Good Job, Brain! - 6: Word Nerds Rejoice!

Episode Date: April 9, 2012

Crossword champ Tyler Hinman joins us for a fantastic fest fawning over words. We talk about the history and process of constructing crosswords, why Noah Webster is our A-hole of the week, and we introduce you to your new ultimate favorite word of THE FOREVER! ALSO: pop quiz, odd spelling bee, Chris Hansen, movie titles lost in translation, and how to memorize the biological taxonomy order. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media podcast. Hello, cheery, chipper chums and chats. Welcome to Good Job, Brain, your weekly quiz show and offbeat trivia podcast. This is episode six, and of course, I am your. humble host Karen and along with me are our ready gleeful and gregarious gang of co-host contestants uh you flaked out on the last two words group I'm running out of it's poetic license you could have said group maybe group yeah gregarious group gang gang gang's not bad yeah the wheels oh gaggle yeah giggling gaggle of

oh now I'm being judge that's why I'm here that's hard yeah today we have I'm Colin Dana and also we have an amazing special guest today. You might have seen him on the big screen in the documentary wordplay and a five-time champion winner of the American Crossword puzzle tournament and Crossword

puzzle creator, Tyler Hinman. Hello, great to be here. Yay. The word expert. Now we actually have a real expert in the house. Bonafide expert. Burn on Colin. At least in Crosswoods.

It's under six letters on Golden. I know. And I guess you don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out that the topic of the week is going to be on words and crosswords and all of that stuff. So word nerds rejoice. But I do have a quick starter question, and I came across this via Twitter, actually. So a lot of celebrities, they have fan groups, and they have names for their fan groups. And some of them sound pretty dumb. Right.

I mean, Lady Gaga has her little monsters, which, you know, it seems very fitting. There's also Justin Bieber fans are Beliebers. The Believers. Now, they come up with that themselves, right? I don't know. I don't know if these are fed. Or media creation. It's like grassroots, I think.

They're like jokes. You never really know where they're going from. Twihearts. Right. Twilers, yeah. Beelibers belong to all of us. Indeed. There's also a Prince Harry has Harry Chasers.

Yeah, that one makes me cringe. It sounds so dirty, the Harry Chasers. The worst bar drink. Harry and a hairy chaser So I'm thinking like You know What if we had famous historical figures What would their fan group names be

If you know it exists right The stupid one I came up with Is one of my heroes Because I'm a math nerd Benoit Mandelbrot fractal Sure Of course Sure

Household name Oh Mandelbrot fractal Yeah Yeah Mandel bros Nice It's good. Or if they're females, they can be fractalettes.

Yeah. It's so tough. I am crushing this fractal. Yo, dude. Yo, bra. Hey, bra. This is Mandel bros, man. Mandel bros for life.

I've always been more of a Serpinski guy. Ooh, I know Sirpinski as well. His triangle and his carpet. Yes, indeed. Words, people. Keep it to words. So what about you guys? Do you guys have any historical fan group names that's equally as dumb as mine?

Well, this is pretty bad. Like, if you're a fan of. of Thomas Edison. I know we talked about him before and how he was a butt headison, but they could be like Edheads. Ed heads. Ed heads.

I, the only one, I was just, I went for the odd, just like the pun angle. All I could think of is like, Eiffel, you know, if you're a fan of Eiffel, you could be the Eiffleutons. Oh,

good. Oh, that is cool. I got to follow that. Yeah. I got a few here. If you're a fan of St. Paul's Cathedral and the architecture thereof, you'd be a Christopher Wrenthusiast.

Oh, enthousiest, that's good. And if you are a defender of an accused Soviet spy, you'd be an Algar, a hiscianado. Oh, my. And, of course, those who enjoy the work of a 19th century French author, take their cue from the 16th century French Protestants

and call themselves the Hugo Nuts. I feel like that's something. Yeah, yeah. You'll be a little bit, I don't know. Hugo Nuts for the Hugo Nuts. Is Hugonuts.com taken? Check that out. You go nuts for you go nuts.

