie from Marquette, Michigan.

Hi, Larry. Welcome.

Thank you.

I’m a little bit of a nerd, and my question is, this has been bothering me for decades.

If you have a space rock that’s large, it’s called an asteroid.

If it’s smaller, they call it a meteoroid.

When the meteoroid hits the Earth’s surface, it’s called a meteor.

And then when it hits the ground, it becomes a meteorite.

Now, I’ve talked to astronomers and geologists.

Nobody can explain why they have the I-T-E ending to the meteor when they hit the ground.

So it’s the meteoroid in space.

It’s the meteor in the atmosphere and the meteorite once it hits the ground, right?

Correct.

Okay.

Yeah, that ITE ending is really diverse.

It can do a lot of different things in language.

It is often used to form the names of minerals, but that’s just about as specific as it gets.

In this particular case, that particular object has transformed by simply being in a new place,

And therefore it earns that new suffix, that ITE.

Meteor becomes meteorite.

And it suggests to any person who’s kind of intuitively familiar with the morphology of English, oh, this must be some kind of mineral or rock.

And that’s it.

It’s just pretty vague, I-T-E.

And you’ll find a ton of words in English that in an I-T-E, which are kind of a rock, kind of a mineral, some combination.

But it’s not like a formal chemical suffix that specifically says, oh, contains two atoms of oxygen or something like that.

Yeah.

I kind of figured geology was kind of the reason, because about 99% of the minerals do end with I-T-E,

Although the rocks don’t, other than granite, which is pronounced differently.

Yeah, granite comes from an Italian word, granito, which means it has grain in it.

It’s grainy.

Yeah.

Very good.

So, Larry, I hope that helps you a little bit.

I won’t try and change it.

Okay.

All right, take care, Larry.

All right, Larry.

Always good to hear from a fellow nerd.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Call us with your language question, 877-929-9673, or send it an email.

That address is words@waywordradio.org, and you can find us on Facebook and Twitter.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Juanita.

I’m calling from the Colony, Texas.

How are you?

Great.

How are you doing, Juanita?

Hey, Juanita.

What’s up?

Good, thank you.

How can we help?

I have a word that I heard, and I haven’t heard it since.

The word is panty waist.

My grandfather used that one time when he was very angry, and I’m not sure if that’s a vulgar word or what type of word that is.

Who was he talking about?

He was just very angry, and he threw out the word panty waist as, I guess, an insult.

Yeah.

Okay.

That sounds about right.

And you’re wondering if it’s vulgar.

It’s interesting that you ask me this because just last week in my Facebook feed, somebody wrote out the term panty waist, but they spelled it W-A-S-T-E.

And that sort of conjures some…

That’s disgusting. No, that’s not the waist we’re talking about.

We’re talking about the waist in the middle of your body, aren’t we?

Yes.

W-A-I-S-T-E.

Yes. Juanita, you ever spend any time around babies and put onesies on them?

Oh, yeah. Yeah, a while ago.

Okay. Okay, you’re quite familiar with that.

Because a panty waist, spelled P-A-N-T-Y-W-A-I-S-T, is an old-fashioned kind of onesie.

You would see that at the beginning of the 20th century.

It’s sort of like, you know, they sometimes call them union suits, just like a one-piece.

But your shirt snaps to your pants, right?

Your shirt snaps to your pants.

At the waist, at the waistline.

Exactly.

That’s why it’s called a panty waist.

And so it was associated with babies, and panty waist became a term that was used to insult people, you know, to imply that they were…

Still needing their mama to dress them, those sort of things.

Yeah.

Oh, interesting.

Yeah.

And it popped up like right away, didn’t it?

Like just a couple decades after the term first appears for the garment,

The insult shows up pretty soon.

Right.

See, that would make sense because he was born in the early 1900s.

Okay.

There you go.

And he wasn’t a vulgar guy, it sounds like, or isn’t.

No.

That’s why I was sort of surprised because he never was one to swear

Or use profanities.

So to hear him say that, it was like I couldn’t understand where that came from.

Yeah, it’s an insult, but it’s a safe one, if that makes sense.

No, no, it does.

Unless you misunderstand.

There was this weird, you know, when I looked into this term, it’s weird.

Like in 1934, 1935, we go from zero mentions of panty waist that don’t mean the garment, like none of the slang uses of it.

And then suddenly in 1934, 1935, it pops up all over the place.

It clearly had this vogue, this period of great popularity.

And it shows up in the language of a lot of blue-collar workers.

I see it in a lot of union journals, like the journal for steam fitters and that sort of oil workers,

Where they’re talking about somebody being a pantyhose because they haven’t given the union what they want.

And it’s just really interesting to me to see a term kind of just pop up into the—or a new meaning just pop up.

That is interesting, yeah, because I have not heard it again from anybody,

And I just couldn’t figure out really what that meant or where it came from.

Yeah, it’s not common these days.

It’s mostly an affected word.

If people use it, they’re kind of knowingly or ironically or winkingly using it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Or really derisively, too, I think.

Yeah.

Panty-washed.

That’s very interesting.

Yeah.

Juanita, thank you so much for your call.

Thank you, and have a good day.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Thanks.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Has a word or phrase caught your ear and you want to talk about it?

Give us a call, 877-929-9673, or send it to us in email.

That address is words@waywordradio.org.

Grant, there is some delicious Australian slang in this video that’s making its way around the internet.

It’s gone viral.

It’s these two guys from Queensland who foiled a robbery, I think while they were drunk,

And they were being interviewed about it on a morning TV show, and they used all this Aussie slang.

And people in this country have had to have glossaries along with the video because it’s so funny.

For example, do you know what a plugger is?

No.

A plugger is a piece of footwear.

It’s a thong.

Flip-flop.

Yeah, flip-flop.

Because if you think about it, the strap on the top goes through the sole and has a little plug.

Plug in the hole.

Yeah, and one of the guys was talking about how he slipped over and busted my plugger.

Didn’t mean his bum, though.

No, no, but it’s marvelous.

It was unintelligible to me until I found a site that had all of the slang explained.

So if we Google Australian foiled robbery TV show or something like TV interview.

Google busted my plugger and see what happens.

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Email words@waywordradio.org.

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Do you want more Way With Words?

Listen to years of past episodes at waywordradio.org or find the shows in any podcast app or on iTunes.

The toll-free line is always open, so leave a message for us at 877-929-9673.

We love to get your emails at words@waywordradio.org, or you can hit us up on Twitter @wayword and look for us on Facebook.

This program would not be possible without you.

Grant and I are out to change the way we listen to each other and the way we think about language.

And you’re making it happen.

Thanks also to senior producer Stefanie Levine and director and editor Tim Felten in San Diego.

In New York, we thank production wizard James Ramsey, quiz guy John Chaneski,

And that master of keeping it real, Paul Ruist at Argo Studios.

A Way with Words is an independent production of Wayword, Inc.

From the Recording Arts Center at Studio West in San Diego, I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

Bye-bye.

So long.

You