Outer Space (episode #1681)

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.

Grant, I wonder if you know what these four words have in common.

Leverett, Elver, spat and smolt.

Are these geology terms?

I’m thinking of smolt and smelt and leverit sounds like leverite, which is a jokey name for rocks that you leave right there.

Leave her right there.

That’s right.

But I don’t know the middle two.

Okay.

Baby animals of some kind?

Maybe fish, maybe turtles.

Yes, these these are all names for baby animals.

And Elver Okay.

More bells are ringing now.

They’re distant in another valley, but it’s all it’s all yeah.

I did know these terms at some point.

Yeah, yeah, they’re terms that you come across every once in a while and then you just forget them because when are you ever gonna talk about, you know But I learned the one for the oysters and Joseph Mitchell’s famous essays in The New Yorker about oysters and clams in the yeah, New York Harbor.

Oh But tell me why you’re thinking about baby animals.

Well, I’m thinking about baby hairs, H A R E S in particular, because I just finished a whole book about a baby hair, and it’s a fantastic book.

It’s the book that I’m pushing on to all my friends.

And I want to talk about it later in the show.

It’s called Raising Hair.

Oh lovely.

Yeah I’m always interested in your book recommendations and you the listener, Martha and I would love to hear what you’re reading and also get your language, stories, thoughts, questions, and ideas.

You can call or text toll-free in the United States and Canada, 877-92 two nine nine six seven three.

Send your email to words@waywordradio.org or just go to our website and on the bottom of every page is a contact form and more ways to reach us.

Hi there, you have A Way with Words.

Hi Martha.

This is Jimmy Prophet.

I’m from East Tennessee.

Hi, Jimmy.

We’re glad to have you from East Tennessee, one of my favorite parts of the country.

What’s up?

Well, I actually grew up in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia.

One of my other county in in particular, I know I’ve heard you mention it before.

And my mom used to say a word and my grandmother s used the same word many times to describe a moth that was in there in their presence and my mom was scared to death of them and she would yell cattle bat.

And we knew that when she yelled cattle bat, it was time to get out of her way because she was going to do whatever it took to get away from it.

And I don’t know why she called it a cattle bat, and my grandmother did the same thing.

And I didn’t know if it was something that was maybe just a a version of candle bat maybe or you know I’ve heard of a horse fly so why not a cattle bat?

I don’t know.

Right.

Oh this is wonderful.

So two generations of people calling moths.

We’re talking about the dark fluttery insects, M O T E just flying around a light or something.

Cattle bats.

And for the listeners, we want to spell that to make sure it’s clear what you’re saying.

C-A-T-T-L-E.

B-A-T-S.

The flying mammals.

What’s so interesting about this, Jimmy, is that usually the word is candle bat, just like you suggested, C-A-N-D-L-E, the you know, the the cylinder cylinders that you light so to put some illumination in the room.

And there’s a bunch of things happening here, a bunch of things happening here, but usually it’s not cattle bat it’s candle bat but I can totally see how phonetically because those two words are so similar similar and they begin the same they end the same they’ve got two syllables they’re stressed the same, just e easyasy, to call to for cattle to come out of candle.

But a couple interesting things have happened here.

When you look into folklore of language, you’ll often find that things are swapped around.

So, moths, for example, have been long been a source of folklore and folk names because they kind of seem like this mirror-world version of butterflies.

They’re dark or neutral where butterflies are colorful, or or they come out at dusk or night when butterflies usually appear during the day.

So this kind of off and on black and white, just reverse thing there.

But but you will sometimes find in various English dialects that moths are called bats, and bats are called moths.

For example, in the Caribbean, there’s more than a few countries, including Jamaica and Barbados, where they do this.

Where sometimes bats are just called moths, and moths are just called bats, depending.

And there’s a kind of moth in Jamaica that’s usually called the Black Witch.

It’s a very big dark moth.

But it’s also sometimes called the Duppy bat.

Duppy D-U-P-P-Y means spirit or ghost.

So you’ll just find them swapped back and forth.

And the history of moths is like that.

They are often just called some version of butterfly.

In Spanish, they might be called the Mariposa de Luz, butterfly of light, or Mariposa Nocturna, which is a butterfly a nighttime butterfly, nocturnal butterfly, which isn’t the same as the bat moth swapping, but it’s a it’s a moth butterfly swapping.

Again, it’s a weird thing happening in the taxonomy where categories are a little shifty, right?

They me they mush around a little bit.

They’re not always as clear cut as you’ll find in in science itself.

But I remember one time she actually ripped the door handle off the inside of the car trying to get away from a moth that had gotten in and was flapping around the light in the the dome light inside the car when we were kids.

Yeah.

So like I said, we we knew to get out of the way ’cause she was Yeah.

Yeah.

But my grandmother wasn’t the same way.

