You're listening to Away With Words, the show about language and how we use it. I'm Grant Barrett.

And I'm Martha Barnett. Grant, you play online Scrabble. Oh, boy, do I.

Well, I wonder if you have the same experience that one of our listeners had.

Keith Hampton of Brownsburg, Indiana, says that sometimes when he is stumped for a word, he's looking at all these letters and he's got to play something, he just plays anything.

You know, puts those letters up to see if maybe they'll work, you know, sort of like throwing it against the wall and seeing if it sticks. And he did this recently with a made-up word, and it turned out that the game accepted it. It was a word. It was a word. Yeah. Nice. And the word was Haverals. Havererals. H-A-V-E-R-E-L-S. Heaveral.

What's a Haverill?

Well, that's what he wanted to know. He looked it up in the dictionary, couldn't find it, and did the next best thing, which of course was to call us.

And so I did some digging, and it turns out that in Scotland and Northern England, to Haver is to talk garrulously and foolishly to talk nonsense. So a haveral is someone who havers or talks without sense. Somebody

who's given to idle foolish chattering. Now what a great word. We don't know anything about that.

No, we don't. We don't. So the next time you know you're watching the 24-hour cable network, you know, hey, burles, stop.

But that is a great strategy for Scrabble and words with friends and word feud and those kind of games because, I mean, you just do consonant, vowel, consonant, vowel, consonant.

Yeah, never know. And you got a really good chance. But because we have this instinct about prefixes and suffixes and roots,

and sometimes you can put them together in logical ways. Yeah, stick on an S and get another point.

Yeah, there we go. 877-929-9673. Email us at Waywardradio.org. Hello, you have a way

with words. Hi, Grant. It's Megan from East Hampton. How are you?

Great, Megan. Welcome to the show.

Hi, Megan.

Well, I've only just discovered you guys because I finally found SoundCloud and found out about podcasts and things like that.

So I've been listening to some of your older shows, and you made a reference at some point,

you were talking about schools and things, and you made a reference at some point we were talking about, you were talking about schools and things, and you made a reference to grammar school, and it occurred to me that

grammar schools, which are also called elementary schools, which makes sense because they're

elementary topics, why would they be called a grammar school if you're learning so much more than grammar? It's a great question. It's a really good question. That never occurred to me. Yeah. It's just like the name for the thing. I didn't even think of to break it apart. Right. We always call it grammar school. Yeah, our elementary school, but still grammar school. Well, Megan, the reason is that that's what the earliest schools were centuries and centuries

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