You're listening to Away with Words to show about language and how we use it.

I'm Grant Barrett.

And I'm Martha Barnett.

Jan Betel Ellis of Shalin Washington teaches English as a second language.

And she also leads workshops for volunteer teachers of English as a second language.

And she was trying to come up with some unusual English words

for common items, because she thought it would be a good exercise for the volunteer teachers to be

confronted with those English words that maybe don't make sense but sort of do in a sentence so she went to our Facebook group and asked for

examples and our listeners there were so helpful they gave her a whole lot of

words in that category. For example, Winkle Hawk. Do you know this word

Winkle Hawk? No. If you have a Winkle Hawk in your pants it's an L-shaped rip.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, doesn't that ring a bell I think I think we may have talked about that a long time ago. It's an old Dutch term that means a carpenter's L-shaped tool so if you have an L-shaped rip in your pants, that's a winkle-hawk.

And another one was Diastema, which I feel like I knew at one point,

but forgot. Diastema is a word for the gap between your teeth.

So think David Letterman.

It comes from a Latin word that means interval.

But it was just so cool the way all these people chimed in

with words for things that you know of but don't quite have the name for.

Yeah and it was also interesting to follow the discussion on Facebook because other

ESL teachers chimed in and talked about how they would teach new teachers by making them

learn a conversation in Japanese, just a short conversation, so that they could have

the experience of experiencing what you do when you learn a foreign language which is you see that

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