You're listening to Away With Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I'm Grant Barrett.

And I'm Martha Barnett.

Think back to New Year's day last year.

Do you remember who the first person was to walk into your home? No, I don't. That year or the year before?

Never really? A year before that? No. I recently learned that there is a word for that person, the first person to walk into your home

There's a word for it. Yes and that word is qualtuk. Now let me explain it's spelled a little bit strangely it's QU-A-A-A-L-T-A-G-H.

Qualtuck.

Yes.

And the reason it looks weird is because it's Manx.

It comes from the Isle of Man,

where there was a tradition of keeping track,

of the first person to enter your house on New Year's Day,

and in fact, there are superstitions involved in which person that was.

You didn't want the person to be light-comlected for a month.

Oh, interesting.

So dark-comlected people mean good luck for the year?

Yes, apparently according to some 19th century texts.

And I wanted to recommend a book of a lot of really interesting words like that.

It's called The Cabinet of Linguistic Curiosities, a yearbook of

forgotten words. It's by Paul Anthony Jones.

That's excellent and you know we will be talking about other books we recommend later in the show, but if you've got books

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