1139. In this bonus discussion with Martha Barnette back in March, we look at Martha's pivotal twelve-year journey with a polyglot tutor who transformed her understanding of ancient Greek, starting with the etymology of "Oedipus." We also look at her beekeeping adventures, including the unknown-to-me history of the term 'queen bee' and a unique book on spotting them.
1139. In this bonus discussion with Martha Barnette back in March, we look at Martha's pivotal twelve-year journey with a polyglot tutor who transformed her understanding of ancient Greek, starting with the etymology of "Oedipus." We also look at her beekeeping adventures, including the unknown-to-me history of the term 'queen bee' and a unique book on spotting them.
Martha's book, “Friends with Words: Adventures in Languageland”
Martha's podcast, "A Way with Words"
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[Computer-generated transcript]
Mignon: Grammar Girl here. As we roll into the depths of winter, I hope you enjoy this great show the Grammarpaloozians who support the podcast got back in July as a bonus episode.
Greetings, Grammarpaloozians. I am here with Martha Barnett, a host of “A Way With Words” podcast and radio show, and more importantly, author of the new book, “Friends With Words: Adventures in Language Land.”
We just finished the main episode, which you'll find in your feeds. We talked about Greek Gods, Ritalin, dubious formation. It was amazing. And you know, we're here to continue the discussion. Martha, welcome to the Grammar Girl podcast.
Martha: Thanks so much, Mignon. Delighted to have you here.
MIgnon: In the book, you describe how your love of Greek started you down the path of being a word lover, a worder, like a birder, when you were in college. And I think people would just love the story of the professor who tutored you for all those years.
Martha: I'm so happy to be able to share this one because it really means a lot to me. I like to think of this story as my favorite failure because I was so embarrassed with the problem I had at the time. But it turned out to be the best thing that happened to me, or one of the best things that ever happened to me.
When I was in college, I had studied Latin in high school, but I thought, well, let's learn ancient Greek. That would be so cool to be able to read Homer in the original, or Plato in the original. So I started taking ancient Greek, and it was so much harder than Latin. You know, different letters, different markings, and I really struggled with it. So much so that I could see I was going to flunk the class if I didn't drop it. So I actually dropped the class, and I felt so embarrassed that I thought, well, I'll go home to Kentucky this summer and try to find some starving graduate student who can teach me ancient Greek. And I didn't find that person, but I did find an elderly professor of classics, a retired professor of classics. He was an immigrant from Latvia, and he was a polyglot who spoke at least a dozen languages very easily.
Mignon: Wow.
Martha: And Professor Leonard Lukowski agreed to teach me Greek, and he taught me Greek on Monday nights. I think on Tuesdays he taught Spanish or Italian, and on Wednesdays, you know, it went on like that. He was a born teacher, and he just couldn't help himself. And so he agreed to teach me Greek. The first time I went to see him, he gave me some hot coffee from—sorry. I don't—how long should I go with? I mean, I can do it.
So I showed up at the professor's house the first evening, and he greeted me in Greek and invited me in. He disappeared into the kitchen, and he came back with a plate of lovely fresh bread and said, "This is recipe from the old country. I baked just for you." And then he set that down and went back and got coffee and brought that. And so here I am with coffee and bread, and I'm thinking, this is gonna be great. And so we sit down, and I've got my dreary textbook that's just full of these boring drills and vocabulary lists. And the whole time that I was there, he was just shuffling his feet. He just kept saying, "Language is not arbitrary. Is not arbitrary." And it was very unsuccessful; here I was having another failure. It was just a bad class, and I almost didn't go back the next week. But the bread was really good, and the coffee was delicious. And so I thought, I'll try it one more time. The next time I go there, he just takes my book and kind of throws it across the table, and he says, "We won't need your book anymore. We will read this." And he hands me a copy of “Oedipus Rex.” The great tragedy by Sophocles in the original Greek. And I'm thinking, I barely know the alphabet, dude. This is not gonna go well. And he said, "Let's start with the name Oedipus. The name Oedipus in ancient Greek means 'swollen foot.'” And you may remember that when Oedipus was a baby, his feet were injured. And so he always had swollen feet. So his name, the professor explained, was Oedipus. And he said, "You have in English, do you not, the word edema?" And I said, "Yeah, edema, it means swelling." And then I thought, oh, swelling. And he said, "Yes, Oedipus and edema come from the same root." And then the "pos" in Oedipus, as he said it, that comes from a word that means foot in ancient Greek. And it's related; the generative form of this "podos" is related to words like podiatrist.
