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Bunny Trails: A Word History Podcast
Episode 100:
Episode 100 Celebration!
Record Date:
February 16, 2021
Air Date: February
17, 2021
Intro
Shauna:
Welcome to Bunny
Trails, a whimsical adventure of idioms and other turns of phrase.
I’m Shauna Harrison
Dan:
And I’m Dan Pugh
Every week, we take
an idiom, or other turn of phrase, and try to tell the story from it’s entry
into the English language, to how it’s used today.
This week we are
celebrating our 100th episode!
Applause
That was a
soundboard, not real. I always feel like laugh tracks and applause tracks are
rather disingenuous, so I wanted to be clear :-)
But onto our 100th
episode!
Shauna: First things
first, we have to thank you, our listeners, for making 100 episodes possible.
And we’d especially like to thank our Patrons over the years, including our
logomorphology interns Pat Rowe and Mary Lopez, as well as our very first Patron
who is still going to this day, Charlie Moore.
Dan: If you want to join
Pat, Mary, Charlie, and many others, head over to patreon.com/bunnytrailspod to
support this educational artform for as little as $1 a month.
Shauna, do you want
to kick off the fun? What’s one of your favorite phrases and why do you love
it?
Shauna:
Choosing favorites is
so tough! But here’s one phrase I love:
“I feel a chill as
though someone’s just walked over my grave.”
I think what’s great
about this phrase is that it’s so evocative. I have a fondness for the strange
and macabre and the thought of one’s grave being walked upon is… well, creepy.
In the most wonderful way!
There are similar
phrases from Dutch folklore, French writings, and other regions of the world.
The most popular origin story is that people have long-held the belief that if
you feel a shiver or chill run down your spine or you get a sudden sense of
foreboding - it meant that someone had just walked on the ground in just the
spot which was to be your future final resting place.
According to Oxford
English Dictionary, the first time this is seen in print is in
1738 in Jonathan Swift’s
· A complete collection of genteel and ingenious conversation, according to the
most polite mode and method now used at court, and in the best companies of
England
Miss [shuddering.]
Lord! there's somebody walking over my Grave.
1853 Zanoni by
Edward Bulwer Lytton
“You must often have felt, gentlemen,
each and all of you, especially when sitting alone at night, a strange and
unaccountable sensation of coldness and awe creep over you; your blood curdles,
and the heart stands still; the limbs shiver; the hair bristles; you are afraid
to look up, to turn your eyes to the darker corners of the room; you have a
horrible fancy that something unearthly is at hand; presently the whole spell,
if I may so call it, passes away, and you are ready to laugh at your own
weakness.
A little further on,
a gentleman adds,
“According to one of our national
superstitions,” said Mervale, the Englishman who had first addressed Glyndon,
“the moment you so feel your blood creep, and your hair stand on end, some one
is walking over the spot which shall be your grave.”
The character who
gave the blood-curdling description goes on to discuss many similar tales and
beliefs from cultures around the world.
1859 Henry Kingsley · The
recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn
Sometimes somebody would walk over my
grave, and give me a creeping in the back.
Isn’t that just
deliciously eerie?
My favorite modern
usage of this phrase?
The 1993 movie
Tombstone in which Val Killmer plays Doc Holliday, who gets this fabulous quote,
I’m your Huckleberry. … Why Johnny
Ringo. You look like somebody just walked over your grave.”
Coincidentally, the scene Doc Holliday and Johnny Ringo first meet includes another of my favorite phrases… In Vino Veritas.
Next up, let’s move
to our friend in podcasting Moxie LaBouche from the Your Brain on Facts Podcast
Moxie: Hey, it's Moxie from Your Brain On Facts
sticking my nose back in into the language podcast world to tell Shauna and
Dan, Mazel Tov on their big one oh oh. I wouldn't want to detract from their
excellent etymological expeditions through our wondrous world of words. But I'm
going to.
There are
lots of nonverbal communications out there, from formal sign languages to the
whistling languages.
