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. I have an email here from Catherine King. She lives in Weathersfield, Vermont, and she's writing us about bacon seed. Bacon seed. Yeah. What is bacon seed? Can you guess what it is? This is a prank you pull. You say, I'm going to go out to the yard and plant some bacon. I like that. No.

Well, let me just read her email. Can you guess what it is? This is a prank you pull. You say I'm going to go out to the yard and plant some bacon.

I like that.

No.

Well, let me just read her email.

As a young child, Summers always met long car trips to visit relatives.

Come late afternoon, my parents and older siblings would begin to scan for a motel to spend the night.

I remember being utterly baffled why they

always looked for ones with bacon seed and always pass by the ones that didn't have any.

She misunderstood the word of vacancy. Vacancy, yeah. Bacon seed, vacancy. Yeah, and she said what it took to figure it out was another road trip after I'd learned to read. That definitely was an aha moment. And I really enjoyed that because I think of, you know, when you're a little kid and you're just at that point where you hear words, but you don't know exactly. You can't differentiate them.

Or you're learning a foreign language.

And at first it's a wall of words, and then you begin to see little individual bricks like that.

Now that my son is nine, he's lost a lot of those cute little expressions.

I really miss those.

I mean, he reads to himself all the time, and there's constant correction happening, but we still remember the cute little things that he said, like lemonade was limelade, and it wasn't T-Rex as in the dinosaur, it was Team Rex. Team Rex. There was a bunch of people all rallying behind Rex, go, Rex. Those are cute, right? They're adorable. And you miss those.

And they do go away once literacy sets in.

But the prize of literacy is worth the price of losing those cute expressions.

And you'll always carry those cute expressions with you.

Yeah, we do.

They're family jokes.

They'll probably be until he has his own kids.

We'd love to hear about yours. You can call us at 8779-9-2673 or send any story about language you like to words at waywardradio.org. Hello, you have a way with words. Hi. Hello, who's this? This is Marcia, and I'm from Traverse City, Michigan.

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