‘Spark words’ and the hidden history of ‘panic’ and ‘Ritalin,’ with Martha Barnette

Grammar Girl Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing

Mignon Fogarty, Inc.

Society & Culture, Education

4.5 • 2.9K Ratings

🗓️ 31 July 2025

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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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."

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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