My mom did say one time when she was a little girl that that her brothers when she was walking home from school, had grabbed a cricket or grasshopper or something and put it in the sleeve of her dress and it was hopping around and it freaked her out and things like that that would move quickly.

Yeah.

Yeah Yeah, because moths are erratic, right?

They’re not necessarily not quite sure where they’re going next, and it could be on you.

Yes.

But that’s that’s kind of the gist of what we know.

It’s an interesting connection to the the way folklore isn’t always so clear cut and bats and moths.

So anything that flies at night, even if it’s not the winged mammal might be called might be called a moth.

So vice versa.

But sometimes you might also hear candle fly or candle bug.

C A N D L E.

Okay.

Well, that’s interesting.

I always thought maybe it was Candle Bat that they were that they were saying, but just came out Cattle Bat.

Well, Jimmy, thanks so much for sharing this story.

I d I didn’t know that people were that afraid of moths, but I guess there are some people out there who are.

But you know, a c a cattle bat sounds a lot bigger than a candle bat.

That you know It does, it does.

And like I said, if there’s a horse fly, maybe there is Well, thank you all so much for for including me.

I appreciate it.

Yeah, sure.

Call us again sometime, all right.

-huh.

Bye-bye.

Hi, Jimmy.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Joe Messina from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Hi you Joe.

Welcome to the show.

What’s up?

If you haven’t heard, Pittsburgh is we’re we’re a hotbed of I don’t know, linguistic abnormalities.

Yeah, Pittsburgh Ease has been well studied.

I think Barbara Johnson has What’s the Pittsburgh Ease you want to talk about today?

Where the Monongahale and Allegheny come together at Point State Park in town.

There’s a a great museum and the outline of w the what was Fort Pitt, which was built around seventeen sixty.

And one of the things we say around here is when something is finished or when you’ve completed a task, you will end it with that’s it, Fort Pitt.

Or you’re unloading and someone may ask you, Well, is that the last box?

You’ll reply, That’s it, Fort Pitt.

And I was wondering, is that unique to to us, or does anybody in else in the country say those things?

I love it.

That’s it, Fort Pitt.

P I T T, so the same pit that Pittsburgh is named after.

Correct.

And do you have any idea where that might have come from?

I don’t.

I went through the museum not long ago, which again is is a terrific tour.

And we didn’t touch on it, and nothing in the tour stood out to me that had to do with finality, except that it was built on the site of Duquesne Fort Duquesne after it was raised and the French retreated in Duquesne.

Right.

Yeah, the Fort Pitt Brewing Company brewed beer there from nineteen oh six to nineteen fifty seven And there was a slogan that became very popular locally, Fort Pitt, that’s it.

Meaning, you know, it’s the best beer you can find.

And so Fort Pitt, that’s it, became this little saying in advertising and over time some people picked it up as that’s it, Fort Pitt.

So the ad Martha was saying you found the beer, that’s the one, basically.

This is it.

This is the greatest beer.

Right.

Fort Pitt, that’s it.

And the researcher Barry Poppick found some early examples of that.

Somebody wrote in a in a chat group in nineteen ninety-three, I have an elderly friend in their seventies who constantly uses the phrase that’s it, Fort Pitt as an explanation, particularly when completing crossword puzzles.

But it’s older.

We’re talking what, nineteen forties?

Well, yeah, yeah, the advertising slogan, and and I’m sure people just reversed it pretty quickly.

Fort Pitt, that’s it, becomes that’s it, Fort Pitt, you know.

I love it.

It’s just it’s it’s adorable.

I mean, I don’t mean this in a condescending way, but I like it.

It’s very adorable to have your own regional saying.

I it’s very cool.

That is a great piece of trivia.

Thank you.

Yeah, it’s wonderful.

I keep waiting for Dr. Robbie to finish a procedure and say, That’s it, Fort Pitt Maybe next season, right?

Yeah, next season.

That’s outstanding.

Well that’s what we know.

Joe, I didn’t mean to rhyme again, friend, but But that’s it.

Fort Pitt.

Yeah, thank you both very much.

I’m completely satisfied.

And that’s that’s it, Fort Pitt.

Excellent.

Thanks, Joe.

Take care of yourself and call us again sometime.

All right..

Awesome.

Thanks All right.

Be well.

Bye-bye.

But it does join this pantheon of other advertising slogans that became more than an advertising slogan.

We talked years ago about Got the Mott’ abouts Motz Apple Juice.

And talking about more of something than Carter has liver pills, also from advertising.

And famous more recent ones like take a licking and keep on ticking or don’t leave home without it.

Right, or don’t forget Claire Peller with Where’s the Beef?

Where’s the Beef?

Yeah, that one almost instantly entered mainstream language.

