A Nevada high-schooler wonders about the slang terms cap meaning "to lie" and no cap, meaning I'm not lying  Many people associate it with the Future & Young Thug song "No Cap." Actually, the expression goes back to the 1500s, when you might cap an anecdote, quotation, or verse as part of a verbal jousting game. By the 1800s, capping was a way of competing by telling a better joke than someone else, and by the 1940s, Black Americans were using the verb to cap when trading ever more exaggerated insults, otherwise known as the dozens or the dirty dozens. In that way, capping became a synonym for "stretching the truth." http://waywordradio.org

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What the fox says may be a mystery, but we do know that dogs bark differently around the world. In China, for example, they say not bow-wow but wang wang.  Also, the story behind the British tradition of scrumping. It's not a middle school dance craze, and it has nothing to do with beer -- or does it? Plus, recipe vs. receipt, mash vs. press, housing a beer, all bollixed up, and empty heads make weary bones.

Wet Brick (full episode)

Robin in Jacksonville, Florida, grew up using the word unthaw as in unthaw the frozen hamburger until someone told her that she should instead simply say thaw to mean "allow something frozen to come to room temperature." Is it wrong to say unthaw? It's less common and less formal than plain old thaw, but the word unthaw has been in use for at least four centuries. In the 1600s, the prefix un- was added as an emphasizer to several words, including the adjectives boundless, helpless, remorseless, and witless to form unboundless, unhelpful, unremorseless, and unwitless as a way of intensifying their meaning. Similarly, verbs such as ravel, peel, loosen can be rendered as unravel, unpeel, and unloosen. The point is that the prefix un- doesn't always negate -- sometimes it serves to emphasize. http://waywordradio.org

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Eels, orts, and Wordle!  Sweden awarded its most prestigious literary award to a book about . . . eels. The Book of Eels reveals the mysterious life cycle of this sea creature and its significance for famous figures from Aristotle to Sigmund Freud.  Plus, what's an ort? It's the last bit of food left on a dinner plate -- and whether or not you finish it can be a matter of manners. Also, an audio puzzle inspired by the popular game Wordle. Harder than it sounds! Plus ginnels, twittens, nerds, Not on your tintype!, piling Pelion upon Ossa, things to say after a sneeze, and a poem about elevators. Ta-da! http://waywordradio.org

A Way with Words

Deep-Fried Air (Full Episode)

Our conversation about the jargon of elevator design and maintenance inspired listener La Donna Ourada to write a moving poem called "Terminal Landing," about how riding a metaphor can be a metaphor for life. http://waywordradio.org

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Quiz Guy John Chaneski's puzzle is inspired by the popular letter-guessing game Wordle, specifically that next-to-last guess before the real answer is found. For example, if the penultimate guess is WAIST, which two letters might be switched to form the winning word? http://waywordradio.org

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If an older man and woman spend lots of time together, going to family gatherings and the like, but they're NOT dating, what do you call their relationship? Best friends? Dear friends? Or . . . something else? And a marathon runner who's crossed 31 states on foot talks about the odd phrases people use when giving directions. Plus, handegg, victuals and vittles, nernees and farsees, take a decision vs. make a decision, and the growing popularity of text tattoos.

Not Quite A Boyfriend (full episode)

Centuries ago, monks who took a vow of silence still had to communicate about routine matters, from gardening to equipment repair. So they developed their own sign language, with hundreds of gestures for various words and ideas. Plus, how do speakers of different languages identify similar colors such as red, yellow, and blue in various languages? It's complicated! And: you don't really need those little rivets on your blue jeans, do you? Those flat metal disks are leftovers from an earlier time, when jeans were worn by mine workers and cowboys. There's a word for decorative elements that no longer serve a practical purpose: skeuomorphs. All that, along with butter of antimony, vein vs. vain, sugar of lead, euchred figs, two bits, mess and gaum, an apt nickname for a garbage disposal, and a quiz about family secrets! http://waywordradio.org

Primary Colors (Full Episode)

How do we agree on how to name various colors? A famous study in the 1960s, Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution (Bookshop|Amazon by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay found that if a language had only two color terms, they were almost always for "black" and "white."  Another fantastic resource on this topic is a book we mentioned in another conversation about color, is The Secret Lives of Color (Bookshop|Amazon) ​​​by cultural historian Kassia St. Clair. http://waywordradio.org

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Butter of antimony, blue vitriol, flowers of zinc are terms used for centuries by alchemists, now replaced by the scientific names antimony trichloride, cupric sulfate, and powdered zinc oxide. In his delightful memoir Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood (Bookshop|Amazon) Oliver Sacks explains how the standardization of such chemical names by the French scientist Antoine Lavoisier and others provides a better understanding of how these substances interact with others. The trade-off, however, is losing a bit of poetry along the way. Sacks is also the author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. (Bookshop|Amazon)http://waywordradio.org

