One Space or Two (rebroadcast) - 5 September 2011

SUMMARY

Is typing two spaces after a period "totally, completely, utterly, and inarguably wrong?" Martha and Grant disagree. Also, is the language of the movie "True Grit" historically accurate? Also, shut your pie-hole, Southern grammar, Oh my Lady Gaga, and a little town called Podunk.

FULL DETAILS

How many spaces go after a period?  Your schoolteacher may have taught you to use two, but others strongly disagree.

 http://www.slate.com/id/2281146/

Shut your piehole! means "Shut your mouth!" Need more slang terms for the mouth? For starters, there's potato trap, tater trap, tatty trap, bun trap, gingerbread trap, kissing trap, fly trap, rattle trap, baconhole, and cakehole.

Where is Podunk?  Grant explains that a columnist in the 1800s used the name for his series called "Life in the Small Town of Podunk," referring to a generic backwoods American town.

A listener shares a phrase he learned in Peru that translates as "more lost than a hard-boiled egg in ceviche." It describes someone who's lost or clueless.

Quiz Guy John Chaneski has a game worthy of the Saturday puzzle called "Cryptic Crosswords".

Is the formal language in "True Grit" (2010) historically accurate?  The hosts discuss why the Coen brothers would do away with contractions to set a tone for the movie.

A transplant from Zimbabwe finds the word irregardless annoying and ungrammatical. Grant explains that regardless of its status, "irregardless" is needlessly redundant.

The phrase oh, my goodness may be a dated way to express surprise or disbelief.  A listener asks for a contemporary replacement.

Multiple modals, as in the phrase "I thought y'all may would have some more of them," have their own logic and are well understood by many in the American South.

The Database of Multiple Modals compiled by Paul Reed and Michael Montgomery is here.

http://casdemo.cas.sc.edu/modals_d/

If you call someone a card, it means they're funny or quick-witted.  Grant and Martha discuss the metaphors inspired by the language of playing cards.

What do you serve to a lawyer coming to dinner?  A listener shares her riddle for the "What Would You Serve" game?

Have you been asked to trip the light fantastic?  This phrase, meaning "dance the night away", dates back to a poem by John Milton from 1640.

Martha shares the German slang term niveaulimbo, meaning "a limbo of standards".

 Why is the word pound abbreviated lb.?  A listener from Tijuana, Mex., learns that the answer relates to his native Spanish as well as the Latin term for "weighing."

Martha reads a love sonnet by the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. Here's the text of the original Spanish, with an English translation by Mark Eisner.

http://www.redpoppy.net/poem37.php

And here's a lovely audio rendering of the poem in Spanish.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJhxNhy3BVA

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