Oh, marketing. So good. All right. Here we go. Let's start the show with our general trivia segment, which is pop quiz, hot shot. All right. Everybody get your barnyard buzzers ready. Here we go.

All right. And the first question, Blue Wedge. What state is home to Mall of America? Oh, that was Tyler. I believe that would be Minnesota. Correct. On the board. Mall of America calls itself a city within a city.

It's nuts. I mean, and like, you know, when the weather's inclement, you could literally spend your entire day in there. I bet people do. Oh, yeah. I bet people can. Man, that's a, I don't know if that's a great day. Yeah, I don't know that's a good. Pink Wedge.

Name three of the four types of cars mentioned in Blondie's Rapture. Oh. I will just place my buzzer down on the table. I'm just trying to run through it in my mind right now. Okay. Five-five Freddy. You can sing out the song if you want. I am not going to embarrass all of us.

I'm not going to embarrass all of. We can edit it. It's fine. It goes out. I won't be embarrassed, call. I cannot remember them. It is Cadillac, Lincoln, Mercury, and Subaru. Wow.

Okay. That's a good one. We only need three out of the four. Yeah. Yellow Wedge. What human rights organization was founded in 1961 after two students were imprisoned for seven years for drinking a toast to justice. Colin.

Was it Amnesty International? Correct. Very nice. And we have Purple Wedge. What Italian author claims to have a personal library of 50,000 books? Italian author. Colin. Calvino.

Incorrect. Any takers? Machiavelli? Incorrect. Tyler. I will name an Italian author. Incorrect. It is Umberto Echo.

Oh, the other one. That is particularly embarrassing because he is in crosswords all the time. All the time because of his last name is. I am shamefaced. That fact does not come up, however. Well, now you can write a new clue. There you got that. Greenwich Science.

in what part of your body might the nurse hear crackles Ronkee or sorry Ron Kai or strider and I'm sorry I don't know how to pronounce Ronkey it is spelled R-H-O-N-C-H-I Tyler

Sounds like Bronchi so I'm going to say the lungs correct Oh and a good bit of a deduction there Slate reduction Good job brain Good job brain Orange Wedge Sports

Where did NFL quarterback Jim McMahon play college football? Oh. Colin. Was it Miami? Incorrect. The only McMahon I know are wrestling McMahon. I was thinking that too.

I was like, I don't know where they played college football. It's a religious school. Gessing Notre Dame? Incorrect. Loyola? No. It's a big religious. just school. Oh, you guys. Yeah, I, well, it is, uh, bring him young. Bayou.

Oh, you are you. Of course. And, uh, we also have our Kickstarter backer questions as well. First one is from Mr. Todd companion from Silver Spring, Maryland. And his question is, what is the fundamental basis of the metric system? As in, what are all those units like meter, gram, and leaders derived from? Uh, I don't suppose it's, 10. You know, that would be my guess because it's, you know, decimal based on 10, but it is not. Think bigger. Okay.

100. Well, I mean, I don't know if this is what he's getting at, but aren't they based on fundamental like wavelengths of frequencies of light under certain temperatures and conditions? You are correct. It is the speed of light and water because light defines the length and therefore volume, fixed volume of water defines mass. Right. And I believe that before that.

They were based on set. There were rods. There were like official reference rods of metal that lived in the standards office. And they updated them. I mean, it was. It was like, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's around here somewhere. These little sticks.

And Mr. Todd, oh. Accidental does. Mr. Todd companion is a standardization nerd. So that's his question. And he's also had many careers such as in science and education, rocket science, law enforcement. But he feels like he. he should have been become a fireman. That was his dream when he was five.

Awesome. And our second Kickstarter question is from Gianne Cruz from San Francisco. And this is related to our, actually, our topic of the week. Okay. What is the only word in the English language that is solely derived from Tagalic, the native language of the Philippines? Oh, nice. One of those things I feel like I've heard and have not retained.

Hmm. Yeah, I feel the same way. I'm just thinking about Lumpia. It is boondocks. Ah. And hence, boonies, rural areas, Tagalog for boondok, B-U-N-D-O-K, meaning mountain. I like that. That's a good one.