And then he said, "And that's related to the Latin word 'pedis,' which means 'of the foot.' And you see that in words like pedestal and pedestrian and petal." And then he said, "And then in Sanskrit—Sanskrit is related to these languages. In Sanskrit, the word is 'padas,' which means foot. And there's a wonderful word in Sanskrit that means tree. It's 'parapa.' And do you know what that means? It means 'the one that drinks with its foot.'"
So, just from the name Oedipus, we had this whole lesson, and it was just an entirely different way of looking at language and looking at the connections between and among so many languages. You know, nearly half the world's population speaks a language that derives from this prehistoric language, this one common ancestor, Proto-Indo-European. And that connects languages like Hindi and Sanskrit and Russian and Italian and Irish and English and Greek. And so it was kind of this mind-blowing experience to learn language in an entirely different way. Now, of course, at that rate, it took us a long time to get through “Oedipus Rex.” It took us twelve years.
Mignon: I was gonna ask. Yeah.
Martha: Yeah, it took a long time, but I saw language in a way that I had never seen it before. And things started to click, and I went back the next year to college, and I aced my ancient Greek course. I took every Greek course I could. I went on to graduate work in ancient Greek. And it was because of this life-changing tutor and what had at the time been kind of humiliating and embarrassing.
Mignon: You worked with him, you know, throughout the rest of his life, didn't you?
Martha: Yes, I studied with him for twelve years. One day his daughter called me and said that he'd fallen ill and he was in the hospital, and she said, "Do you want to go see him?" And I said, "Of course. I'll be there this evening." And so I go into his room, and even if he hadn't been there, I would've known that it was his room because there were newspapers in at least three different languages there. And he seemed good; he was upright and alert, and he was happy to see me. And he had been studying gemstones, and he was telling me about Alexandrite, which is a gemstone that was originally found in the Ural Mountains and named for Alexander in Russia. And so he was telling me that we were going to study gemstones, you know, when I come home.
As I was leaving, he seemed so good. And as I was leaving, he said to me in Spanish, "No me olvides," which we never spoke in Spanish. I had learned a little bit of Spanish by then, but he said "No me olvides," and in Spanish, that means "Don't forget me." And I thought, well, that's kind of weird, you know, he's just tossing out this Spanish phrase.
And then, the next morning, I woke up to my alarm and I hit the snooze alarm so I could sleep a little bit longer. And I had this really vivid dream that somewhere a library was burning. I was awakened again when his daughter called me to tell me that the professor had died.
Mignon: Oh.
Martha: So everything I do now, professionally, is an attempt to share what he shared with me, to do the same kind of exploration of language and make it accessible to our fellow worders.
Mignon: Yeah. It's such a testament to the influence that a teacher can have. And the relationship that can build up between a teacher and a student. You have a huge section in your book on regionalisms, the things that people say in different parts of the country. What are some of your favorites?
Martha: Oh gosh. That's like being asked to choose a favorite star or something. But yeah, in the book, I go around to all 50 states to share at least one thing that you might hear if you went to that particular state. It's important to point out that dialect doesn't start and stop at state lines, but there are words that I tend to associate with certain states, like in South Carolina, for example, a "bloody noun." Do you know what a bloody noun is?
Mignon: No.
Martha: I mean, it's...
Mignon: And noun you're angry at...
