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

Your Imaginary Boyfriend (Rebroadcast) - 11 August 2025

·54 min·5 clips

Discover how a 19th-century sailing term for jammed pulleys became 'chock-a-block'.

Humpty 12 is a fun little thing to say, and the episode treats it that way. Grant and Martha start with those not-quite-numbers people use when exactness would kill the mood. Martha brings the phrase back from a family visit in the mountains of North Carolina. Grant hears its kinship with umpteen, and telephone numbers gets pulled in as an older way to mean a very large amount. The charm is in the sound as much as the sense. Family talk and vacation mail do most of the explaining. Then Lola calls with a house problem. Her place has a room full of doorways, a sink, concrete flooring nearby, and drains that seem to run toward a cistern. The answer comes through practical clues. Before refrigerators, an icebox needed some distance from kitchen heat, shade from sun, and a way to deal with melting ice. Once that lands, the odd floor plan stops looking quite so random. The room may have been used for cold storage, washing dishes, preparing food, and draining water. The hosts keep the mood loose. A downstairs bathroom joke gets tossed in, but the reasoning stays close to domestic work: big families, hired help, cutting, cleaning, eating, dishwashing, and keeping the stove from becoming the whole kitchen. Lola's house sounds partly magical and partly exhausting. Some people would call it a nightmare, especially after being judged uninhabitable and still needing work. She loves it anyway. By the end, fuzzy numbers and house archaeology have met in the same place: old language and old rooms both keep receipts.

As heard by us

Approximate numbers and old-house practicality meet in a light, grounded conversation.

The episode opens on approximate-number slang, moving through Humpty 12, forty-eleven, zillions, jillions, and telephone numbers as if they were ordinary speech.

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Why you'd press play

For Humpty 12, telephone numbers, and an old-house clue that may point to the icebox room.

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