<Sample
clip of a person communicating in a whistling language>
Moxie: Whistling languages? Never heard of
them, you might say. Well, there are more than 70 of them. In fairness, they're
not truly languages, in an According To Hoyle sense, but a fascinating way to
speak a language from a long way off. Historically, whistled languages have
almost always developed in remote mountainous villages or in densely forested
areas, where environmental conditions require some form of communication to
travel long distances. In addition to traveling well, as far as six miles or 10
kilometers, whistles don't echo as much as shouting does, so you're less likely
to scare away potential prey if your hunting and whistles don't get as
distorted as words can. Plus they're free. Unlike using a horn or a drum, you
don't need to own or carry anything to communicate all the way across the
valley. Researcher Julien Meyer hypothesizes that whistling might actually have
been a precursor to spoken language, a sort of musical proto language.
According to Meyer, regions of the world with tonal languages like Mandarin,
tend to produce whistled languages that replicate the melodies of the spoken
sentences. Other languages like Spanish and Turkish, produce whistled versions
that imitate the resonance of different vowel sounds, and use rests or breaks
in place of the consonants.
<Clip of
a person using a whistling language and then translating the sounds into spoken
syllables>
Moxie: Whistled languages can also reveal
how our brains process language. It's traditionally been understood that the
left hemisphere does most of the work when it comes to processing language. But
recent studies have suggested that whistled languages are handled equally by
both hemispheres.
In the
mountains of northern Turkey, their whistling language, known as bird language,
is clinging on in a single village Kuskoy.
<Sample
clip of the bird language in Kuskoy>
Moxie: Though the bird language had once
been prevalent throughout the mountain region, it's only spoken mostly by
shepherds today. And that's because they can't get cell signal. No joke. Text
messaging has really threatened to completely obviate the bird language. But
even though fewer people in each generation learn it, it's still important to
the people of Kuskoy, culturally. They hold a bird language festival every
year, and UNESCO recognizes bird language on its list of intangible cultural
heritage in need of urgent safeguarding.
In the
Himalayas, the Hmong people use whistling language for workaday things like
farming and hunting topics, but they can also use it in a form of courtship.
Though increasingly rare, boys would whistle their favorite poem when walking
through neighboring villages. If he caught a girl's fancy, she would whistle
back and the flirtation was on. Some couples would even come up with their own
personal code within the whistling language, so nobody else can understand
their breezy DMs.
Thank you, Dan, and Shauna for inviting me to be part of the festivities. I look forward to being on episode 200. Remember, my name is Moxie and this is Your Brain On Facts.
Dan: Thank you Moxie.
200 seemed quite daunting back in April of 2018 when we started this show, but
now it seems totally do-able!
Next up are Aven and
Mark from Endless Knot…
Aven: Hi, I'm Aven
Mark: and I'm Mark.
Aven: And we're from The
Endless Knot, a podcast about etymology, about language, about history, about
cool stuff and the connections between all of those things.
Mark: An we are delighted
to help celebrate the hundredth episode of Bunny Trails. You guys are awesome.
Congratulations!
Aven: Phrase, we decided to
go with more than one phrase because we're not good at following directions,
but we chose as sort of the basic phase "between Scylla and Charybdis".
And then some words or phrases that
mean about the same thing and are similar to it, like "between a rock and
a hard place" or "between the devil and the deep blue sea". So
let me start with Scylla and Charybdis. And we chose this because it has a nice
classical etymology and our podcast talks a lot about the ancient world and the
medieval world, so let me give you a couple of words about Scylla and
Charybdis. These are two mythological creatures that turn up in the Odyssey.
That's the earliest discussion of them we have. And in the Odyssey, as
Odysseus is telling the story about the many trials and tribulations he had in
trying to get home from Troy when he was lost in the ocean , he describes at
one point going past two terrifying dangers on the ocean.
"There lives Scylla. Howling and
barking horribly, her voice is puppy like, but she is dangerous. Even a God
would be afraid of her. She has 12 dangling legs and six long necks with a
gruesome head on each and in each face three rows of crowded teeth pregnant
with death. ... She snatches one man with each mouth from off each dark-prowed
ship."
And then across from it, so close
that you could shoot an arrow from Scylla to the other side is Charybdis.
