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Matt Katz: It is the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Welcome back, everybody. I'm Matt Katz, filling in for Brian today. For the last few minutes of the show, we're diving into etymology. Ever wonder where the words we use come from, why we call junk mail spam, or how the word cocktail ended up in a bartender's vocabulary? My next guest has spent years tracing the roots of language and talks about how words connect people. Martha Barnette is the co-host of the public radio show, A Way with Words, and author of the new book, Friends with Words: Adventures in Languageland. Martha, welcome back to WNYC.

Martha Barnette: Hey, Matt. Thank you. I'm glad to be here.

Matt Katz: Excellent. We're glad to have you. Since I mentioned spam a couple times in the intro and cocktail, van you just start us off by telling us where both of those words come from?

Martha Barnette: There are really good stories behind both of those words. Spam actually goes back to, some of your listeners may remember, the old Monty Python's Flying Circus show that aired back in the '70s. In 1970, there was this really goofy sketch where this couple goes out to breakfast and they ask what's on offer that day. The person behind the counter says, "We have egg and bacon, egg, sausage and bacon, egg and spam, egg, bacon and spam, egg, bacon, sausage and spam, spam, bacon, sausage and spam, spam, egg, spam, spam, bacon and spam."

Then, because this is a weird Monty Python sketch, there happened to be all these Vikings in the coffee shop, and they break into song and start singing about the wonders of spam. Now, this program was very popular, particularly among college students, and many of those college students were, of course, early adopters of computers. The first time that somebody actually sent an email to too many people or sent a message to too many people, it was natural that they would start calling it spam.

Matt Katz: How about that? Amazing. I did not know that. I love how you know that Monty Python sketch by heart. That was tremendous.

Martha Barnette: I committed that to memory.

Matt Katz: I could tell. Very impressive. Then cocktail, where's that word come from?

Martha Barnette: That one has a fascinating story, too. It's baffled etymologist for a long time, but our best guess is that the word cocktail originally applied to a horse with a docked tail, that is a horse with a tail that was cropped so short that the hair stood up prickly like the tail of a rooster or a cock. Unlike thoroughbreds, these horses were unpedigreed. They were working horses. Around that same time, in the 1800s or so, cocktails were similarly unpedigreed. They were mixed drinks. A lot of people thought, "Why would you dilute perfectly good booze with these other ingredients?" Over time, the term cocktail for this horse that was not a thoroughbred was applied to the drink.

Matt Katz: So interesting. I'll think about that the next time I have a cocktail and try to impress whoever I'm having a cocktail with, with that anecdote. There are so many anecdotes and vignettes, and histories in your book. It's just so interesting. You open with tracing your own language from growing up in Appalachia, studying ancient Greek in college, later co-hosting a radio show. What drew you to etymology? What sparked your interest and sustained your interest?

Martha Barnette: I had taken Latin when I was in junior high school, and I was really taken by that. My spark word in Latin was the word cras, C-R-A-S, which means tomorrow. I had this moment where I thought cras, procrastinate, could those words possibly be related? I went running to the dictionary, and sure enough, procrastinate comes from the Latin that literally means to put off till the day after tomorrow. When I was in college, I went to Vassar. When I was at Vassar, I thought, "Wouldn't it be cool to learn ancient Greek, sit around at night sipping warm tea and reading Homer, Plato, and Sappho, and all those folks in the original Greek?

What I found out was that ancient Greek was a whole lot harder, at least for me, in terms of language. Instead of flunking the class, I dropped it, went back home to Kentucky, and I was looking for a starving graduate student who could tutor me in ancient Greek. I was lucky enough to find an elderly professor of classics, a retired professor of classics, Dr. Leonard Koski, who was an immigrant from Latvia. He also happened to be a polyglot. He spoke at least a dozen languages, perfectly fluently, and he was really good in several others. He was also this born teacher who just could not stop teaching.

He taught me Greek on Monday nights, and every night of the week, he taught a different language. I took my boring book of vocabulary drills and exercises, and he just tossed it aside and said, "We're going to read Oedipus Rex," which I thought was nuts because I could barely get through elementary Greek, but he said, "Let's look at the word Oedipus." If you know the story of Oedipus, his feet were swollen because they were injured when he was a child. He said, "You have in English, do you not, the word edema?" "I said, yes, it means swelling." He said, "That's a connection. Oedipus and edema are related."

He started showing me how all these words in so many languages, from Russian to Italian, to German, to Irish, to English, to Greek, are related because they all spring from this prehistoric common ancestor. Nearly half the people in the world speak a language that grew from proto-Indo-European. He started showing me all these connections and the ways that you could just tease open a word and find out so much, and find out so many great stories like spam and cocktail.

Matt Katz: How cool. Listeners, we'd like to hear from you. Is there a word that you treasure? Maybe something from your childhood, your schooling, your region, a phrase you use all the time? Call or text us. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Martha, the book feels like a road trip through the country. You share stories of words based in the northeast, the south, Appalachia, the west. You have a section where you literally go state by state. You write that a giveaway that you're a New Yorker is calling out sick. Why is that, and what do other people say?

Martha Barnette: It's really interesting that in New York, y'all say, "I'm going to call out sick." Most of the rest of the country says, "Call in sick." That's a telltale sign.

