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“Friends with Words” author Martha Barnette relishes obsolete words like hurkle-durkle and swink.
Andrea D'Aquino (Getty Images 1)
It started with a conversation about the difference between the words nice and kind.
Bonnie Benitez called in to A Way with Words, the public radio show and podcast about language hosted by journalist and author Martha Barnette and lexicographer and linguist Grant Barrett. The show mirrors the popular talk show Car Talk, but instead of Click and Clack discussing your sputtering transmission or balding tires, it’s Barnette and Barrett discussing why a Kentuckian would say mulligrubbing instead of bellyaching, or why Nebraskans call pull-tab lottery cards pickles. (It has to do with illegal gambling!)
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For that episode in 2015, Benitez wanted to discuss why she thought being nice and kind were different, prompted by a recent discussion she’d had with colleagues.
Barnette recalls the conversation: “She’s a New Yorker, and she said, ‘You know, I think of myself as a kind person but not a nice person. And by that, she meant that nice is this performative thing you do, but that kind comes from within.”
Barnette, 67, tied the difference back to etymology, the study of the origin and evolution of words. Nice comes from the Latin nescius, meaning “unaware and ignorant.”
“Friends with Words: Adventures in Languageland” (Aug. 5) shares personal anecdotes and word origins.
Courtesy Esther Leeflang
“Then nice changed over the centuries to mean what it means today,” says Barnette. Kind comes from Old English cynd, meaning “natural” or “innate.” “Early uses of it as an adjective suggested the idea of kinship, or treating someone as you would family, which is a lovely etymology, right?”
Ultimately, Barnette didn’t think the conversation was all that memorable. “I would have loved to go further into the etymology of nice, but my cohost and Bonnie were more focused on the modern meanings.”
Years later, Benitez resumed the conversation at a Way with Words fundraiser by walking up to Barnette and mentioning that they had spoken years prior about nice and kind. And before Benitez left, she put a piece of paper in Barnette’s hand. “It was the first and only time that I ever hoped that that piece of paper was not a check for our struggling nonprofit!” Barnette says. Benitez had heard Barnette mention that she was single on the show and used the pronouns “she” and “her” when talking about an ex. And she was there to shoot her shot.
“A couple of days later, we went out, and a couple of years later, we got married,” Barnette says. “Kind of a meet-cute, right?”
It’s these delightful details that prompted Barnette to write her fourth book on etymology, Friends with Words: Adventures in Languageland, out August 5. It weaves stories from her time on-air and off- (including how she met Benitez) with her adoration for linguistic history. (Barnette has also penned A Garden of Words, Ladyfingers and Nun’s Tummies, and Dog Days and Dandelions.)
“I really love obsolete words that I think should be revived,” Barnette says. “But I also realized that I wanted to share some of my life — the things that I haven’t talked about on the show before, some of the lessons that I’ve learned.”
Some of Barnette’s favorite bygone words include opismath: someone who learns or begins to study something late in life (perfect for our AARP readers); hurkle-durkle: lounging in bed, or, if you follow TikTok trends, to bed rot. Swink is an archaic word of unknown origin that means “to work hard.” And if you have a nosy neighbor, you might call them a quidnunc. “It’s from the Latin words quid ‘what’ and nunc ‘now,’ and suggests the image of someone pestering you with the question ‘What now? What now?’” Barnette says.
After two decades of cohosting the public radio show and podcast “A Way with Words,” Martha Barnette says she and cohost Grant Barrett still have plenty of words, phrases, idioms and jargon to talk about.
Courtesy Esther Leeflang
Her lifelong interest in language started in childhood. She was born in Louisville, Kentucky, to educators. Her father was a Baptist minister and professor of Christian ethics, and her mother was a public school English teacher for 25 years who championed proper spelling and grammar.
“If a student was struggling, for example, with the spelling of cemetery, she would say, ‘What happens when you go through a cemetery late at night? You go 'eee' all the way through, because it’s scary.’ It’s a silly little trick, but she had a lot of those that actually taught people how to use grammar correctly.”
As an English major in college, Barnette was encouraged to take a classical language. Latin in high school was fun, right? So Greek seemed to be the perfect choice. “I imagined wintry evenings nestled into a comfy chair, sipping something warm as I thrilled to the epic clashes in Homer, word for Greek word,” she writes in Friends with Words.
But Greek turned out to be more difficult than Latin. Much harder: accent marks, difficult pronunciations and grueling grammar. A few weeks into the semester, Barnette dropped the class — but was determined to understand the language one day. “I promised myself that I would go home that summer and find myself some starving graduate student who could teach me,” she says. She wrote to a university in her hometown to find one. Leonard Latkovski Sr., a retired classics professor and polyglot — someone who knows multiple languages — wrote back.
“He agreed to teach me Greek on Monday nights. I was lucky that I had Monday nights free, because it turned out that on Tuesdays, the professor taught Spanish; on Wednesdays, he taught Hebrew; on Thursdays, he taught Turkish; and on Fridays, Italian,” Barnette writes in Friends with Words.
Latkovski introduced her to the original Greek text of Oedipus. It helped her appreciate the nuances involved in translation, and instilled in her a continuous curiosity about words and their origins.
“It was actually thrilling to see all these connections in a way that I had never seen before,” Barnette says.
Courtesy 'A Way with Words'
Calling all logophiles and linguaphiles
Mulling over the use of magniloquence? Questioning the use of quidditative? A Way with Words radio hosts Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett would love to hear from you. Send in your language questions by calling or texting 877-929-9673 or emailing words@waywordradio.org. You can listen to A Way with Words on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and YouTube.
It’s that evolution across generations that Barnette is thrilled to share with listeners and readers. For example, boomers may consider groovy a word from their era, but it entered the lexicon in the 1930s, stemming from jazz origins and meaning you were performing well and in sync with the music.
“That happens a lot with words that are really positive, like the word cool, for example, which goes back at least to the 1920s,” says Barnette. “Words that you would stereotypically think originated in the ’60s — like bread for money — that goes back to at least 1935 from underworld slang, and the fuzz for the police goes back to the ’20s.”
And just as much as Barnette likes to look back at history, she relishes chattering about the new words and phrases we may see in the coming years. In Friends with Words, she shares an anecdote about a couple who emailed the show asking about grandparents who move to be near their grandkids: “Shouldn’t there be a word that means ‘to pull up stakes and relocate specifically to be near your offspring and offspring’s offspring?’”
Listeners responded with suggestions: grandsferring, grandfaring, grandnearing, granding, boomergrands and boomergranding.
Barnette says two stood out for her: grooving, a combination of “grandparent” and “moving”; and grandsplant, a play on “transplant,” which could also easily work as a noun, as in “Herb and I are grandsplants from Minnesota.” “Who knows? It might work,” Barnette writes. “For now, let’s all keep an eye out for ‘Proud Grandsplant’ bumper stickers.”
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