Two Shades of Grey (Rebroadcast) - 25 February 2013
A Way with Words - language, linguistics, and callers from all over
A Way with Words
4.6 • 2.3K Ratings
🗓️ 24 February 2013
⏱️ 52 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | At Accardo, you'll save 25% on your first shop and get free delivery, which means if you were to buy a four cheese pizza, you'd basically be getting one of the cheeses for free. Save and splurge at Accardo, the online supermarket. Geographical and other restrictions. Min spend £60 on charge to apply. Discount available on food, new customers only, max saving £20,000. Terms atacado.com. You're listening to Away With Words. I'm Grant Barrett. |
| 0:22.5 | And I'm Martha Barnett. Grant, I came across a word the other day in my reading that I'd never seen before. Okay. You know how I am about that. I got so excited. I wanted to share it with you, but I thought I would share it in the form of a little quiz. Okay. Okay. It turns out this word first appeared in the 19th century, and the word is |
| 0:39.6 | Squiffy, S-Q-U-I-F-F-Y. Grant is Squiffy, a noun meaning a kitchen implement made from corn husks. |
| 0:49.6 | B, an adjective describing someone who's drunk, or C, a proper name for a small breed of dog popular |
| 0:55.9 | in Newfoundland, as in he's a purebred squiffy. It's drunk. How did you know that? Because I've |
| 1:02.0 | heard it before. Oh, you have? Yeah, squiffy. He's a bit squiffy. It's British. Yeah, yeah, 19th century. |
| 1:10.9 | Well, let me ask you one then. Okay. If I say that you have a golden gut, what am I saying about you? That I have excellent taste in food. I can eat anything, a golden gut. No, I'm talking about... Good intuition. Yes. I'm talking about your business acumen, your business intuition. And this term golden gut came to surface because I was looking at the rise of data in the business world. |
| 1:33.3 | And more decisions now are being made by people who appreciate data and they care about the data. |
| 1:38.8 | And they ignore their gut. |
| 1:40.2 | They ignore their golden gut, even if they've been successful in the past. |
| 1:43.5 | So you have this paradigm shift where this old method of the boss is always right because his gut and his experience say so. |
| 1:50.0 | And the new crowd comes and said, look, but it's not supported by the data. |
| 1:53.9 | Right? |
| 1:54.3 | There's a great story that they tell about Google. |
| 1:56.8 | A guy who left Google said that when he was there, they tested 41 shades of blue by showing this particular element on a page to millions of visitors and figuring out which one got clicked on the most. |
| 2:09.2 | And then that's the one that they used. |
| 2:10.3 | Oh, my gosh. |
| 2:10.8 | And that is completely the opposite of going with your golden gut. |
| 2:14.3 | I wonder if they could have. |
| 2:15.7 | That's so interesting. |
| 2:17.1 | Golden gut. What new words have you That's so interesting. Golden Gut. |
| 2:18.1 | What new words have you encountered? 877-929-9673 or email us. The address is words at waywardradio.org. |
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