You know, not long ago I was getting into a hot tub and it was extra hot, hotter than I expected, and I said who and then I immediately said to myself Smith’s furniture that’s who and everybody who grew up in Louisville Kentucky when I did will know what I was talking about because there was this ad for a furniture store that featured an owl blinking at you and it would say whoo and the announcer would say Smith’s furniture that’s who Oh these are so common where we have these little lines and phrases that come from ads, either national or local.

And somehow they become part of our personal daily discourse.

Share those with us, words@waywordradio.org, or tell us on the telephone toll-free in the United States and Canada 877-929-9673.

Here’s a word that’s been making the rounds on social media lately, hobbyess.

People talk about hobbyless behavior and it’s sort of an insult along the lines of get a life.

Like really you don’t have anything better to do than you know refresh your feed every five minutes to look for replies or something that’s hobbyless behavior right start building a lego or something time consuming not this something put down the lego, call or text toll-free 877-929-9673.

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 and Glad handing his way around the room, kissing babies all around.

It’s our quiz guy, John Chaneski.

Hey, how are you doing?

How are you?

How are you?

Good to see you.

How what’s up?

How are you?

Nice.

This is great.

Thank you for coming, everybody.

Thanks.

This is just great.

Look, you guys, I’ve talked about cryptic crosswords before, which I consider the gold standard of grid puzzles.

And now there are about a dozen different cryptic clue types and this one that we’re gonna talk about today is kind of rare.

I don’t see it very often, but I think it’s pretty fun.

I call it the cycle.

All right.

You take a word and you cycle the letters by moving the final letter to the beginning and you get a new word.

And you won’t see this very often, but sometimes and sometimes this will be used as part of a bigger clue.

For example, the word earth.

If you cycle the H to the beginning, you get heart.

Heart, yes, very good.

That simple.

You’re just moving basically this is the simple cycle, you’re just moving the last letter to the beginning.

Okay?

Unfortunately, I do have to put a level of difficulty above that.

I’ll give you a sentence that clues two words.

You take one of those words and move its last letter to the beginning, and you get another clued word in that clue.

Got it?

Okay.

All right.

Here we go.

It wasn’t hard to get enough votes to pass the bill.

I’m thinking about enough votes.

I’m thinking about ayes or yeses.

Oh, oh.

What about easy and yes?

Yes, very good.

Yeah, easy enough.

Yea, it was easy enough for Martha.

Easy and yes.

The underworld king is attended by a spirit.

So he’s a mob boss or a Don or a Well that well Hades Hades?

Yeah.

Is what?

Hades.

Shade.

Oh, shade.

Yeah.

Hades is attended by a shade.

A spirit or shade.

Good teamwork.

We went to different underworlds.

I’m thinking of Tammany Hall.

Right.

Riley’s emotions ran the gamut from rage to joy.

Oh boy.

This is gonna be a core memory, I know it.

Riley’s Rage to Joy, so her range and her anger.

Yes, very good.

Anger and rage.

Take anger, move the R to the beginning, you get range.

I wagered on two, four, six, and eight, and well, it was almost eight.

So it was seven.

Or seven and a half.

Seven and three quarters.

Seven and even.

Yes, I waged it on the evens and well it ended up being seven, which is not one of the evens.

Nice.

That’s a there’s something really pleasant, pleasing about that one.

Very good.

Here’s the last one.

They say her potatoes with a lightly browned cheesy crust earned her those two Michelin stars.

I love the sentences.

Thanks.

Lightly brown cheesy crust.

Are we talking about a French name?

Mm—

Oh Yeah.

Oh, Grotten.

Gratin.

And then that becomes rating.

Rating.

The two mission stars is her rating.

Yes, very good.

Gratin and Raiding.

Well done.

John, give our best to the family.

Thanks again for coming out and doing this really hard quiz with us.

You two guys.

Cheers to you and yours.

I’ll see you next time.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Thanks, John.

John’s not the only one who can talk to us.

We’ve got a toll-free line available in the United States and Canada, 877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Yes, hello.

This is Sarah from Elk Rapids, Michigan.

Hi Sarah.

We’re glad to have you.

What’d you call us about today?

So well, I’ve always been curious about a word that turned up in our family lore.

It’s from a story that my mom told me when she was talking about her childhood.

So it’s something that happened, I guess, about a hundred years ago.

And she told that when she and her younger brother and sister were at the age when swear words became quite enticing to them.

My grandparents, who were upstanding citizens, were a little perturbed about this and look kind of appalled.

So they cooked up a scheme.

And so one day, when the three children were at the dining table, grandma and grandpa went into the next room, and my grandfather said in a slightly louder than usual voice to my grandmother, Oh, you know so and so.

I he’s just an old band doozer.

And my grandmother quickly shushed him and she said, Oh, not so loud, dear, the children might hear.