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After our earlier conversation with Amanda in Evansville, Indiana, whose family refers to their garbage disposal as George, a listener shares his own family's term for this device: the spoon sharpener. http://waywordradio.org

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Quiz Guy John Chaneski brings a bunch of brain teasers that he calls "Family Secrets." It's inspired by the hit song "We Don't Talk About Bruno" from the Disney film Encanto. What about the secrets other families refuse to discuss? For example, in Roman mythology, the chief god's wife was quite jealous of his affairs, which means . . . ? http://waywordradio.org

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Sure, there's winter, spring, summer, and fall. But the seasons in between have even more poetic names. In Alaska, greenup describes a sudden, dramatic burst of green after a long, dark winter. And there are many, many terms for a cold snap that follows the first taste of spring: blackberry winter, redbud winter, onion snow, and whippoorwill storm, to name a few. Plus, the family that plays trivia games at home may end up cheering for their teen in high-school competitions. Also, playful prayers at the dinner table: Amen, Brother Ben! Pass the butter, let's begin! All that, plus retten up, push the envelope, with bells on, self-deprecating vs. self-depreciating, taffy pockets, pigeon pair, the end of pea time, a puzzle about pairs of words. Here we go, laughing and scratching! http://waywordradio.org

Pushing the Envelope (Full Episode)

Angel says her grandfather, who was from Manning, South Carolina, was a pastor who used to repeat the phrase Amen, Brother Ben, shot a rooster, killed a hen. This expression can express affirmation, and can also serve as a quick, joking way to say grace before a meal, including Amen, Brother Ben, shot a rooster, killed a hen, rooster died, chicken cried, and everybody was mortified and Amen, Brother Ben, shot a rooster, killed a hen, rooster died, chicken cried, and all were satisfied. Shorter versions that get the prayer over with even sooner are Amen, Brother Ben, pass the butter, let's begin! And Amen, Brother Ben, back your ears and dive in! http://waywordradio.org

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Quiz Guy John Chaneski wants you to think of two-word phrases in which both words end in the letters ER. For example, engineer Lonnie Johnson invented a popular toy that might be described as "an overachieving water gun." What is it? http://waywordradio.org

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Do you refer to your dog or cat as "somebody"? As in: When you love somebody that much, you don't mind if they slobber. In other words, is your pet a somebody or a something? Also, for centuries, there was little consistency in the way many English words were spelled. But long before the printing press helped to standardize spelling, powerful historical forces were already shaping how those words looked on the page. Plus, Irish words that are as handy as they are fun to say: bockety, which describes something wobbly, and segotia, a fond term for "friend." And ship vs. yacht, rope vs. line, the New Yorker vs. the The New Yorker, evening vs. afternoon, how to pronounce hammock, a wild and woolly animal quiz, "talking cheese" in German, and an Iranian-American playwright on the challenges of learning another language. http://waywordradio.org

You Talk Like a Sausage (Full Episode)

The editors of the Oxford English Dictionary recently added several Irish English terms. One of them is segotia, which means "friend." There's an entry for this word, also spelled segocia, in Grant's own book, The Official Dictionary of Unofficial English (Bookshop|Amazon) James Joyce used another version of this word in Finnegans Wake (Bookshop|Amazon):  skeowsha. The etymology of segotia is unclear, although some have suggested that it derives from Irish Seo Dhuitse, meaning "here you are." Another Irish word, ciotóg, means "left-handed." Originally it carried a far more negative connotation, as do several words in various languages alluding to the "left hand." Our word sinister, for example, is from Latin for "left." http://waywordradio.org

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The new play English by Iranian-American playwright Sanaz Toossi powerfully evokes the challenges and rewards and changes involved in struggling to gain fluency in another language. Reviewing the play in the The New Yorker, Alexandra Schwartz memorably observes that for someone trying to learn another tongue, one's personality "dissolves in an unfamiliar language like a sugar cube dropped into a cup of tea." http://waywordradio.org

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Quiz Guy John Chaneski's puzzle is about animal anatomy, specifically nouns and adjectives formed by combining the name of an animal with another word. For example, what zoologically-related noun is associated with the idea of  "a high, close-fitting collar used especially for sweaters"? http://waywordradio.org