I like it, too. The interesting fact about Mr. Cruz is that if there was a sport that involved catching food in his mouth from a long distance, he would be the world champion. Ooh, YouTube. Yeah, exactly. They've already been held on YouTube, I'm pretty sure. That sounds like a wager, yeah. Picks or it didn't happen. Have you ever seen the Blumen Group?

Oh, yeah. That's his new career. There you go. I've seriously injured my teeth trying to catch an M&M at distance. Really? Oh, I mean, you get it like square on the tooth. It can really hurt. Especially the peanut ones, ruthless.

Yeah. All right, good job everybody's brains. Segway into our topic of this week, which is words. Woo! Yay! 1,000 words swarm around my head, 10 million more in books written beneath my bed. I wrote or read them all when searching in the swarm, still can't find out. Well, obviously, the topic of words and puzzles or of the English language is pretty vast.

I'd say it's pretty vast. So we're choosing. We're not going to cover at all. No, not everything. Hard bark. We're going to choose some of our favorite subjects, and hopefully we'll maybe do another episode in the future, covering other stuff, interesting things about words. And to start it off, I have a quick, weird vocabulary quiz. Oh, boy.

We can buzz, but everybody has to give me an answer. Okay. All right. So almost like round robin. Multiplay. Multiplay. All right. Here we go.

Name a non-proper name word that uses two consecutive A's. Non-proper. Yeah. Did you just say it? I think I just said one. I will say Ardvark. Ardvar. Do we have to come up with a new one?

Oh, I thought, okay, game over. Well done. Crap. All right, so another word with two consecutive A's. Wow. Tyler, you can keep on home? Can I sweep the board here? Yeah, exactly.

You can go for, yeah, just go two more. Make it official with the buzz here. Would non be one? No. Okay, no, nice, nice. Party. I believe it's pronounced partay No, I have consecutive aides in my

Party Other possible answers In addition to Ardbark there's also Ard Wolf Oh, yeah Ard Wolf Yeah and the plural version Ard Wolves There's also the monetary unit of Finland

Which is Marca Oh yeah The easy one would be ba As in she Or ah A.A.H. is a word. Ah, is a word. And even just A.A. is a word. I almost said that one.

Scrabble. No one is from Scrabble. And it actually means cindery lava. And it's Hawaiian. So a lot of these words are also home. Another one. Name another word that uses two consecutive eyes. Skiing. Correct. Any other takers? Tyler. I will say radii. Radiae. Yes. Also acceptable. Dana, you're last.

No. This is great for me, because I don't have to come up with any of these. I'm thinking Hawaii. Taxing. Right, right, right. Name a word that has consecutive use. Oh, damn. We all want the first one.

Vacuum. Dachium. Colin. Continuum. Very good. There goes my second one. And let's see. Equis?

No, that's a play. I like it. I like Equus, though. Uh, let's think. There's got to be... There's some cheater words. Cheater, oh, well... Okay, so... Mimu.

Mimu. Yes. Yeah. Under the water. That's the death. Well done. Well done. Good job.

Nice. And it has two sets of them, right? Yeah. Double points. Double points, yeah. Ultra vacuum is also... Oh. Stop.

Yeah, that's a little. Sub vacuum. Yeah. Mimu vacuum. Three set. Which is on the muu vacuum continuum. We're just making our own portmanteau words here. Yeah.

Okay. What is that? I want to know more. That's actually the next question is name me a portmanteau word, which is two words squished together to make a new word. Tyler. How about smog? Smog.

Smog, smoke and fog, right? Yes, indeed. Smoor. Smoor is not. I don't know. Smooth and... Some more. I don't know.

Some more. Colin. I've got one that related to what we talked about a couple weeks ago, which is... electrocution, which was a combination of electrical execution. Data. I'm not sure a note. There are plenty, actually. But rockumentary is a good one.

Mockumentary, too. And mockumentary, right, right. Brangelina. Tomcat. Right, absolutely. My favorite word has to be, Pormantile word would have to be bodacious. Oh, yeah.

