Think about cheese.

Make your thoughts cheesier.

Now add 100% chicken breast fillet, Chipopla sauce and Ameta cheese melt.

And it's giving the new cheesy chicken stack at McDonald's.

Did we mention it's cheesy?

Cheese!

Availments with the 4th of Jan, 2026 from 11am.

Plus and participation may vary.

Subjects availability.

You're listening to an away with words minicast. And today we're diving into a fascinating

question from Gary Heath. He's an emeritus professor at Mount St. Clair College in Clinton, Iowa.

And Gary writes, a French teacher at Dartmouth College told me about Purgatory, Kansas, becoming picket wire, Kansas, due to Yankee immigrants replacing French settlers.

I can find no documentation or reference to this. Can you help?

Oh, yeah, we can help. That's on the right track, but it's not quite right. The shift from

purgator to picket wire is for a river and its canyon land in southeastern Colorado, not Kansas. It is a

great example, though, of folk etymology and how it shapes what we say. So how does purgatoire become picket wire phonetically

grant? I mean, the first word is French for purgatory, but picket wire? Well, this name has undergone

a couple transformations. First, it was Spanish. Rio de las an amazas pedigas in Purgatorio, meaning the river of the lost souls in purgatory.

And then the French settlers took that Spanish and shortened it to just purgatoir.

English speakers heard something like purgatir, and then mapped it to the familiar words picket and wire.

In folk etymology like this, a change is made to fit current knowledge.

So we reshape a word or name into a form that seems to make sense.

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