" Beneath, divine Charybdis sucks black water down. Three times a day she
spurts it up, three times she glugs it down."
And from that comes the idea that
you're between Scylla and Charybdis, two impossible dangers. If you avoid one,
you run into the other. So Scylla is this monster. In art she's depicted
as fish tailed with a cluster of canine fore-parts surrounding her waist, dogs'
heads around her nether regions . So that's Scylla and then Charybdis is this
Whirlpool and also described as a daughter of Pontus and Gaia, that is the sea
and earth So I'll stop there, but I have one last thing I want to tell you that
the Greeks had a verb or one Greek had a verb, ekcharubidzo, which meant to
swallow like Charybdis. So to gulp something down just like the whirlpool did.
And that is the mythological origin of the phrase "between Scylla and
Charybdis".
Mark: And that phrase is
used in English at least as early as the 16th century. The etymology of
Charybdis, the Whirlpool, is unknown; Scylla might be related to the Greek
verb, "skyllein" to tear from the Proto Indo European root *sker- to
cut, which among many other words is the source of the words shore and skerry,
S K E R R Y, which means "isolated rock in the sea". First used an
English in the 1610s, but from the old Norse word "sker". Now, moving
on to the very similar phrase "between the devil and the deep blue
sea". The origin of this phrase is unknown, but perhaps nautical, as you
might guess. The word devil might refer in fact to the seam on a ship's hull,
though, it probably is just devil, but let's pursue this. There is a sense of
the word devil. That means "any of various seams in the planking of a
wooden ship, especially either of the long seams running along the keel, which
are considered difficult to caulk". It's first recorded in 1857. this
particular use of the word devil. Therefore this might thereby be connected
with the idiom, "the devil to pay". And the full expression is
"the devil to pay and no pitch hot " which is recorded in writing
since at least 1500. It means service expected and no one is ready to perform
it. So the word, paying is another word for filling a seam. In other words,
doing that job of caulking, but the phrase "devil and the dead
sea" is recorded as early as 1601 and "devil and the deep sea"
recorded as early as 1627.
So the dates for the phrase seem to go
way before this use of the word devil, unless it's just not recorded for quite
a long time. The word devil comes ultimately from Greek "diabolus",
meaning slanderer, which is made up of "dia", meaning
"across" and the verb "ballein", "to throw",
think English, "ballistics". And it's a loan translation of the,
Hebrew source of the word, "Satan". "Deep" on the other
hand comes from the Proto Indo European root *deub-, meaning "deep or
hollow", which by the way is also the source of two Greek serpentine,
mythical monsters, Python, and Typhon.
The word "sea" originally
seems to have meant "Lake" and early on the words for sea and Lake
seem to have been used rather indiscriminately. So they didn't make a strong
distinction between those two types of bodies of water. But the etymology of
the word "sea" is somewhat uncertain. It may be related to the word
"soul " because of the belief that souls came from and return to a
sacred Lake.
And ultimately they may come from a
Germanic root *saiwaz that means sea or Lake, which might come from the
proto Germanic route *sihwanan which means "percolate or filter",
which would then come from the Proto Indo European root *seikw- to flow
out, also the source of the words, "desiccate" and "sack",
as in a dry Sherry. Or the root may come from the Proto Indo European root
*sai- , which means "suffering", which had the suffixed form *sai-wo-
meaning “to be fierce, or afflict”. And that could be the sense of the idea of
the sea kind of a fierce thing.
Also the source of the Latin word
"saevus", which means "wild" or "fierce". And of
course the phrase "between the devil and the deep blue sea " is also
well-known from a song, the title of a song written by Ted Koehler and Harold
Arlen , first recorded by Cab Calloway in 1931. But my favorite version, I
think is the posthumously released recording by George Harrison on his album Brainwashed.