Martha: Yeah. I don't know if that's too dark for a Grammar Girl podcast or not, but actually, a bloody noun has nothing to do with blood. It's the sound of a frog, a bloody noun. It looks like "bloody noun," but it’s all one word and it simply means a certain type of bullfrog. It comes from a Gullah term, "bloody noun."
Mignon: Huh. Well, being in California, we've talked on the show before about how people in California always put "the" before highway names. You know, I'm taking the 405. But I did not know the origin of the Sigalerts we hear all the time on the radio.
Martha: Yeah, I was surprised when I moved to California as well from Kentucky, and people were talking about Sigalerts, and I thought, what is that? Should I be scared? What's going on? What's a SIG alert? But it has to do with a major traffic delay. And a Sigalert is named for an engineer who went by the name Sig Sigman, and he developed a system that let police send those kinds of alerts directly to radio stations so that people could get them quickly. I don't know what his first name was for sure, but everybody called him Sig, so there Sigalerts.
Mignon: That's great. And, let's hop back to the East Coast. In Rhode Island, why do they call hot dogs "New York System"?
Martha: Yeah. In Rhode Island, you'll hear people talk about a hot dog topped with mustard and chili and onions and celery salt, described as a “New York System” because back in the early 1900s, Coney Island hot dogs were famous, and they just wanted to let people know that their hot dogs were just as good that they were created like a New York System.
Mignon: That's great, and I was really surprised to hear why people sometimes paint their houses blue in South Carolina.
Martha: Yeah, that's a fascinating one. If you go to the South, particularly the coastal area of South Carolina, you'll often see this beautiful light blue that's painted on the ceilings of porches or on shutters or doors. And the "haint" in "haint blue" is a reference to the word "haint," which means “haunt.” I remember my Aunt Mazo telling me, "Oh, that's just a haint,” meaning that's just a ghost or something like that.
And "haint blue" is a kind of color that is supposed to ward off ghosts and things that are haunting you. They either mistake the paint blue for the color of the sky or the color of water, and so they won't get to your house if you paint the house haint blue.
Mignon: What a great story. I love that now because, I mean we are just, we have barely touched on everything in the book. It is just a dense dance book filled with just fascinating tidbits. You will love it. Because it's called “Friends With Words,” which is a play on the word game “Words With Friends,” I wanted to end with two words that I think may be very useful to people when they are doing word games. So, the first one is how about a good Scrabble word?
Martha: How about a good Scrabble word?
Mignon: How about “quidnunc”?
Martha: "Quidnunc" is a good one. Yeah. I thought you were gonna ask for Scrabble advice. And the truth is that I'm terrible at Scrabble because, you know, I'll see some big potential word that's missing one letter, and I'll just hold out that, you know, to share that. But, yeah, "quidnunc" is a wonderful word that means a nosy neighbor or something, because the Latin word “quid” means "what"? And the word “nunc” in Latin means "now." And so a “quidnunc” is somebody who's got their nose in your business. They're constantly saying, "What now? What now?" They're those people out on the porch, you know, that you can't pass by without them inquiring. So, "quidnunc." Yeah. I don't know how many points that would get you, but if all those letters are available, play "quidnunk."
Mignon: I'm always looking for another good new Q-U word, you know, especially a longer one. That's good. And then, I think to wrap up, you talked to Will Shortz once about his favorite word, and it is such an oddly specific word and, you know, I just wonder it might pop up in a crossword puzzle someone's doing someday.
Martha: That's a good point. Yes. Will Shortz and I once had a conversation at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament where he shared his favorite word, at least at the time. Maybe it's changed since then. But the word is “ucalegon,” which I had never heard. And so, of course, like a birder or a worder, you know, seeing a new one in the wild. I was really excited. Yeah. That word is "ucalegon," U-C-A-L-E-G-O-N. And Will explained that the word "ucalegon" means “a neighbor whose house is on fire.”
Mignon: What an oddly specific word.
Martha: It really is. You know, if you ever have a neighbor whose house is on fire, I wouldn't bother with that word. I would just, you know, call 911 and say, "My neighbor's house is on fire." But that's a word that goes back to the “Iliad.” I'd forgotten that in the “Iliad,” there's a character named Ucalegon whose house burns.