What? It's what the turtles say. But it is not. It is a bold. and audacious. Bowatious. All right. And our last vocab quiz question,

name me a palindrome word. Palindrome being you can read forward and backwards the same way. Tyler. How about race car? Race car, very good. That's my favorite one. Oh, man.

Come on, you guys. Pop. Low-hanging fruit there. Mom. dad I'm trying to go for a long one Those are palindromes Oh yeah

Tot there Yeah fine You get one to the wire I was trying to go for like the long ones You should have put a word Yeah I should put like a five letters Well I was thinking of all the sentence palindrums that I know And I just kind of blank

Kayak level Rotor Oh rotor My personal favorite one is The Fear of Palindromes Which is of course Ibophobia Dispelled

A-I That is awesome So I am a huge Giant, giant crossword fan I'm not very good at it And yeah I try to solve the New York Times And the Onion ones almost every day And Tyler here who is not only a champ

In solving them You also write them From time to time, yeah And I actually did some of your puzzles before And I want to ask you like Give me a brief history of crossword puzzles Yeah Well we're coming up on the 100th

the anniversary, actually, the crossword. It was first appeared in December of 1913 in the New York world. Is there going to be a party? There is going to be a book. Okay. An editor named Peter Gordon, who does really good work, is calling out constructors to make just a book for basically tribute to the crossword puzzle on its own anniversary. That is cool. I would have guessed it was older, yeah, than 100 years, yeah. Good bar bet there. Yeah. 100 years. When it came out, was it just kind of like a giant fad that, like, swept the whole nation, or was it kind of a highbrow? And it was it wasn't a fad once upon a time. It was a little before my time, but a hundred years ago. Yeah, I remember reading

like on a train that would supply dictionaries for travelers who had crossword puzzle books to pass the time. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. I guess cheating material. I came, yeah, I mean, I came across, I knew we were being talking about crosswords. And I came across something, it just seems so funny to me. There was an article about worrying about the panic of, you know, people storming libraries and commandeering

dictionaries and encyclopedias just for the purpose of filling in the puzzles and you know that the tone of the editorials what are we going to do when people who are there to use the library for normal reasons can't have access to these reference books and i'm like i feel like that's awesome to have all these people go in libraries to salt puzzles if that's the thing you're complaining about on your op-ed pages yeah you've got they look 90 years in the future i think library should be happy for the attention exactly they'd be happy to be fending people off so like when you when you create a crossword puzzle like how does it start i mean and for a lot of people who aren't big crossword fans, the bigger crossword puzzles, they have four or six

very long clues. And usually they're themed. Usually they're like kind of a play on words. You work around that. Like what is your process, Tyler? Well, first I have to come up with the theme, which for me is kind of the biggest stumbling block for me. It's, it's hard to come up with the theme that you haven't seen before, you know, doing as many puzzles as I've done over the years. And to come up with something you think solvers are going to like and that will work in a grid and we'll just, we'll just be entertaining and can be executed well. So if I come up with one of those, you got to get, got to get your theme entries going because if you weren't aware of all crossword puzzles, you know, in the main markets, almost all of them have 180 degree rotational

symmetry. Right, right. So you turn the grid upside down. Black squares look exactly the same. So if you have a 10-letter theme answer, you need another 10-letter theme answer. And you can have one that's an odd length that can go in the center. But other than that, you need, you need them to pair off somehow. And sometimes that's a, that's a stumbling block. I never noticed that. symmetry. I didn't. I always noticed it. I didn't know if it was just a convention or if it was, I mean, if there was something in designing the puzzles or solving the puzzles that made it easier. It's just more beautiful. It's true. That's true. That's the reason. Yeah, it's more attractive and it's just the way it's always been done. Yeah. It's a good limitation though. I feel that that is part of the challenge too. Right. Right. Because yeah, I can make my own crossword puzzles. It's going to take like six pages and it's like all branching out. Karen, there's no black squares here. What is this? And one of the things I want to ask you, Tyler, is like, what are some of the limitations like can you can you put gross things in you like you can't you obviously cannot put curse words can you you you cannot unless you hide them on a diagonal and the editor is lazy I would never do such a thing of course he's winking at us right now yeah that's false