Now, finally the similar phrase
"between a rock and a hard place". This one is a more recent
expression from the early 20th century. The earliest citation is in the year
1921 in an American dialect society journal in which they record the
phrase as "to be between a rock and a hard place, to be bankrupt , common
in Arizona in recent panics, sporadic in California." Now these recent
panics seem to refer to the US bankers panic of 1907, which was damaging to the
mining and railroad industries of the Western States. And this kicked off a
huge labor dispute problem between the copper mining companies and the mine
workers in places such as Bisbee, Arizona. They organized into unions, but
their demands were refused and the workers were deported to New Mexico.
So perhaps this expression
"between a rock and a hard place" it may be the choice of those
workers between the hard underpaid work at the rock face or poverty.
Aven: And that's a very
quick rundown of three related phrases. We hope it contributes to your
celebratory anniversary episode. Again, congratulations to Bunny Trails
from the Endless Knot your fellow podcast in word nerdery
Mark: Woo hoo! Word nerds
unite!
Shauna: We love our fellow
word nerds! Thank you Aven and Mark.
Next up are two
brilliant women who don’t take no crap from nobody, Carrie and Megan of the
Vocal Fries podcast. Quick warning, there is a swear, so if you are listening
with little ones Carrie warns you that she’s about to do it.
Carrie: Hi, we're the vocal
fries and I'm Carrie Gillon,
Megan: I'm Megan Figueroa.
Carrie: And we wanted to
congratulate Bunny Trails for making it to the 100th episode!
Megan: 100. That's a
beautiful number. I don't know why, but it is. And it's just really amazing.
Carrie: Yes, it's a nice
round number.
Megan: It is it is.
Carrie: And we're here to
talk to you about our favorite idioms or phrases. So what's yours, Megan?
Megan: So mine is, after a
lot of thought, to spill the beans, which I guess basically means that you say
something that you shouldn't, Perhaps it's because it you know, like, it wasn't
your news to tell or it was, you know, never supposed to be known. So there are
different reasons why you shouldn't have been told. But anyway, you spill the
beans, I actually don't really know where it comes from. I guess that's the
idea. But if you were to spill a bag of beans, that would really suck.
Carrie: Yeah, yes it would.
Megan: As someone who grew
up with a mom who made homemade pinto beans and having to go through a bag of
beans, you don't want to drop that on the floor. So I can really see that being
the issue. I don't get to use it that often. But I do use it and I really like
it. I like the imagery of it. And I think it just helps that I love beans.
Carrie: You know you did
that reminded me of one of the cold opens in the office where Kevin makes a big
pot of chili…
Megan: Oh my god, yes!
Carrie: then he spills it
all over.
Megan Exactly. You
would not want… that is like a worst nightmare situation.
Carrie: It upsets me just
thinking about it every time.
Megan: It's a great gif,
though, or gif if you will. So what about you, Kerri?
Carrie: Okay, so once
again, mine. Well, actually, this one actually involves swearing last time, the
interpretation involves wearing but this time, it's just sort of swearing, so I
apologize. F*ck around and find out.
Megan Yes, that is so
good. You're right. Can I change mine? I'm just kidding.
Carrie: We've been… it's
been used a lot in the last little while. Today, in particular. Stock stuff,
the hedge fund shorting? I'm not gonna go into…
Megan: Like Robin Hood
app. All this, sure. Yeah.
Carrie: So basically means
you know you, I don't know, do I even have to describe it? You do something
silly. And then what are the consequences? You find out. So I don't know. It's
been very entertaining the last few months to see it be used so often.
Megan: And you mostly other
people would use it about someone doing something, right? Or would you
use it about yourself?
Carrie: I guess you could.
I haven't seen anyone refer to themselves. But that but technically one could.
Yes.
Megan: Yeah. I feel like
both of ours are related to some sort of central theme that I can't quite put
my finger on.
Carrie: So thank you so
much for letting us talk about our favorite phrases or idioms.
Megan: Yes.
Carrie: And once again,
congratulations.
Megan: Congratulations.
Shauna:We did talk about
spill the beans in episode 18 back in July of 2018. It has a bit of a dark and
sinister vibe to it once you learn what “spilt” was used for in old english. So
go find episode 18 so you can learn more about spill the beans!
Dan: Next up are Amy and
Ryan from Lexitecture.