Mignon: Wild. Martha, thank you so much for just romping through all these words with me today. It's been just delightful. Now I want to finish up like we always do to get your book recommendations.
Martha: Ok. All right. I have some books I'm very excited to share with you. The first one is called "The Invention of Nature" by Andrea Wulf. Do you know this one?
Mignon: No.
Martha: It's incredible. The subtitle is, “Alexander Von Humboldt's New World.” And I didn't know who Alexander Von Humboldt was when I started the book, but he was born in 1769 and get this, a hundred years later, in 1869, there were mass celebrations of this anniversary of his birth in New York, in Boston, in Buenos Aires, in Melbourne, Australia, in Moscow. People were pouring into the streets to celebrate this guy.
Mignon: My gosh, who was he?
Martha: That was my question. That was my question! Well, Alexander Von Humboldt was a German polymath, and he was also an explorer and a traveler, and he traveled through much of Latin America and he was also a naturalist. And so he was constantly writing down his observations about nature. And he actually changed the way that people thought about nature in those days because, in those days, people thought of nature as sort of this hierarchy, you know, with humans at the top and then everything below it. But he showed that nature is really a great web of life.
He also predicted climate change back in his day. And what's really amazing too is that he was such a hero to so many people because Charles Darwin just idolized him. Simón Bolívar, the Latin American revolutionary loved him. He was a friend of Goethe, the German poet. He met Napoleon. Thomas Jefferson eagerly welcomed him to the White House. Mignon, I think of him as sort of the Forrest Gump…
Mignon: Yeah, that's what I was thinking.
Martha: … of the 1800s. And I never — the other thing that I love about this book, besides the fact that it's wonderfully well written, is that it was recommended to me by our show's fabulous producer, Stephanie Levine. And she kept pressing this book on me. She kept saying, "Martha, read this book, read 'The Invention of Nature.'" And I kept saying, "Eh, it looks like a, you know, a dense history book. I, you know, why would I wanna read this?" And she said, "Martha, I know you, and I know you wanna read this book." And so I picked it up, started reading, and I couldn't put it down. So, highly recommend "The Invention of Nature."
Mignon: Wonderful.
Martha: The second book I wanna recommend is called "Queen Spotting." Now, a couple of years ago, I decided that I wanted to become a beekeeper. So I got really into bees. I read everything I possibly could about bees, and this book, "Queen Spotting," is written by a professional beekeeper. She's also an artist. So the book is just gorgeous. It's got all these gorgeous photographs, and the layout, you know, her background is in art, so it's just a beautiful artifact as a book. And I learned all kinds of interesting things from this book, for example. I mean, there's so much great language when it comes to bees because, for example, queen bees make a noise called piping, and there are varieties of piping like quacking and tooting, which I didn't know, which I was really excited about. And get this, the term “queen bee” itself is really fascinating because did you know until the early 1700s, do you know what queen bees were called?
Mignon: No.
Martha: King bees.
Mignon: No.
Martha: They were called king bees because they were the biggest bees in the hive. The hives couldn't survive without them. And everybody just assumed — well, a lot of people assumed that these big bees are king bees, that they were male bees. And so it wasn't until, you know, later in the 18th century that people got a clue that the queen bees were female. So that's super cool.
Mignon: Oh, that's amazing.
Martha: And being able to spot a queen bee in a hive is a really key skill that you need to learn as a beekeeper. And so there are all these wonderful fold-out pictures of the inside of hives.
Mignon: Wow.
Martha: That's why it's called “Queen Spotting,” because that's a term — queen spotting — finding the queen bee, because that's so important to beekeepers. But this book is, besides having all this great information, there are all these fold-out pictures of hives. So you can look for the queen bee in these pictures and try to develop that queen spotting skill yourself. It's sort of like, “Where's Waldo,” but for bees.
Mignon: That's what I thought when you held up the picture.