So, of course, the children’s ears perked right up when they overheard their parents talking, and the word band dozer instantly became their very favorite.

So they really thought they were hot stuff when they slung that word around.

So I guess my question is, was banduzer an actual word in that time frame or was it something my grandfather just simply made up?

So your story is so wonderful.

I can’t even believe it, Sarah.

So they manufactured this word, I’m pretty sure.

Did they tell you over the years?

I mean, did it was it passed down to you now that you’re an adult that this word was invente Well, they I I never talked about it with my grandparents, I guess, but and I don’t remember if they had passed at the time my mother told me about this.

I mean, I’ve heard of bamboozled, but banozer just seemed to be something that they had used.

So I couldn’t tell where it originated.

Well yeah, everything that I know about swearing and I kinda have this sideline of swearing says that it’s a an invented word from your family’s story.

But that idea of creating a fake swear word, that one has got some legs.

Many people have done that with their children or their classrooms.

We had a caller, Martha, if you remember, tell us that sacapuntas, which means pencil sharpener in Spanish was was their big swear word.

And and there’s a wonderful book, by the way, Sarah, about fake swearing.

It’s called The Craptastic Book of Pseudo Swearing by Michelle Whitty, W-I-T-T-E, and you can find it as an ebook on bookshop.org and other online booksellers.

There’s a lot of this stuff, a lot of from popular entertainment, like in science fiction alone, there’s Gorham from Firefly, Smeg from Red to Warf, Frack from Battlestar Galactica and Frell from Farscape and there’s even more, but but like so many fake swear words have been invented.

Well that is fascinating.

It’s a wonderful tradition, I think.

Yeah, it seems it seemed to work.

Least At it worked well for the first week or so until the kids discovered it really was not a Oh it only lasted a week.

I was hoping this was like a lifetime thing that they only found out on like the grandparents’ deathbed That’s not a word.

So perhaps it it spread in the among their friends.

Who knows?

Who knows?

But I will tell you that it doesn’t appear in any of the reference works that I know.

Oh well.

And I got a lot of them.

Appreciate you checking.

One thing I want to leave you with before we go, in children’s lore, there’s also fake gestures, fake offensive gestures.

So for example, instead of holding up the middle finger, you hold up your pinky finger.

Oh that’s a fake.

So it’s not just words that we fake when we’re trying to do pretend swearing or pretend naughty behavior.

I’ll have to keep all of that in mind for my grandchildren.

You do that, Sarah.

Thank you so much for calling.

Yeah, take care of it.

Thank you so much.

I appreciate you looking into it for me.

Mystery solved.

Louise Smart from Ellensburg, Washington shared a word with us that I didn’t know.

The word is Pobbies, P-O-B-B-I-E-S.

Pobbies refers to a mix of warm milk, bread and sugar, she says British mothers used to give it to their child to fill them up or if they weren’t feeling well, but she says that her mother used to make up a batch to give to the family of hedgehogs that lived in the front garden Oh that’s adorable.

It’s also very British.

We’d love to hear the little food customs, the little food ways that you and your family have.

Hi there, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, how are you?

I’m doing well.

Who is this and where are you?

My name is Alison and I’m calling from Madison, Wisconsin.

Hey Alison.

What’s going on up there?

So I was swimming laps the other day at the YNCA near to my house and I looked up at a sign on a door.

And it said that the outside space was reserved for programming.

And I thought to myself, like, outside space, that sounds kind of awkward.

Why don’t they just say outer space?

And then I kind of laughed because like outer space seemed ridiculous.

And then I had questions about like why does outer space why does it sound so ridiculous?

Like what why don’t we use the word outer to describe things anymore?

Okay.

So so you’re talking about first of one of the things you’re talking about is a linguistic collision f where we have these two terms we we can’t talk about the outer space of a building because that makes it sounds like it’s it’s circling the planet.

Right.

Yeah.

Right.

It sounded it sounded very odd.

Yeah, and so that is a thing.

It’s actually a thing, the oddness that you felt there as a native speaker of English is exactly what happens when two words try to occupy the same space and it’s just clear that we’re gonna need to say something else.

This is why you would use the word outside to talk about the space outside a building rather than outer because it’s just just the way it’s gonna go, because you know in your heart that it’s clearer that way.

So am I hearing you trying to get at the really why we talk about outer space at all.

What does that outer mean and why is that happening?

Well and I was I was also like wondering like is that a is outer space a technical term?

It seems like when I read things about like like science-based things, they use space.

They don’t use the word outer space.

And so I was wondering like I guess sort of what the difference is between space and outer space.

I think while for example in the recent Artemis II mission, we we had much discussion of space and maybe people talked about outer space.

I think what they tend to do is prefer to talk about altitude and how far you are from a certain part of the planet or other things in space because you always need a point of reference in space.

