Tend to the Rat-Killin' - 6 June 2011

SUMMARY

Anagrams, rebuses, cryptograms, Jumble -- Martha and Grant swap stories about the games that first made them realize that playing with words and letters can be fun. Also this week, what's a jitney supper and where do you eat graveyard stew? The hosts explain the origin of the term “hang fire” and why Alaskans sound like they're from the Midwest, and take on a debate about whether an egregious falsehood is a bald-faced lie or a bold-faced lie.

FULL DETAILS

What games first made you realize that words and letters make great playthings? Martha describes puzzling, as a child, over the odd combination of letters, F-U-N-E-X, until she finally figured out the joke. Grant talks about discovering anagrams as a youngster, and how word puzzles in the newspaper became a daily ritual.

An office worker in Indianapolis is mystified when a British colleague sends an email telling her to "hang fire." The hosts explain the expression has to do with faulty firearms.
 
"Call up to 24 hours in advance to make a reservation." Do those instructions mean you can call until 24 hours before the deadline, or that you should call within 24 hours of it. When a San Diego listener assumed it was the former, she had an unpleasant surprise.

Did you know the POTUS (President of the United States) has a BOTUS? Grant explains what a BOTUS is.

Quiz Guy Greg Pliska's game this week is "Name Dropping."  The answer for each set of clues will be a word that has a common first name hidden somewhere in it; when that name's removed, the remaining letters spell a new word. For example, the first clue is "one of the seven deadly sins," the second is "the grain consumed by one-fifth of the world's inhabitants." Subtract the latter from the former, and you get a woman's name.

A Charlottesville, Virginia, caller says that when she was a child and recovering from an illness, her mother fed her a kind of milk toast she called graveyard stew. Is that strange name unique to her family?

During the health care debate in Congress, there was lots of talk about an up-or-down vote. A Montana listener finds this expression annoying.  What's wrong with plain old "vote"?

In youth slang, "totes" is short for "totally." Grant talks about new, lengthened version of this slang shortening.

A Carlsbad, California, couple has a running debate over whether an egregious whopper is correctly called a bold-faced lie or a bald-faced lie.

The Library of Congress is archiving the entire content of Twitter. Grant explains why that's a gold mine for language researchers like David Bamman at Tufts University. You can see some of the results Bamman's compiled at Lexicalist.com.

http://www.lexicalist.com/

What do you eat at a jitney supper? Jitney?

Why do people from Alaska sound like they're from the Midwest?

A caller who grew up in Arkansas says his mother used a colorful expression instead of "mind your own business," which was “tend to your own rat-killing.” Grant talks about that and a similar phrase, go on with your rat-killing, meaning "Finish what you were saying."

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