character assassination look for puzzles by Tyler there's bad words in them so but that must be like a fun thing in the crossword community right like the little easter eggs or it's I mean I joke those those really don't come up very often. Just puzzle construction is hard enough. I mean, one of the reasons I really like contributing to the onion. I'm one of eight people that makes the onions weekly crossword. So I'm in there every two months or so. Is we can get away with, uh, not, maybe not so much on the grid.

And, you know, we definitely don't overdo it. But in the clues, there's definitely a lot of, uh, we can get away with some PG-13 stuff, at least. So it's a lot more fun that way. And you'll see a lot of the same thing and, uh, some alt-weeklies run a crossword. And that'll have some, that'll have some PG-13 material as well. And that's, those are fun to do sometimes. What was probably your proudest answer or clue ever? The clue that sticks out.

I mean, cluing tends to me, a lot of constructors really like it. I really don't. I see it as kind of a nuisance because I finished the grid. I've done the hard part. And now it's like, oh, now I got 78 clues to write or 76 or however many words are in my puzzle. Particularly if you're writing a harder puzzle, you want to get creative and challenging. So it's going to challenge the solvers, but still be fair. And they'll have a nice little moment when they get it, rather than just saying, oh, I guess that's it.

okay. But one I wrote was it's eight letters. And my clue was bars for a cell. Bars for a cell. S-E-L-L-C-E-L-C-E-L-L. Bars for a cell. Eight letters. Membrane? Yeah, I was going to say, yeah, membrane or, yeah. Well, there is a question mark on it. Oh, okay. So there's some wordplay as a foot in this little cleverness here.

Membrane is eight. I'm going to go with membrane. I like that. It's also wrong. It's not clever. It's not clever enough. It has to be. It is. It's the thing that goes around a cell. It has to be something like a pub. Yeah, or a... A me bar.

No made-up words and puzzles. Okay, give it to us. All right, well, bars for a cell, of course, your mind immediately goes to prison because those are, you know, prison bars, but that's not all what you want. The answer is actually ringtone, as in bars of music that are on your cell phone. So smart.

That's probably the best one I've ever. written in some time. That's all I have written down. The one I remember the most from Tyler is the whole theme of the puzzle is the long words, they're kind of like sayings, but you have to add an extra letter in front of the two words. So they're parents. They're like blank and blank.

And you have to add another letter. And I think the clue was something like being annoying in the magic forum question mark. And it was trick trolling. Like Rick rolling and trick trolling. That's so many levels. going on there. Oh, I was so happy when I solved it. I was so happy. You must be an internet person to get that one. Yeah. I mean, that was obviously for the onion. That's the sort of thing I don't think would really fly in the New York Times or another conventional venue because, you know, maybe the

average New York Times reader doesn't really know what Rick Rowling is. Right, right. I think the average Onion reader is perhaps more likely to get that. That's good. I mean, you must, when you're coming up with these, you must just randomly have some clues that come to you, you know, in the shower or on the train. You're like, oh, I got to save that for a puzzle or something, right? From time to time. I've been having those thoughts lately more with cryptic crossword clues, which is another altogether different beast of a puzzle. And that clues in that puzzle, or their answers are clued two ways. Each clue is two halves, basically. There's the normal kind of conventional crossword clue. And it's kind of welded together with a second clue that uses

wordplay. But it's all kind of crunched together into a sentence, into a phrase that makes sense on the whole. And it's kind of figure out the dividing point and what order they're in. Wow. Like each step as a puzzle, yeah. If you get an email for me, in my signature, I have, uh, bank tellers, beginning to come back for me. And that's a cryptic crossword clue for my name, Tyler, because bank is Rely. Teller's beginning is T. T. The beginning of T. And then coming back, Rely T reversed is Tyler. And then me is just the normal portion of the clue. Oh my God. That's so many levels.