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Ever wonder what medieval England looked and sounded like? In Old English, the word hord meant "treasure" and your wordhord was the treasure of words locked up inside you. A delightful new book uses the language of that period to create a vivid look at everyday life. Plus, a shotgun house is long and narrow with no hallway -- just one room leading into the next. It's an architectural style with a long history stretching from Africa to Haiti and into the American South. And: say you accidentally cut someone off in traffic, and you know it's your fault. What's a quick, clear way to communicate that you're sorry? NO texting allowed! All that, and feaking, feather merchant, gradoo, spondulicks, echar un zorrito, tocayo and cueto, a take-off quiz, and an onomatopoeic Old English word for "sneeze." http://waywordradio.org

Word Hoard (Full Episode)

In Mexico, echar un coyotito -- literally, "throw a little coyote" -- means "to take a short nap." In Venezuela, it's more common to talk about a quick snooze using echar un zorrito, the word zorrito being a diminutive for zorro, or "fox." http://waywordradio.org

1593-Zorrito

This week on "A Way with Words": If you take up texting and social media late in life, there's a lot to learn! A 20-something wants advice getting her dad up to speed on memes, Instagram, and animated images. Plus, when you're on a long road trip, what do you call that one driver you keep passing on the freeway, or who sets the pace for your car mile after mile? Road buddy? Some call them Follow Johns. Plus, the linguistic reason why some people say "SANG-wich" instead of "SAND-wich." It's a mouthful -- literally! And: thalweg, stick season, quare, jimmycane, the many Spanish words that derive from the Nahuatl language, camera and camaraderie, cada chango en su mecate, a puzzle all about the letter E, the connection between dollar and Neanderthal, umarell, and menos burros, más elotes. http://waywordradio.org

Familiar Strangers (Full Episode)

You've seen this guy before: the older gent who strolls around at construction sites, asking questions, offering suggestions, and kibitizing about the activities there. The Italian dictionary Lo Zingarelli recently added the handy neologism umarell, or "little man," which refers to such a person, noting that he roams around mostly con le mani dietro la schiena, "with his hands behind his back." (Amazon) http://waywordradio.org

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What did the grapes say when the elephant stepped on them? Apologies in advance for the answer. http://waywordradio.org

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Quiz Guy John Chaneski has crafted this puzzle with eeeeeeeease. In fact, all the answers are combinations of words that include only one vowel sound -- a long E. For example, suppose the clue is It's what some people say the moon is made of, and who's to say it's not? What's the answer? http://waywordradio.org

1594-Word-Quiz-Long-E

We tend to take the index of a book for granted, but centuries ago, these helpful lists were viewed with suspicion. Some even worried that indexes would harm reading comprehension! A witty new book tells the story. Plus, the Latin term bona fides [BOHN-ah FYDZ] was adopted into English to mean "good faith" or "authentic credentials." But there's more than one way to pronounce it. And: say you're off at summer camp, and there's a container in the dining hall labeled ort bucket. What will you find if you look inside? Also: crisp, with one foot in the milk bucket, a brain teaser about nicknames, French gestures, Dutchman, million-dollar family, dungarees, scared water, and nuking food. http://waywordradio.org

All That and a Bag of Chips (Full Episode)

Brendan from Lewes, Delaware, is eager to move up the career ladder, and has been telling people he seeks a path to ascension within a company. Is ascension the right word to use in this case? A better choice would be advancement. Generally Ascension refers to the biblical story of the ascent of Christ into Heaven. Ascension was adapted into English from Latin ascensio, meaning "a going up." The word ascent came later, formed by analogy with descent, which came into English via Old French descente, meaning "genealogical lineage," derived from Latin descendere "to go down." http://waywordradio.org

1595-Caller-Brendan-Ascension

Carolyn in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, has been teaching her grandchildren some conventional French gestures to tease their grandfather. She's using the book Beaux Gestes: A Guide to French Body Talk by renowned French scholar Laurence Wylie, with photographs by Rick Stafford. (Bookshop|Amazon) For example, pointing to one's eye, or even using a finger to pull down one's lower eyelid, and saying Mon oeil! expresses doubt or refusal to acknowledge what's been said. http://waywordradio.org

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Why do we describe someone or something very special as all that and a bag of chips? This casual saying appears to have been popularized by a 1991 newspaper story about new slang. http://waywordradio.org

1595-Caller-Kyla-All-That-And-A-Bag-Of-Chips

The word dungarees is a relic of the British colonial presence in India. Dungri was the name applied to a durable cotton cloth exported from India to England in the 1600s, and used to make sails and tents. Dungaree comes from the Marathi term Ḍoṅgarī Killā, or "Hill Fort," the name of a fortification and port near Mumbai, where the cloth was originally traded. By the middle of the 19th century, this material was also used for sturdy work trousers called dungarees. Jeans were originally made of jean, a fabric  from Genoa, Italy, and denim comes from French serge de Nîmes, or "serge from Nîmes," a town in Southern France, which produced it. http://waywordradio.org