And often Earth is that point of reference or the International Space Station or the Moon or what have you.

So they outer space isn’t necessarily a term that you’re they’re going to use except in a casual way.

But that outer is really interesting and it comes up in a poem in 1841 or 1842 by a woman named Emmeline Stewart Wortley.

And the poem isn’t that great, so I’m not going to repeat it here.

But she uses outer space and because it’s poetry, it is not even clear to me that she’s actually talking about, you know, way up high outside the atmosphere where there’s nothing but a vacuum and whatever space debris happens to be there.

But other people who’ve studied this stuff insist that’s what she’s talking about.

She’s talking about actual outer spaces of note today.

But but not long after, by the mid-1840s, you could get famous people like Humboldt, who did all this exploring and stuff and wrote in German and English and used variations on the term talking about outer space.

And he talks about in relation to the cosmos and the the remoter regions of universal space and the bodies belonging to the outer world and all these, he’s just talking about outer meaning away from Earth.

So it’s outer, just far from us.

We are we’re very self centered as humans.

We think of Earth is everything and everything else is in relationship to it.

So the outer is only really talking about how far we are away from the planet.

I see.

So everything away from us is outer.

Okay.

See, I was thinking that maybe outer space is more of like a science fiction term.

Well it it does turn into science fiction, definitely by H.

G.

Wells who wrote a in very 1901.

H.

G.

Wells had it in in one of the books talking about a character going into outer space.

So by that time, not I mean sixty years it’s not that long in linguistic terms.

Sixty years later, you could just use it in science fiction and people would know what you meant.

It kinda caught on rather quickly.

Well Alison, thanks so much for the question.

Yeah.

Thank you for taking my call.

It was great to talk to you.

Yeah.

Take care.

Call us again sometime.

Bye bye.

Thank you.

877-929-9673 or send an email anytime.

Words at waywordradio dot or g Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Jody.

I’m calling from Ohio, although I am a native born and raised in Southern California in the Valley.

I guess you could say I was a Valley girl.

Nice.

All right.

So what’s on your mind today, Jody?

All right.

So I listened to your show and I love it and I’m like, okay, I’ve always wanted to know this.

So when I was growing up, my family used a particular word for vomit, throw up, and that word was erp.

And I I didn’t grow up wondering it because I literally that’s the word we used.

If you if the dog irped, he irped, you know, or the cat or me, or if you feel sick, you can irp into the bucket.

It was just a word we used.

We we could say vomit or throw up, but puke was rude.

So we didn’t use that word.

But it was mostly herb.

And it was all I knew, really.

I mean not all I knew, I knew the other words, but that’s all we used for that pretty much.

And then as I was getting older and I would go to friends’ houses, you know, you kind of expand beyond your own home.

You know, it it’s not something that comes up all the time, but if somebody were to throw up, I would say, Oh, he irped, or look, the dog irped over here.

And they would kind of like go, What?

Seriously.

And I that’s when I started to learn it wasn’t like an average word that everybody knew.

And I go, Oh oh, he threw up.

Most people just went, oh mm.

And as I got older, you know, still with my family, I guess we would use it.

It’s not like we couldn’t say else.

I don’t use it at all anymore, except when I’m playing Scrabble or something where you ’cause I love word games so when you’re generating your own words and darn it that word has never been in there at least defined the way I would spell it either E A R P is what I thought like Wyatt ERP or URP or I guess it could be ERP and it never I never could find that word that means vomit.

And and and I’ve asked a few people here and there, I mean, you know, how often do you start talking about vomit with people but as it’s appropriate head hey do you guys ever heard of this word?

Nope.

No that’s weird.

But we have Jody Martha and I have for sure.

We’ve definitely heard of this.

But let me ask you a question just on the off chance I get the answer I want.

So you’re from California.

But where are your parents from?

Okay.

My mom grew up in Central Valley, Taft, California, and which is near Bakersfield.

And my dad was from the Midwest.

My mom’s parents, which I think it’s that side of the family, I’m almost positive that it came from my grandma.

Her mom was born in Kansas.

And so they were in the med mid west area.

But then, you know, they migrated to California.

You know, the reason I asked is because when the linguistic atlases have researched the terms that people use for Vama and they did do it and the dictionary of American Regional English did its own field work and they asked a question about, you know, what do you call this activity, this biological activity?

ERP, URP as it’s usually spelled, was incredibly common in the Mississippi Valley, kind of Louisiana andorth north or nward and kind of east and west of there including Georgia, maybe even far as far west as the southwest, you know, southwest kind of capital less southwest as a as a geographic destination.

So it’s what was particularly strong.

Of course there’s a big asterisk here is that all that field work is old.

You know, that fieldwork is fifty, sixty, seventy years old.

But you know, sometimes those patterns hold remarkably well over the decades.

But interestingly, the word actually appears in the movie Greece, you know, like really the high school.

