Singing Sand (Rebroadcast) - 26 August 2024

A Way with Words - language, linguistics, and callers from all over

A Way with Words

Education, Language Learning, Society & Culture

4.6 • 2.1K Ratings

🗓️ 26 August 2024

⏱️ 51 minutes

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Summary

Cat hair may be something you brush off, but cat hair is also a slang term that means “money.” In the same way, cat beer isn’t alcoholic — some people use cat beer as a joking term for “milk.” And imagine walking on a beach with a long stretch of shoreline. With each step, the ground makes a squeaking sound under your feet. There’s a term for the kind of sand that makes this yip-yip-yip sound. It’s called barking sand. Plus, a listener describes some of the English she heard in a small Alaskan coastal town. It’s a rich mixture of fishermen’s slang, along with the speech of Native people, and the Norwegians who settled there. All that, and a triple-threat puzzle, paternoster lakes, barely vs. nearly, comprised of vs. composed of, cark, kittenball, the pokey, happy as a boardinghouse pup, close, but no tomato, and plenty more. Read full show notes, hear hundreds of free episodes, send your thoughts and questions, and learn more on the A Way with Words website: https://waywordradio.org/contact. Be a part of the show: call 1 (877) 929-9673 toll-free in the United States and Canada; worldwide, call or text/SMS +1 (619) 800-4443. Email [email protected]. Copyright Wayword, Inc., a 501(c)(3) corporation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to Away with Words, the show about language and how we use it.
0:03.4	I'm Grant Barrett.
0:04.4	And I'm Martha Barnett.
0:05.8	Grant, this week I put on my flippers and mask and took a deep dive into one of our favorite books.
0:10.9	The Dictionary?
0:11.9	Close, it was Homeground, a guide to the American people. favorite books. The Dictionary? Close.
0:13.0	It was Home Ground, a Guide to the American Landscape.
0:16.0	Oh, what a lovely book.
0:17.0	Yes.
0:18.0	You'll recall that this is a book in which writers have gathered more than 800 terms that have to do with features of the landscape
0:26.2	particular to various places.
0:28.3	So these are words that are used in particular locales but not necessarily something that you would find in a regular dictionary.
0:36.6	And here's a great example from that book that I brought up from my deep dive,
0:44.0	Potter Noster Lake.
0:43.2	So Potter Noster is our father in Latin?
0:46.9	Yes, yes.
0:48.4	So I don't really know where to go from there.
0:50.7	Yeah, yeah, it's sort of puzzling, right? But this isn't an official name, this is a kind of lake, right? Yeah, so not a proper noun. Yeah, it's a series of circular lakes along a valley, like you're standing at one end of the valley
1:03.8	does it look like rosary beads yes that's exactly it that's exactly it as the
1:09.1	book says a Potter Noster Lake is also known as a glacial stairway, the result of a mountain glacier pushing down a valley scouring at various intervals a series of water basins connected by rapids and waterfalls.
1:23.0	Scouring a series of water basins.
1:26.0	Yeah, yeah.
	...

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