‘Spark words’ and the hidden history of ‘panic’ and ‘Ritalin,’ with Martha Barnette
Grammar Girl: For Writers and Language Lovers.
Mignon Fogarty, Inc.
4.5 • 2.9K Ratings
🗓️ 31 July 2025
⏱️ 32 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
1104. This week with Martha Barnette, co-host of "A Way with Words" and author of "Friends with Words: Adventures in Languageland," we look at the concept of a "spark word" — the word that ignites a love of language. We also look at fascinating etymologies from ancient Greek, including the surprising connections between "Nike" and "fennel," and the origins of "panic" and "Ritalin."
Martha's book, “Friends with Words: Adventures in Languageland”
Martha's podcast, "A Way with Words"
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Grammar Girl here. I'm Minion Fogarty and welcome to the Thursday show where I chat with people who are doing interesting things with language. And you are in for a treat today because we have Martha Barnett. And we're going to talk about Greek gods, riddalen, dubious formication, and more. |
| 0:22.4 | Martha is a longtime journalist and co-host of the popular show called Away with Words, |
| 0:27.0 | an author of the new book, Friends with Words, Adventures in Language Land. |
| 0:31.8 | Martha has a degree in English from Vassar, did graduate work in classical languages at the University of Kentucky, |
| 0:37.9 | and studied Spanish in Costa Rica. Martha, welcome to the Grammar Girl podcast. It's so great to be here, |
| 0:44.2 | Mignon. Thanks for having me. Oh, I am just delighted. So one of the things you mentioned in your |
| 0:49.9 | book is that you compare people who love words to birders. How do you do that? Well, I like to think |
| 0:57.8 | of us as worders in that in the same way that birders love to discover new birds or just |
| 1:05.5 | have a fascination with individual birds and really start to learn all about them one by one and collect them. |
| 1:14.5 | It occurred to me, because I got into birding last year, and it occurred to me that people |
| 1:20.3 | like us are worders. |
| 1:22.7 | You know, we do the same thing. |
| 1:24.4 | And I was also thinking about the fact that one interesting word that I learned from |
| 1:29.0 | birding is the term spark bird. Do you know this term? No. This is the bird that really sets you on that |
| 1:36.3 | path. You know, you go on vacation and you see just this gorgeous bird, beautiful plumage, colors you've |
| 1:43.0 | never seen before. And that gets you all excited |
| 1:45.9 | about birding. And people call that their spark bird. And I was thinking about the fact that |
| 1:51.4 | that I and probably you and a lot of your listeners probably have that spark word, that one word |
| 1:58.1 | that just sort of set you off to become a language lover. |
| 2:02.6 | Okay, so what was your spark word? |
| 2:04.6 | Well, this happened when I was learning Latin in ninth grade, and we had a list of vocabulary words to learn, |
| 2:14.6 | and one of the words was Westigium, which starts with a V. It looks like |
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