Hidden Treasures - 20 November 2017

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

🗓️ 20 November 2017

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A new online archive of Civil War letters offers a vivid portrait of the everyday lives of enlisted men. These soldiers lacked formal education so they wrote and spelled by ear. The letters show us how ordinary people spoke then. • Is there a single word that means the opposite of prejudice? Unhate? Or maybe allophilia? • There’s an old joke that if you buy clothes at a flea market, they throw in the fleas for free. But the story behind the term flea market is a lot more complicated. • Also: go to grass, go up the spout, take the devil out of it, bobbery, and diabetes of the blow-hole. 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/. Email words@waywordradio.org. Twitter @wayword. Our listener phone line 1 (877) 929-9673 is toll-free in the United States and Canada. Elsewhere in the world, call +1 (619) 800-4443; charges may apply. From anywhere, text/SMS +1 (619) 567-9673. Copyright Wayword, Inc., a 501(c)(3) corporation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Every episode of A Way With Words is a labor of love made possible by your support.
0:05.5	From research to radio, we're here because of you.
0:08.6	Show your love and donate at wayward radio.org
0:13.0	slash donate. Thank you.
0:15.8	You're listening to a way with words,
0:17.2	the show about language and how we use it.
0:19.1	I'm Grant Barrett.
0:20.1	And I'm Martha Barnett.
0:21.8	What if I told you that you could go back in time
0:24.8	and actually read the correspondence of Civil War soldiers,
0:28.4	not the officers, but the everyday soldiers?
0:31.7	What might that tell us about our nation at another really divided time?
0:37.0	There's an incredibly cool new collection of thousands of letters from everyday Civil War soldiers, it's online, and it's free. of new archive online and it's called Private Voices.
0:53.6	And what's really special about all these letters
0:56.7	from Civil War soldiers is that it's
0:58.8	from guys who wrote by ear, that is they were
1:02.4	untrained in spelling or punctuation or
1:04.9	capitalization so sometimes it's hard to read them but you can sound them out
1:09.0	so I'm going to read a letter from a Civil War soldier later in the show, but for right now I just
1:14.3	wanted to mention one expression that jumped out at me, and that's one that occurs time and again
1:19.4	in these letters, and that's the phrase to go up the spout.
1:22.4	Do you know this expression? I don't know that. and that's the phrase to go up the spout.
	...

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