Electric Hootenanny (Rebroadcast) - 28 December 2015

A Way with Words - language, linguistics, and callers from all over

A Way with Words

Language Learning, Society & Culture, Education

4.6 • 2.3K Ratings

🗓️ 28 December 2015

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Bathroom walls, missing graffiti, and social media. Where have all the cute quips on bathroom stalls gone? We wonder about the apparent decline of restroom graffiti. Are people saving their witticisms for Twitter and Facebook? And: If there were a universal law named in your honor, what would it be? Martha says in her case, “Barnette’s Law” would be “The lane you just got out of is the one that ends up going faster.” Always. Finally: Andre the Giant fancies a cocktail called “The American.” The recipe? Fill a 40-ounce pitcher with various liquors, then stir. Eeeeuww! Plus, using Master vs. Mister in correspondence, how fixin’ to became finna, the meaning of derp, and what happens when you take a forest bath in Japan. Read full show notes, hear hundreds of free episodes, send your thoughts and questions, and learn more on the A Way with Words website: https://waywordradio.org/contact. Be a part of the show: call 1 (877) 929-9673 toll-free in the United States and Canada; worldwide, call or text/SMS +1 (619) 800-4443. Email words@waywordradio.org. Twitter @wayword. Copyright Wayword, Inc., a 501(c)(3) corporation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:29.0	You're listening to A Way With Words, the show about language and how we use it.
0:32.0	I'm Grant Barrett.
0:33.0	And I'm Martha Barnett. Grant you and I are fans of Proverbs.
0:37.0	Oh yes. And I have a particular fondness for a type of Proverb known as an eponymous law.
0:42.0	That's a jokey way of packaging,
0:44.8	epithy observation, and naming it after somebody either real or fictional.
0:49.4	And of course I guess the most famous is Murphy's Law, yeah. Right, which goes.
0:54.4	If a thing can go wrong, it probably will.
0:56.2	Exactly.
0:56.6	And then there's Muffries Law.
0:58.3	Muffries.
0:59.6	is when you try to make a correction to somebody else and then make a mistake yourself.
1:04.0	Right, it's misspelled, right?
1:06.0	And there's something about attributing it to somebody and making it like a scientific law that makes it a little funnier.
1:13.0	Well, is it the mixed registers here because the content is a joke, but the name sounds so formal?
1:17.0	Exactly. They're all kind of rye like that.
1:20.0	And I was trying to think, well, what would Barnett's law be? Oh no I don't know. Well I was thinking
	...

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