Bingo Fuel - 13 July 2015

<p>This week on "A Way with Words": "If you come to a fork in the road . . . take it!" Baseball legend Yogi Berra was famous for such head-scratching observations.. What most people don't realize, though, is that the former Yankees star often wasn't the first person to say them. As Berra himself once quipped, "I really didn't say everything I said." Speaking of Yankees, do you know what a "Yankee dime" is?  Here's a hint: it's wet, made with love, and you can't take it to a bank. "It's all downhill from here, y'all"--which is not always a bad thing. Plus, nice vs. kind, premises vs. premise, a time-travelling word quiz, drunk as Cooter Brown, footing the bill, and some new words for the opposite of avuncular.<br /><br />FULL DETAILS<br /><br />It's such a delight to hear Yankee legend Yogi Berra deliver his Yogisms that it's easy to overlook the fact that he likely didn't make up most of them. Of course, that doesn't make lines like You can observe a lot by watching any less profound. But if you're interested in the accuracy of quotes attributed to him or someone else, start with linguist Garson O'Toole's Quote Investigator.<br /><br />If someone's drunk as Cooter Brown, they're pretty darn intoxicated. The saying comes from the word cooter, meaning box turtle, and alludes to a turtle swimming around in its own drink.<br /><br />Another great Yogism: It's difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.<br /><br />A San Diego, California, listener shares some slang used by her father, who was a Navy fighter pilot. To bang off the cat is to take off from an aircraft carrier. The meatball refers to the landing system that requires lining up with an amber light. And bingo fuel is the exact minimum amount of fuel a jet needs to get back and land on its designated runway. Some of these terms pop up in a 1954 New York Times Magazine article called Jet-Stream of Talk.<br /><br />Quiz Guy John Chaneski has built a time machine for this word game that requires guessing the imaginary early version of nouns like