That sounds so time intensive to generate. If you're born, I've never made an entire cryptic crossword. It's just really, really hard to clue well. Wow. Okay. So Tyler, I know you have prepared a quick crossword clue quiz. Oh, that was good alliteration. Right that down. And yay, this way I can play too. Yeah. Okay, all right. So I'm kind of presenting these in sets,

and you'll kind of see where I'm going with this. All right, hopefully. So crossword ease is a quick primer here. They're words that you may not encounter very much in real life, but you have to know them to be good at crosswords because they have very handy, letter combinations. They're short, vowels, common consonants, that sort of thing. So here we go.

Blank S-S-O, Canadian gas brand. Is it S-O? It is. E-S-S-O. Blank S-S-O. Blank Bucco, Veildish. Oh. Ah, Oss-O.

Yes, correct. A lot of, you'll do you, after doing a lot of crosswords, you'll find that a lot of these have several letters in common. Right. If you can't differentiate between them in your head, then you might have a difficult time. Here's another, here's another pair. Blank G-E-E, author James. Agie? Yes, it isn't A, correct.

And blank, G-E-E, a curved molding. Oh, wait, oops. Take a guess. It's not going to be like a Q, so it's a O. It's an O-G, yes. I don't know, a curved molding, like architectural? It's S-shaped, yes. Oh, G-E-E.

Yes, that one's very handy. That's a good one. All right, how about this one? O-blank O-E, a double-reed instrument. O-Boh, that comes in all the time. That it does. And it's one you might encounter in real life, but this one maybe not so much. O-blank O-E, an Indian tribe of Nebraska.

in Oklahoma. Oh, darn it. I was about to say a loony, but no. I would just be guessing if I'd get, yeah. I would just put a random letter and hope I was right. Well, that's why you have the crossing, right? Olo? It is not an L, sorry.

O-ho? Nope, sorry, it is a T, the O-2. And you sometimes see that without the E, so it's very handy. Oh, O-T-O. And this one can really, this is one you really want to get straight in your head, because you'll see why. Blank R-A-L, a disappearing C. Ural? Ah, yeah.

See, that's the trap. So it's not UR.A. It's not Ural. Oh, that's what I was going to say. A disappearing C. Hmm. That one's an A, the Aural C.

And then, of course, blanked R.A.L. The Eurasian mountain range. Ural! Yeah! Where is the Aural C? Do we, is that... I think it's...

I'm not sure... It's on Google. The exact location is typically too long for a crossroad clue. I mean, that's the fact people like to use that it's shrinking, so that's... Kind of an interesting fact that...

So I better go look now before it's gone. All right. Let's try this trio now. The next three are all going to be E-blank N-E. And these are all very handy in crosswords. E-blank N-E. Yes. A German article.

A-N-E. Yes, I, E-I-N-E. Same pattern. A C-E-E-R-N-E? That's it, Errn, yes. That's another one that's frequently spelled out the E. Just E-R-N. Oh, that's a good one.

Like turn and... Turn and earn, both very common. Scrabble word. Absolutely. And the last member of the trio, one of the quintessential examples of crossword ease, is an e-blank N-E, an Anglo-Saxon laborer. Like,

Anglo-Sax. If you don't solve crosswords, it's not likely you know this one, because I've literally never seen it in my life outside of crosswords. Whoa. Pass. Pass. No shot?

Okay. No. It's Es-N-E. and you can see how that would be it's four letters very common letters you can stick it in like the bottom row of a crossword and it's all nice letters same words with it's like the most common letters yeah right right but modern constructors do try to avoid that like oh no one really that's yeah that's the thing do like obviously these are really handy as as word fillers but are there a lot of crossword creators who who try to stray from I wouldn't say cheating but like this common words that you only see in that venue oh absolutely the philosophy behind modern crosswords is they really should reflect as much as possible, just how people speak. So, like, the word like Esne or something might be in the dictionary, but you don't really