Martha: So yeah, "Queen Spotting" by Hillary Kearney. It's a wonderful book.
Mignon: And were you successful in your beekeeping?
Martha: No, alas, we had a consultant come out, and our yard's just not big enough for it. So, I guess I'm a wannabe beekeeper.
Mignon: Yeah, I know one other person who tried it and also was not able to get it to go, so it sounds like it's pretty hard.
Martha: It is, especially now with, you know, colony collapse and problems, you know, climate change and all of that. It's becoming very, very hard. So, I have to content myself with just being a wanna-bee, as it were.
Mignon: Oh, and what's your third book?
Martha: And the third book I want to share with you involves a confession, Mignon, because I have to confess that I don't read that much fiction. I haven't, and people are often surprised to hear that I don't read that much fiction. But for me, I'm not sure why. Nonfiction is a lot easier to read. I think when I'm reading fiction, I hear what somebody has called the clanking of the machinery.
That is, I'm often thinking, “Well, why did they use this literary device? And why did they choose that word? And did they choose that word because of the etymology?” So for many years, reading fiction was very hard for me. You know what changed my life? It was audiobooks.
Mignon: Mm-hmm. I love them.
Martha: Okay. So yet another place that you and I are on the same page because, you know, we had a caller to "A Way with Words" a few weeks ago. And the question that she had, she asked it sort of sheepishly. She said, "I really enjoy audiobooks, but is it legitimate for me to say I read audiobooks? Can I say I read this book?" And, you know, Grant, my co-host Grant Barrett, and I thought about it, and we said absolutely that there are different ways to experience books. You know, not everybody reads a book with their eyes. You know, some people read with Braille, and some people listen to books because it's simply easier for one reason or another. And when I started listening to audiobooks just a couple of years ago, it opened up this whole world for me because for some reason, when I'm listening to an audiobook that is fiction, I can get caught up in it. I don't hear the clanking of the machinery. I totally give myself over to the book. And so the book that has meant the most to me in that form — it's a fiction book — it's Barbara Kingsolver's "Demon Copperhead,” which is a marvelous book. I don't have to go into all of it except to say that it won the Pulitzer for Fiction a few years ago, and rightly so. It's a fantastic book. It is a retelling of Dickens' "David Copperfield," but it's set in contemporary Southern Appalachia. And it's just a beautiful story and very powerful.
And I just loved it. And I have to give a shout-out to the audiobook narrator because, you know, some are better than others. And the fellow who read "Demon Copperhead" is named Charlie Thurston. And it was just — it was an absolutely transporting experience. And the other thing that I'll say about this book, which I strongly encourage everybody to read with your eyes or listen to with your ears. The other thing I'll say about it is that you do not have to have read "David Copperfield" to appreciate this book. It really stands on its own, and I think it's just an impressive work of fiction. In fact, from time to time, I just think, well, what's Demon doing now? You know, the lead character's named Demon, and I just think, I wonder how he's doing. I hope he's okay.
Mignon: That is an amazing recommendation. Yeah, and you're right. A good narrator makes all the difference. Yeah, I really appreciate a good narrator. I always have at least one audiobook going. I got a notice the other day from Audible that I'd been a member for 20 years. You know, I just ... yeah, I just always, yeah, I always have one audiobook on. I love them.
Martha: Yes, they can be really life-changing. I think it's changed my world.
Mignon: Well, thank you so much for those recommendations; definitely a lot of them are going on my list. So we're here again to wrap up with Martha Barnette, the co-host of "A Way with Words" radio show and podcast, and author of a fabulous new book I know you all love, called “Friends with Words: Adventures in Language Land.” Martha, where can people find you?
Martha: Well, I invite you to come to my website and check it out. It is marthabarnette.com. That's Barnette with an E on the end. I’m all over social media under that same name. And I would also invite you to come to the “A Way with Words” website. That's waywordradio.org.
Mignon: Great. Thank you so much for being here.
Martha: It was a delight. Thanks.