SHOW SUMMARY

If your friend says she's coming to town "Sunday week," exactly when should you expect to see her? And what do you call those typographical symbols that cartoonists use in place of profanity? Martha and Grant have the answer. Plus grass widows, the linguistic phenomenon called creaky voice, the difference between insure and ensure, the roots of the term jingoism and what it means if someone warns You don't believe fat meat is greasy. Also, is it okay to make a noun out of a verb?

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Researchers have found that stress is a leading cause of plewds--you know, those drops of sweat popping off the foreheads of nervous cartoon characters. That's one of several cartooning terms coined by Mort Walker, creator of the Beetle Bailey comic strip. Martha and Grant discuss this and other coinages from The Lexicon of Comicana.

http://www.mortwalker.com/books7.html

If someone's coming to town Sunday week, when exactly should you expect them? This Scots-Irish term means "a week after the coming day mentioned."

What are those symbols cartoonists use in place of profanity? They're called grawlixes--good to know for the next time you play "Comic Strip Trope or Pokemon?"

Is it okay to make a verb out of a noun? Yes! It's estimated that twenty percent of English verbs started as nouns. Just think of the head-to-toe mnemonic: you can head off a problem, face a situation, nose around, shoulder responsibility, elbow your way into something, stomach a problem, foot the bill, or toe the line.

http://madshakespeare.com/2010/08/sunday-funnies-verbing-weirds-language/

http://moreintelligentlife.com/content/ideas/anthony-gardner/youve-been-verbed

Squeans are the little starbursts or circles surrounding a cartoon character's head to signify intoxication or dizziness.

Quiz Guy John Chaneski has a puzzle called Categories. The challenge is to find the common thread that unites seemingly unrelated things. For example, Mary-Kate and Ashley, Jack Sparrow's crew, and Cherubim all fall into which category? The answer: Twins, Pirates, and Angels are all baseball teams!

What's a grass widow? In the 1500s,this term applied to a woman with loose sexual morals. Over time, it came to mean a woman who's been separated from her husband, or a divorcee.

If someone's jingoistic, they're extremely patriotic, often belligerently so. The term comes from a British song written in 1870 that uses the phrase By jingo! to conjure up enthusiasm for a British naval action.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnCNJD3-e7g

The curved lines that follow the moving limbs of cartoon characters? Those are called blurgits or swalloops.

The admonition You don't believe fat meat is greasy means "Just go ahead and try me" or "Don't push your luck." This idiom is found almost exclusively among African-Americans. The idea is apparently that if you don't believe fat meat is greasy, you're someone who misses the obvious.
 
What's the difference between the words insure and ensure? To ensure means to make certain. Insure means to protect someone or something from risk, and should be used exclusively in a financial sense.

For some time now, linguists have been studying a style of speaking known as creaky voice. In the United States, it's heard particularly heard among young, white  women in urban areas. New research about this phenomenon, also known as vocal fry, has been making the rounds on the internet.

http://www.waywordradio.org/chicken-scratches-and-creaky-voice/

http://healthland.time.com/2011/12/15/get-your-creak-on-is-vocal-fry-a-female-fad/

Voila (not spelled wallah or vwala) is a good example of a borrowed word. Though French for "there it is," Americans often use it as a simple utterance, akin to presto or ta-da.

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005052.html

Lock the bad guys up in the hoosegow! This slang term for a jail comes from the Spanish juzgado, meaning "tribunal." It's an etymological relative of the English words judge and judicial.

Did you know roly-polies, or pill bugs, aren't even bugs? They're isopods, meaning they have equal feet, and they're technically crustaceans.
 
Autocorrect mistakes abound, but have you ever made the errors yourself, such as typing the word buy when you meant by? Studies in Computer Mediated Communications have linked this phenomenon to the way we process words phonetically before typing them out.

Solrads are those lines radiating from the sun or a lightbulb in a comic strip, while dites are the diagonal lines on a smooth mirror.

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