I know that very well.

Yes, there’s a line from Rizzo where the the I think it’s the principal or says something about I’m not only a prince, I’m a pal, I’m a principal or something like that.

It’s just ridiculous.

And and she says something along the lines like she’s like, Asen, Jason, bring the basin, herp slop, get them up.

Or maybe she just says the last part, erp slop, get them up get them up.

So throughout folklore, there’s records of this particular long saying, kind of a a playground saying of icky dicky, I feel sicky, hasten Jason, bring the basin.

ERP slop.

Get the mop.

And so part of that appears in the movie Greece.

And I wonder if it was a little bit of a popularizer of ERP URP to meet vomit.

I love that.

ERP slop hip the mop.

I’m gonna go write that down right now.

You take care of yourself now.

Thank you very much.

Have a baby.

Bye bye.

Well, if a language question comes up for you, you can always call us 877-929-9673.

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.

At the top of the show, I mentioned a book I’m really excited about.

It’s a memoir by British writer Chloe Dalton, and it’s called Raising Hair, H A R E.

At the beginning of the book, Dalton is a hard-charging political speechwriter in London.

She travels all over the world at a moment’s notice, but during COVID, she’s stuck in a small home in the countryside.

And one cold day she’s out walking along a dirt road and she chances upon a tiny creature in the middle of it, and she writes The animal no longer than the width of my palm, lay on its stomach with its eyes open and its short silky ears held tightly against its back.

Its fur was dark brown, thick and choppy and grew in delicate curls along its spine.

Long pale guard hairs and whiskers stood out from its body and glowed in the weak sun, creating a corona of light around its rump and muzzle.

Set against the bare earth and dry grass, it was hard to tell where its fur ended and the ground began.

It blended into the dead winter landscape so And when she returns hours later, that little creature is still there and their birds of prey circling overhead, so she’s torn about whether to let nature take its course, and then against her better judgment, she scoops it up in a handful of dry leaves and heads home.

Now, this little leveret weighs less than an apple.

And of course, once she gets it home, she thinks, oh my gosh, what have I done?

What do I do?

An expert tells her that most leverets in captivity either die of shock or starve, and the books that she finds about hares are mostly about hunting or cooking them.

But she finds answers oddly enough in a two hundred fifty year old poem In the late 1700s, the poet William Cowper kept hares as pets and he wrote about them and what they ate, and so she tries feeding the leverett what he suggests porridge, oats, and coriander, and improbably this little animal begins to thrive.

And she goes on to read lots of natural history and folklore involving hares, and her memoir is rich with all of that information.

But she’s always mindful of the need to respect the fact that this is a wild animal.

This isn’t how it’s supposed to be.

So she’s careful not to name it or pet it or assume its gender.

Instead, she adjusts her life so that the growing leveret has the run of her house and her garden.

And this memoir is a meditation on nature and our relationship to it, for better and for worse.

It’s about slowing down and observing.

And surprisingly, there’s also this quiet underlying amount of suspense through it.

You get invested in this question of will the animal survive?

Because after all, this is nature in the natural world for all its beauty, can also be grim.

But there’s some absolutely gorgeous writing to savor here and.

And for me it changed the way that I think about hairs.

I think about Leverett’s.

And you know, Grant, there are a few books that I want to read all over again right away.

And this is one of them.

Yes, you’ve been forcing this book on everyone.

It’s my turn’s next.

Thank you so much, Martha, for sharing this lovely book with us.

We will link to Raising Hair by Chloe Dalton on our website at waywordradio.org.

And as always, Martha and I love to hear what you’re reading.

Send it along and email words@waywordradio.org or tell us on the telephone, call or text 877-929-9673 in the US and Canada.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, good afternoon.

My name is Catherine.

I’m calling from Ontario in Canada, but my question is about a phrase that I heard when I was growing up in Newfoundland.

So it it would have been around nineteen seventy four and my grandfather would come in from outside and he would say the fog is thick as burgoo out there and I would say, Popo, what is burgoo?

And he would just laugh and I have never heard anybody else say it.

The fog is thick as burgoo.

So we’re talking you can’t see your hand in front of your face kind of thickness.

Exactly.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Just really thick.

And I’ve never heard anybody else in the family use it, but I don’t know burgoo is.

Yeah, it’s as thick as oatmeal porridge, actually.

Burgu was a name that was applied by eighteenth century sailors to sort of that gray sludge of old oatmeal that they would eat.

You know, oats boiled in sea water, maybe a smear of salt fat or something like that.

And so if they were talking about fog that was really, really thick, yeah, they would say it was thick as burgoo.

Wow, I’ve never heard porridge called burgoo, but it it makes sense Well it’s very much a Canadianism though.

In Canada.