1595-Caller-Madeline-Dungarees

Marianne from Valdosta, Georgia, is stumped about how to pronounce the term bona fides. It means "authentic credentials," as in literary bona fides, and comes from Latin bona fides, literally "good faith."In the United States, it's usually pronounced BOHN-a FYE-DEEZ and BOHN-a-fydz. However, if at all possible, it's best to avoid it altogether; as a Latin term adopted whole into English, chances are it will rub someone the wrong way. Bona fides literally means "good faith." http://waywordradio.org

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Nathan from San Antonio, Texas, reports that his parents used to use the word crisp to mean "tired" or "cranky." This usage seems to have originated on U.S, college campuses in the 1970s. http://waywordradio.org

1595-Caller-Nathan-Crisp

Working for a furniture maker in New England, Steven and his co-workers used the word Dutchman to denote a high-quality patch to disguise an imperfection in the wood. In an article in the Journal of American Speech, historian Archie Green notes that many similar terms have arisen amid a mingling of immigrants in the labor force. Dutchman in this sense, for example, may reflect the superb craftsmanship of German woodworkers, the German Deutsch or "German," often being adapted into English as Dutch. http://waywordradio.org

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Our list of words for stingy people just grew longer, thanks to a contribution from Rick in San Antonio, Texas: When he lived in Brazil, he learned the expression mão-de-vaca, literally "hand of a cow" and pão-duro, literally "hard bread." The former reflects the idea that someone who has a cow's hand is literally "tight-fisted," and the latter may suggest someone so miserly they hoard their bread, taking tiny nibbles at it for so long that it gets rock-hard. http://waywordradio.org

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Do you answer the phone with a word or phrase that's a little out of the ordinary? Readers of our email newsletter had some surprising answers to that question. One says that just for fun, he likes to answer with a cheery Front desk! A reader in Ithaca, New York, reports her grandfather used to pick up a ringing phone and say Commence! And a Salisbury, North Carolina, woman was known for picking up the phone and saying All right! http://waywordradio.org

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The wittily named Index, A History of The by Dennis Duncan is a comprehensive and engaging history of that part of books most of us take for granted. (Bookshop|Amazon) http://waywordradio.org

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As members of The Andy Griffith Show Rerun Watchers Club know, Andy sometimes shook his head and declared, You're a bird in this world, meaning that someone was unique or otherwise remarkable. The expression appears to have originated with the show's writers or perhaps with Griffith himself. http://waywordradio.org

1396-Caller-Iris-Bird-In-This-World

What's YOUR choice for the Word of the Year for 2011? What word or phrase best sums up the ideas, events, and themes that speakers of English have been talking about? Grant shares some of his picks. And speaking of picks, why do football commentators seem to love the term pick-six? Also, great quotations from writers, the meaning of such Britishisms as cheeky and naff, the intentionally misspelled and mispronounced word defulgaty and a discussion of whether the term ladies is offensive. And does the insect called an earwig really crawl into people's ears at night?

Bah, Humblebrag! (Full Episode)

The highly specialized vocabulary of people who work outdoors, like farmers and fishermen, can bring us closer to the natural world. Also, a woman who trains sled dogs discusses the words she uses to communicate with her animals. You may be surprised to hear that "Mush!" is not one of them! Finally, if you're getting ready to go rock climbing, you'll first want the beta--a word with roots in the technology of video recording. Plus church key, browse line, smeuse, nitnoy, mommick, zawn, zwer, boom dog, and I think my pig is whistling. http://waywordradio.org

Gee and Haw (Full Episode)

The first recorded use of the phrase fight the good fight is in the Biblical book of Timothy. http://waywordradio.org

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Emilia from Chicago, Illinois, says a co-worker used the phrase get the Motts to describe the feeling of second-hand embarrassment she feels for someone when watching a cringeworthy performance. The phrase I got the Motts became a catchphrase in the early 1980s thanks to a commercial for Motts applesauce. German has a word for that "uncomfortable feeling of shame or embarrassment for someone else": Fremdscham. http://waywordradio.org

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A Way with Words is a fun and funny public radio program about language examined through history, culture, and family. Its mission is to change the way you think about language. The program is heard by broadcast and podcast across the United States and around the world by more than a quarter-million listeners each week. It's produced by Wayword, Inc., a nonprofit whose mission is to promote lifelong learning, better human communication, and the value of a thing well-said or well-written. Call or write with your language questions at any time: (877) 929-9673 (toll-free in the US and Canada) or just email us: words@waywordradio.org.

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