Matt Katz: Funny. Is there a reason that you came across in your research about why New Yorkers say that phrase differently?

Martha Barnette: I did say call out sick, didn't I?

Matt Katz: Yes.

Martha Barnette: That that's what y'all say? We're not really sure why that's different, just as we're not sure why you all stand on line rather than the rest of us standing in line. One really interesting thing is that a lot of civil servants and firefighters, and police officers in New York will also talk about how they're going to bang out sick, which I think is really interesting. We really don't know why it is that there are these differences, but this linguistic diversity is something that my cohost Grant Barrette and I love to celebrate on A Way With Words.

Matt Katz: When you started your show, A Way With Words, you described yourself as a finger-wagging stickler about grammar, but then the show changed your own relationship with language. What did you come to appreciate?

Martha Barnette: Yes, it sure did. I'm an English teacher's kid, so I absorbed a lot of grammar just by osmosis. When I came to the show, I really was a stickler. I was what they call a constructivist. I thought that there were these certain grammatical rules that you had to abide by, but a lot of those so-called grammatical rules are things that 17th and 18th-century self-appointed grammarians just decided were correct. They wanted English to be more like Latin. To try to fit the swollen feet of English into the tight shoes of Latin grammar. For example, they would say, "You can't split an infinitive." In Latin, you certainly can't split an infinitive because it's all one word, and ditto in Old English.

Language changes all the time. That's one of the things I definitely learned hosting the show. Over time, I began to understand that some of those so-called grammatical rules are nonsense up with which I will not put. You notice how I try to avoid a preposition at the end of that sentence, which one does in Latin, but it sounds silly.

Matt Katz: Wait, we can end a sentence in a preposition? That's okay in English?

Martha Barnette: Oh, goodness, yes.

Matt Katz: [laughs] Excellent. Good to know. You do this detective work where you trace word origins. I had one question about a word that you told me about the origin of in the book, but then we also got a question from a texter who wants a etymology of the French word for grapefruit, pamplemousse. Do you happen to know the origin of that word? Pamplemousse.

Martha Barnette: Offhand, I don't, unless there's something about the sweetness in mousse.

Matt Katz: Oh, interesting.

Martha Barnette: [laughs] I don't know offhand, but I know it's one of my co-host's favorite words.

Matt Katz: [chuckles] Nice. I'll give you one that you do know, because you read about in the book. Dollar. The origin of dollar.

Martha Barnette: That's a twisted etymological path, but dollar is related to the German word thal, T-H-A-L, which means valley. That's one of those words where you can see connections with English, because the German word for valley, thal, is related to the English word, dale, D-A-L-E, which means the same thing. If you trace it back, there are lots of different words that have thal in them, like Rosenthal, Rose Valley. There was a place in Europe that was called Joachimsthal, which was Joachim Valley.

There was a mine there where people were minting silver. There was also a place where people were coining, taking the silver, and creating coins. From Joachimsthal, ultimately, it took a long path, but we ultimately get dollar. Oh, and another interesting thal is Neander Valley, which is Neanderthal, which is where you find those early, early hominid fossils.

Matt Katz: We have a caller, Joan, in Manhattan. Hi Joan. Thanks for calling in.

Joan: Hi. I'm fascinated also by etymology, but one of the other things that's fascinating is words that have survived, but only in one context. I don't know too many examples of that, but one is the expression one fell swoop, which practically everybody uses these days. Do you ever think of what the word fell means there? Fell as an adjective. We know what a swoop is. I guess it's you swoop down and pick something, but what's a fell swoop? You look it up and it will say it's obsolete, archaic, and it means fierce.

There's no other place I can think of in English that that has survived. Only in that one expression. I think most people use that expression, but have no idea what the word means. I did find it when I was reading Hamlet some time ago, and in Hamlet, Hamlet is talking to Horatio, and he's talking about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern deserve what they're going to get, which is to get killed in England. He said, "Just dangerous when the base nature, meaning the riffraff, right? Rosencrantz and Guildenstern come between the fell and incensed points of mighty opposites." In other words, when a king and a prince don't get in the middle, you could get killed.

The line would have the word fell in there like any other word, and the footnote, if you have an annotated Shakespeare, will say it means fierce. I don't know if there's any other place where you would ever find that fell used as an adjective. I don't think so.

Matt Katz: Thanks so much for the call, Joan.

Martha Barnette: I was going to say--

Matt Katz: We have 30 seconds left, Martha, but tell us.

Martha Barnette: I was going to say fell may be related to the word felon. It's an evil thing.

Matt Katz: How about that? On your show and in the course of writing this book, you just learn new stuff all the time about these words, and you get new questions that you probably never thought of.

Martha Barnette: Oh my gosh, I've been doing A Way With Words for 20 years now, and we have never run out of things to talk about because everybody wants to talk about word origins or slang or that weird thing their grandma used to say, and they don't know if it's her word or somebody else's, or some cute coinage that stuck around because your kids said it and your family just holds onto it. Endless supply of conversation.

Matt Katz: Oh, that's fantastic. Martha, thanks so much. Martha Barnette is the co-host of the public radio show, A Way With Words, author of the new book, Friends with Words: Adventures in Languageland. Martha, I appreciate you coming on.

Martha Barnette: Thanks, Matt. Glad to be here.

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