SHOW SUMMARY

Survey time! Do you call that kind of cap a beanie, a toboggan, or a stocking hat, or something else? What about rubber-soled athletic shoes? Do you call them sneakers or tennis shoes? Also, great Scrabble words, feeling owly, Jumpin' Jehoshaphat!, finjans and zarfs, catching plagiarism with mountweazels, and the art of long sentences. It's a larrupin' good episode!

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What do you call a knitted cap? A beanie? A toboggan? A stocking hat? Grant's Great Knitted Hat Survey (knitted-hat-survey.html">http://waywordradio.org/great-knitted-hat-survey.html) traces the different terms for this cold weather accessory used across the country.

How do you refer to athletic shoes? Are they sneakers or tennis shoes? When canvas shoes with soft rubber soles came into use, they were so quiet compared to wood-soled shoes that one could literally sneak about. Outside the Northeast, however, tennis shoe is the much more common term.

The biblical king Jehoshaphat is the inspiration for the exclamation Jumpin' Jehosaphat. This alliterative idiom probably arose in the 19th century, but was popularized by the cartoon character Yosemite Sam.

Looking for some good Scrabble words? Try zarf, a type of cup holder of Arabic origin, or finjan, the small cup that's held by the zarf.

Our Quiz Guy John Chaneski shows off his acting skills with a word puzzle based on sounds. 

Tight games often end up at a rubber match, or tiebreaker. Used for a variety of sports and card games, rubber match has been in use since the late 16th century, and seem to have originated in the game of lawn bowling. The term may allude to the idea of erasing one's opponent.

Do dictionaries deal with copyright infringement or plagiarism when definitions match up between volumes? Since many modern dictionaries derive from the same few tomes, it's common to see definitions that match. But lexicographers have been known to plant mountweazels, (http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/08/29/050829ta_talk_alford) or fake words, to catch serial plagiarizers. One famous mountweazel is the word jungftak (http://www.waywordradio.org/picklebacks-and-mountweazels/) the spurious definition of which is "A Persian bird, the male of which had only one wing, on the right side, and the female only one wing, on the left side; instead of the missing wings, the male had a hook of bone, and the female an eyelet of bone, and it was by uniting hook and eye that they were enable[d] to fly,—each, when alone, had to remain on the ground."

If someone directs you to drive three C's, they're advising you "drive as far as you can see, then do it two more times."

If something's larrupin' good, it's spankin' good or thumpin' good, and comes from the word larrup, a verb meaning "to beat or thrash." 

Martha shares a couple of choice idioms: dry as a contribution box, and plump as a partridge.

Pico Iyer's piece in the Los Angeles Times (http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jan/08/entertainment/la-ca-pico-iyer-20120108) is a testament to the value of long sentences in our age of tweets and abbrevs.

Oh no you di-int! The linguistic term for what happens when someone pronounces didn't as di-int, or Martin as Mar-in without the "t" sound, (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kF4H5vZ-Km4&feature=related) is called glottalization. Instead of making a "t" sound with the tongue behind the teeth, a different sound is made farther back in the mouth. John Rickford (http://www.johnrickford.com/Home/tabid/1101/Default.aspx), professor of linguistics at Stanford University, does a thorough job tracing this phenomenon in his book African-American English: Structure, History, and Use. (http://www.johnrickford.com/Writings/Books/tabid/1128/Default.aspx)

When putting together a jigsaw puzzle, do you call it making a puzzle or doing a puzzle? Listeners shared lots of different opinions on the A Way with Words Facebook page. https://www.facebook.com/waywordradio

The Dictionary of American Regional English traces you'uns, a plural form of you, to the Midlands and the Ohio River Valley. But the phrase goes back a while; even Chaucer used it. 

If someone's feeling owly, they're in a grumpy mood and ought to pull up their socks and cut it out. The phrase is chiefly used in the Midwest and Canada, and can be found in some dictionaries from Novia Scotia and Prince Edward Island. Some people think owls look grumpy or creepy (http://bit.ly/y31Ja5), although others think they're adorable (http://www.kpbs.org/news/2010/mar/25/san-marcos-famous-barn-owl/). Then there are those who prefer moist owlets (http://bit.ly/x7XVcD)

Martha reads a favorite love poem by e.e. cummings. (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/179622)

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