Yeah, and what’s really weird is is as a native Kentuckian, I have to mention that burgoo in Kentucky is very, very popular, but it’s not oatmeal or porridge.

It’s a thick soup or stew that’s made with whatever meat you have around, beef, venison, porks, even squirrel and vegetables.

It’s usually cooked outdoors.

And if you can’t stand up a spoon in it, if if you put the spoon in and it falls over, then that burgoo is not ready.

And it’s super popular in Kentucky and part of Illinois and especially Derby Week in in Louisville.

Yeah, I’m seeing here, Martha, that that burgu definition as oatmeal is actually kind of old fashioned and many people in Canada use it in the way that you’ve just described it, which is it’s whatever you have on hand put into a stew.

Mm—

Mm—

Yeah, and we’re not sure of the origin of burgu.

There’s a good chance that sailors picked it up from similar sounding Arabic or Persian words for bulgar, you know, that kind of wheat that is in tabule, but we’re not sure about the origin.

Oh that’s interesting.

Yeah.

Well he m he he was a fisherman, so he might have picked it up that way, right?

Yeah.

Oh that’s interesting.

Thank you so much for explaining.

Sure thing.

And that’s B U R G O O.

I assume that’s how your family knew it.

That’s how I’ve always assumed it was spelt, but I like I say I’ve never I’ve sir I’ve never seen it written down.

So thank you so much and you take care.

Thank you very much.

Bye bye.

Bye bye.

Bye.

We’d love to hear from people all around the world.

And if you’re in Canada, you’ve got a total free number you can use, eight seven seven nine two nine-nine six seven three If you’re anywhere else in the world besides North America, you can find lots of ways to reach us on WhatsApp, on our contact form, and email on our website at waywordradio.org.

Grant, I just learned the meaning of the word Kriya.

C-R-I-A.

It seems like it would be a great word for scrabble or something.

Is this from biology refers to groups of animals of some kind?

Wow, you’re on the right track there.

Like bunnies, foxes?

I’m not sure.

Well, cría, C-R-I-A, refers to a baby llama or a baby alpaca.

It comes from the Spanish word cría, which means the rearing of an animal or baby animal.

So it’s an an up-and-comer little little fuzzy guy from the Andes.

Exactly.

I thought that would be such a good word for the word.

Yeah, the the list of baby animal names and they’re often very cute.

If you have baby alpacas and baby llamas, we definitely want to see the pictures.

But we also want your questions, stories, thoughts, whatever about language, call or text toll free eight seven seven nine two nine nine six seven three.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Gran and Martha.

This is Connie from Morana, Arizona.

I love your show and my question is the origin of bloody bones and rawhead.

When I was a child and had younger brothers and sisters, my mother and grandmother who were from rural Georgia used to basically terrorize us with bloody bones and rawhead if we went rambling any any closets or drawers and I just wondered where that came from.

Well Connie talk to us about what that terrorizing is like.

So what’s the circumstances here?

What how is this threatening you?

Anyway, I just remember as a little girl, you know, four or five years old being told that if we went into that area and opened the closets or went into Granny’s Hope Chest, Bloody Bones and Rawhat would get us.

And, you know, when you’re a little kid, it’s scary.

And I Yeah, and I had l little sister and little brother who are two and and then four years younger than me.

But when I was probably ten or eleven and we would visit, I was afraid to go through those green curtains and when if I got through the green curtains and they didn’t get me, then I wanted somebody to come into the bathroom and make sure they weren’t hiding behind the shower curtain.

Yeah.

Yes, well, Rawhead and Bloody Bones or Bloody Bones and Rawhead, it has a lot of history behind it, Connie.

It’s really fascinating.

It goes all the way back to the mid-1500s in England, maybe even earlier than that.

But Rawhead or Tommy Rawhead was this boogeyman used in the same way that your family used it, you know, to scare little kids in And Rahead was the name of this ghastly creature whose skin had actually been ripped off his skull.

It’s it’s really Oh my god.

Yeah, I know, right?

That would scare a little kid, right?

And you see this as early as fifteen forty-eight there was an anti-Catholic tract that was called The Will of the Devil.

And it’s where the devil dictates his last will and testament to his secretaries who are named Hobgoblin, Rawhead, and Bloody Bone.

And then we see the characters named Rawhead or Tommy Rawhead or Rawhead and Bloody Bones in a lot of care in a lot of folklore after that.

And sometimes the name is applied to just one monster, Rawhead and Bloody Bones, because this poor guy is in terrible shape, or sometimes it’s two separate creatures.

But the bottom line is that Rawhead and Bloody Bones was this creepy guy with a flayed head, and it’s it’s one of those monsters that parents would use to keep kids in line, like Jenny Green teeth, who was supposedly lurking in ponds and would pull children in if they got too close.

So it’s it’s basically some serious stranger danger.

It’s just really grisly.