Ryan: Hello Bunny Trails listeners. My name
is Ryan,
Amy: I’m Amy
Ryan: and we are the co-hosts of
Lexitecture at etymology podcast and we would like to offer our congratulations
to Dan and Shauna for reaching the 100th episode milestone. We love what they
do we do something similar to them, except we take a pair of words each episode
as opposed to an idiom or phrase, but we're delving into their territory,
because we've been asked to contribute a phrase and its story that we find particularly
interesting, and I have a Scottish cohost. So I'm going to pass it over to her
for an interesting phrase from the Scots language.
Amy: Ryan, I need you to prepare yourself
here.
Ryan: Okay
Amy: This phrase is a kind of a follow on
from another commonly mocked phrase from my hometown of Dundee.
Ryan: Okay
Amy: And but, but I like this one better
for reasons that will become clear. So the phrase that I don't want to talk
about is a plehn bridie an' an inyin in an' a'
Ryan: Right…
Amy: You can start here to make quizzical
faces and confused noises. But I want to talk today about the beautiful
interaction of eh a’ i’ ah.
Ryan: Yeah, that's… uh… yes, go.
Amy: Something that is curious about
Dundonian Scot, and people, first of all, like to say that Scots is not a
language. It is. And they also think that it's all one language. It's not. For
such a small country, there's an astonishing number of dialects and quirks and
Dundee, a city in the northeast of Scotland that I am from… born and raised
and bred, has this very peculiar… sound… syllable. It's really, really
useful and nowhere else in Scotland to my knowledge uses the sound “eh” the way
that Dundonians do. So eh, which is generally rendered, e-h, but it's quite
hard to kind of write that down is a sound, that can mean “I” first
person singular, it can also mean “yes”, it can also mean “ocular organ on the
front of your head”. And if your glottal stops are in place, it can also mean
“ate”. So the phrase “eh a’ i’ ah” translates to “I ate it all”. And the
previous phrase, Dundee is famous for its baked goods, because we love have
meat pies. And just up the just up the road from Dundee and the county of Angus,
there's a city – a town sorry – Forfar is not a city, a city called Forfar and
they make bridie’s, which are sort of like Cornish pastries. Same shape but
slightly different vibe. And bridies come in two main types. You get plain
bridies plain bridies and you get onion bridies, onion bridies. So you can have
a plehn bridie an' an inyin in an' a'. A plain one and an onion one, too.
Ryan: Okay
Amy: So this phrase is a sort of, it's
like a Shibboleth of how well you understand Scots. And you'd find it on merchandise
t shirts, and costers and things like that. But I really love eh a’ i’ ah,
which can be used in the same conversation since it's talking about foodstuffs.
But also it's so beautifully incomprehensible. It makes eyebrows raises and
yeah, makes beautiful use of that very peculiarly Dundonian sound, eh.
Ryan: Yeah, that's, this is like the Scots
equivalent of that, that Mandarin poem that is essentially just the Shī-shì. shí shī shǐ,. And it's like the different tones
and I'm not meaning to be disrespectful. I just don't know the tones and I, but
the idea where it is the whole poem…
Amy: I’m not disrespectful, I just don't
know.
Ryan: I’m just, I’m ignorant. I'm just
dumb. I'm not disrespectful. I'm just stupid. But it's that the one where it's
all the same character in the same word, but just depending on how you
pronounce it. It's a different word entirely. And it's an entire poem, but I
didn't know that Scot's had one of those.
Amy: There are a few phrases like that in
Scots, another one that people enjoy is a braw bricht moonlicht nicht taenicht.
And which again, I think it's more about the sounds than the individual words
or the phraseology itself, but…
Ryan: it really is
Amy: Yeah, I could do this all day. And…
Ryan: That’s amazing
Amy: … many a mickle makes a muckle, which
is a much misunderstood phrase. And it's usually translated as meaning lots of
small things will make a big thing.
Ryan: Oh, okay
Amy …but it's one of the words in there is
mistranslated, and I don't remember… That's… this is the reason why I
didn't choose that phrase, because I couldn't remember the story. But yes, eh
a’ i’ ah, I ate it all. And it's great. I love it.
