A Way with Words - language, linguistics, and callers from all over · Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett. Produced by Stefanie Levine.

Diamond Dust (Rebroadcast) - 6 October 2025

·54 min·4 clips

A retired teacher reveals how 'voluntold' perfectly captures being forced into duties without volunteering.

The episode opens with a round of rhyming farewell phrases across languages — Spanish ciao, pescao (bye, fish), Dutch au revoir, paraplu (goodbye, umbrella), and Swedish taco, hej, leverpastej (thank you, goodbye, liverpaste) — inviting listener contributions. A caller from Greensboro, North Carolina introduces three words coined in her professional circle: voluntold (being assigned something nominally framed as a request, common in the military and school administration), swallowship (fellowshipping while sharing a meal), and smart attack (the visible excitement of a student who has just realized they know a correct answer). A caller from Santa Barbara distinguishes several functions of the tag question right — building camaraderie, confirming mutual knowledge, yielding the floor, maintaining speech rhythm, and, most importantly, the prejudicial use that asserts the speaker's framing as shared consensus without leaving room for disagreement. Grant notes that this use is distinct from linguistically appropriate tag questions and that overuse weakens a speaker's authority. A college instructor from Massachusetts calls about the difficulty of remembering singular they pronouns for her son's partner, who presents as a woman but uses he/they; Grant and Martha affirm that the challenge reflects having to consciously override pronoun intuitions absorbed in early childhood rather than learned analytically, and compare it to language learning. A Coast Guard member from Louisiana introduces the Cajun unit of distance one eyesight — meaning as far as you can see from one bayou bend — which Grant connects to the Appalachian term farsi (same concept, from as far as I can see), and the Pennsylvania Dutch variant farsight. Martha shares diamond dust — ice crystals that precipitate directly from a cloudless atmosphere — from a 1955 military glossary of Arctic terms, along with nieves penitentes, the Spanish term for jagged ice pinnacles on high-altitude glaciers that recall penitent figures in Holy Week processions, and tapioca snow (granular snow pellets). The word do-funny is traced back to 1850s satire as an indefinite specific like doohickey.

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A warm call-in hour where goodbyes, pronouns, and wordplay all matter.

A Way with Words keeps language tied to daily life, moving from rhyming goodbyes in several languages to a caller's careful question about pronouns and family respect.

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You want a language show that starts with rhyming goodbyes in several languages and turns to pronouns and intention without losing its warmth.

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