Who You Calling a Jabroney? (rebroadcast) - 2 January 2012

<p>SHOW SUMMARY<br /><br />Yo! Who you callin' a jabronie? And what exactly is a jabronie, anyway? Also, what do vintage school buses and hack writers have in common? Grant and Martha trace the origins of famous quotes, and a listener offers a clever new way to say "not my problem." All that, plus winklehawks, motherwit, oxymorons, word mash-ups, and a quiz about palindromes. <br /><br />FULL DETAILS<br /><br />Is that a winklehawk in your pants? A listener shares this word for those L-shaped rips in your trousers, from an old Dutch term for "a carpenter's L-shaped tool." And Grant has a new favorite term, motherwit, meaning "the natural ability to cope with everyday life." You could say a mark of wisdom is showing some motherwit in the face of life's winklehawks.<br /><br />Ever heard a school bus called a school hack? Grant and Martha explain the etymology of hack, beginning with hackney horses in England, then referring to the drivers of the horse-drawn carriages, then the carriages themselves, and finally the automobiles that replaced them. A museum in Richmond, Indiana, has a vintage yellow school hack, once used in the 19th and early 20th centuries to bring rural children to their schoolhouse. Incidentally, the contemporary term hack, meaning a tired old journalist, comes directly from the original term for the tired old horse.<br /><br />http://bit.ly/mfS08T<br /><br />O heavy lightness! Serious vanity! Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms! A listener senses something awfully good about oxymorons, from the Greek for "pointedly foolish". Grant shares this favorite example from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, while Martha picks a modern classic: airline food. What are your favorites?<br /><br />In the U.K., they don't count their seconds as one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi, because, well, they have no Mississippi. Instead, they say one-elephant, two-elephant. Lynne Murphy, author of the blog Separated by a Common Language, points out this difference between English speakers on opposite sides of the pond. <b