But Connie, something I notice in the folklore is there are echoes of exactly what you experienced where kids are being kept away from dangerous places or places their parents don’t want them by this mythology, by these fictional characters.

Like Martha said, like keeping them away from a pond, because kids can drown in ponds, or keeping them away from mining pits was another one.

You might have these random holes in the ground from centuries of mining and you just don’t want the kids messing about there.

So you’ll say, Oh well yeah if you go over there Tommy Rowhead’s gonna get ya rather than just saying it could be dangerous.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Dangerous isn’t isn’t nearly as as frightening as Tommy Rawhead.

I think Right.

Dangerous sounds exciting when you’re a kid.

So your family was participating in a very old tradition.

Well Connie, thank you so much for sharing your memories with us.

We really appreciate it.

Thank you so much.

It was lovely talking to you both.

Take care.

Okay.

Take care.

Okay.

Bye.

You can call us toll free in the United States and Canada, eight seven seven nine two nine nine six seven three.

Email us words@waywordradio.org or find all of our past episodes and a lot of ways to reach us on our website at waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, how’s it going?

Super duper.

Who is this?

This is Chase from Jacksonville, Florida.

Hi, Chase.

Welcome to the program.

What’s on your mind?

Well, I had a question about something that we always would say when I was a kid I didn’t grow up in Florida, I grew up in Sacramento, California and we didn’t play rock, paper, scissors.

We played Ro Chambeau.

So it was the same kind of game.

We did throw out a rock, paper, or scissors, Oh interesting.

Yeah.

Did you pick up Rochambeau as a name for it from family or from schoolmates?

I just remember playing it, yeah, on the schoolyard in elementary school and I mean I our whole family called it that too.

Mm—

Yeah.

I mean I know now from history who Rochambeau is, but I just don’t know why we called it that.

Yeah.

Martha, it’s complicated, right?

Well it is, yeah.

And you mentioned Rochambeau from history.

You’re talking about the famous French general who was involved in the American Revolution.

Yeah.

And I think it had something to do maybe with the French Revolution too.

Mm.

And you so you’re wondering why you called it Rochambeau and other people called it rock, paper, scissors?

Yeah.

It’s it’s kind of always been on my mind.

I was just like, why did we call it that?

And then when we moved to Florida, everybody was doing rock, paper, scissors.

Yeah, that’s interesting.

I spent part of my childhood in central Florida and we called it scissors paper rock.

Different order.

That’s funny, yeah.

Yeah.

But the answer about Rochambeau is nobody knows.

Nobody knows why there’s a connection between this word and this choosing game.

Folklors call it a choosing game where kids or adults can sort of engage in in a kind of fairness ritual.

You know, you decide things depending on whether you throw out with your hand a fist or or something that looks like scissors or a flat hand for paper and decide who beats who.

Anyway, nobody knows.

And I don’t know that there’s a regional component to it either, do you grant?

No, no, I will say that it is probably American, and I will also say be warned that there are false histories of the word Rochambeau out there.

Some of them put forth by organizations that are devoted to Rochambeau.

They just made stuff up out of whole cloth as a gag and people believed it.

Yeah.

But it does look like people from Europe and and the United States started picking up on actually an earlier version that they encountered in Japan.

It was a game called Jan Ken Pond that was virtually identical to Rochambeau or Scissors Paper Rock.

But I’m wondering, have you ever played Rock Paper Scissors Lizard Spock?

No, but I can see how that would go though with the hand symbol there.

Yeah.

Live long and prosper.

Yeah, scissors cut paper.

Paper covers rock.

Rock crushes lizardard.

L, liizzard poisons Spock, Spock smashes scissors, scissors decapitate lizard, lizard eats paper, paper disproves Spock, Spock vaporizes rock and rock brace scissors.

You know that’s what’s funny about that is both Jan Kin Pon, which is Rock Scissors Paper, and another similar game first appear in a a journal of Japanese culture in the eighteen nineties.

But this other game, Martha, is basically translates as bug fist, but it’s got a snake in it.

And it’s it’s got a frog in it.

And it’s got a slug in it.

So it’s snake, frog, slug.

It it”ss really called mushiken.

The snake swallows the frog, the frog swallows the slug, and the slug poisons the snake.

Area.

And so a lot of my friends too, yeah, they would have different versions of the game as well.

Now that I remember that.

Well, in any case, Chase, thank you so much.

And if we find out more, you’ll hear it on the show.

All right.

All right, perfect.

Thank you very much to you both.

And it’s been enjoyable listening to you for these years.

Oh yeah thanks for sharing with us.

Bye bye.

All right cheers bye bye.

Sometimes we talk about games of choosing, games of counting, and we’d love to hear yours eight seven seven nine two nine nine six seven three.

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I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

Until next time, goodbye.

So long.