Ryan: That's fantastic. That's it for our contribution
and congratulations from Lexitecture to Bunny Trails and we hope that we're
still around to help you celebrate episodes 150, 200, 250, and 3872 hurray!
Shauna: 3,872 might be
pushing it, but there is a phrase “never say never”.
Dan: I did the
transcript on this one for our website and I hope I got it all correct, Amy. If
I missed anything, I trust that any of our Scots speakers will let me know.
The poem Ryan
mentioned is, in English, “Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den”, which is an
amazing linguistic demonstration if you want to check it out.
Shauna: Dan, why don’t you
share with us one of your favorite phrases?
Dan: Okay, well I will
share the phrase “armchair quarterback”. It’s not that I love the phrase, but I
do appreciate how aptly it describes the whole situation.
From the OED -
armchair quarterback n. North American colloquial (depreciative) a person
who offers comment or criticism on something (esp. a sporting event) in which
he or she is not actively involved, or about which he or she lacks first-hand
or specialist knowledge.
We aren’t sure where
it came from, but it certainly feels like it came from an American football, or
possibly rugby, background.
We see numerous
examples of its use in the 1930s along with the contemporary phrase “Monday
Morning Quarterback”.
I’ll read one from
1948 as it seems to capture the gist of the usage.
While the phrase is
still commonly used regarding American Football. Which is a weird name for a
sport in which the “ball” is shaped more like an egg and only special people
are allowed to use their feet and they aren’t even on the field for most of the
game. But I digress… this phrase is also used for any sort of situation where
someone claims they would have made different decisions in the moment. It comes
up quite a bit relating to crisis decision making. But as someone who is a bit
of an expert on crisis decision making, I can tell you it’s usually better to
make a decision with what you have and make course corrections as you get new
information, rather than waiting until you have all the information until you
try to make a decision. And armchair quarterbacks have the benefit of having
much of the information now - but the decision maker did not necessarily have
that information.
But I hear this
phrase used quite often and I think it aptly describes the action being taken
by someone sitting comfortably in their living room, far away from the
situation at hand, picking apart the actions of others.
Shauna: It seems fitting to
end the show with Dustin from Sandman Stories Presents. Dustin’s voice is
perfect for relaxing at the end of a hard day while learning from folk tales
and ancient stories. Thank you Dustin for all you do to spread the word about
great podcasts out there, including our own. And thank you for adding a
wonderful podcast to the list of our regular downloads.
Dan: Thank you again to
Your Brain on Facts, Endless Knot, Vocal Fries, Lexitecture, and Sandman
Stories Presents. If you aren’t subscribed to each of these podcasts, go do it
now!
Shauna: As they say, take
us home, Dustin!
Dustin: Hello, this is
Dustin Steichmann from the Sandman Stories Presents Podcast, where I read folk
tales from around the world that are in the public domain. I often add music or
sound effects from the stories home region to give it a little more feeling.
The
phrase I'd like to bring to you for this show is sleep tight. I remember as a
little kid my mother would often say to me, good night, sleep tight, and don't
let the bedbugs bite. It is a bit of a comforting phrase for me. And if and
when I finally have kids, I'll be sure to say it to them.
I've
looked around a few places online and Gary Martin on his phrases.org.uk puts
the earliest sighting in Susan Bedford Epps diary titled, “Through Some
Eventful Years” in 1866:
“All
is ready, and we leave as soon as breakfast is over. Goodnight little diary,
sleep tight and wake bright. For I will need you when I return.”
The
OED doesn't have it until 1933. But Michael Quinion of worldwidewords.org found
an antedating in “Rinky Tink in OZ” by L. Frank Baum dated to 1916. And the
same sighting of Susan Epps in 1866. All of the places I look rejected the idea
of tightening ropes under the beds as being the source of the phrase as tight is
just a shortening of tightly so that it rhymes with night.
Essentially, it means sleep safely.
So
on behalf of Sandman Stories Presents, I say good night, sleep tight, and don't
let the bedbugs bite
Dan: Thanks for joining
us. We’ll talk to you again next week. And until then remember...
Together:
Words belong to their
users.
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