want to use it as a nice word that a lot of people are using, but isn't in the dictionary would be perfectly good for a crossword because it's just a nice fun thing to see in a grid where it hasn't been there before. Yeah. In fact, if you're making a themeless puzzle, which is a wide open puzzle, which doesn't have a theme, it has lots of chunky white space and lots of long answers to compensate and typically very hard clues. Sometimes those will get started like at one across or somewhere else with a word that or a

phrase that has never, just has never been in crossroads before. And it might contain a Q or a Z or something as a bonus, because those are always fun to work in. You don't want E's and S's and R's just flooding the entire grid. It's almost like unfun. How about, how about a set of eight here to finish things off? All right. All right. All these are blank R.A. Start with an easy one here. A block of time. Oh, era. Pretty much everything. Yeah. Okay. Blank la la la la. A refrain from a song. Trah la la. Yeah. That's a Lyracist Gershwin.

Ira. Ira's correct. Two cups. And one girl? No, you're thinking along the right lines. Blah, there I go. I just thought of it. Let's see here.

Blank pro nobis, which means pray for us. Oh, I've heard this in the Latin phrase list before. Pra. It's not Pra. Is it A-R-A-R-A-R? It is not an A, sorry. What is it? It is ORA.

ORA. And, of course, you'll also see man-blank mouse. And the reason they don't say, are you a man-blank mouse, is because A is in the clue. So a lot of times you'll just see the ellipsis, man-blank mouse. It'll be a little two-letter partial there. Or A. Let's see. A married Malaga woman for short.

Malaga. Oh, Signora. Signora. S-R-A. Extremely handy. Nice, nice, nice. Group that's packing, another abbreviation. here.

NRA. I was going to say bra. That works too. Nice. Maybe we could put them next to each other. It's not an abbreviation, though. And I think the last one I have in the list here is Coach Persigen of the aforementioned Notre Dame.

Era. Era is correct. That's the ARA. And I believe it's also a constellation. Very. That was good. That was good. Lots more where that came from.

Yeah. Man. No frills, delivers. Get grocery. delivered to your door from No Frails with PC Express. Shop online and get $15 in PC optimum points on your first five orders. Shop now at nofrails.ca. I'm Chris Hadfield.

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I actually learn a lot of words through crosswords. The ones I always will always carry with me is a T-A-R-N, which is a mountain lake. And Obie, which is the belt. Oh, yeah. Oh, right. I know that. Oh, man. That shows up so much.

Not to be confused at the off-B-B-B-B-Ward award, the Obi-I-E. The OB-I-E. And certainly not to be confused with Obi-Wan Kenobi. Absolutely. But it is spelled the same way. Yes, it is. Blank-Wan, yeah, I'll see that from time to time. Or the club Obi-Wan from the Indiana Jones movie.

What? Yeah. That I've never seen. In the second movie, so what is that? Temple of Doom, right? Yeah. In the Asian club? Yeah, in Shanghai.

The name of the club is the club Obi-Wan, and that was kind of their little in-joke. Cool. Well, let's take a quick break from all the word nerdery here and let's share a quick trick of memorizing some stuff we got our today's demonic will help you memorize the biological classification taxonomy order and most people are familiar with with genus and species right like homing erectus but what about all the other ones above genus yeah daniel fight wrote in and this is something that he learned from tv fun house

and what are they're going to give us what they are first so they are from large to small we have kingdom phylum class order family genus species right and you can add one more for subspecies but that's that's easy enough to remember um so daniel suggested something that he learned from tv fun house is a little bit racy which is please come over for gay sex and watch my pearls but that leaves out the kitty that does leave the k so i modified it in the spirit of hollywood gossip these days Kim Kardashian and Kanye West had a trist of some sort and so

I modified it adding the kingdom in front so it's Kanye please come over for great sex I wonder what the portmanteau there is Kim Ye like Kim Ye like Kanye needs one more thing to go to his head is that he's got

yeah people all over the nation yeah memorizing Kanye please come over for great sex and there are a lot of other pneumonics floating here and there, including there's one, which is King Philip Chase's old fat Girl Scouts. I like that one. That one's funny. I like that one. Featring Chris Hanson.

Exactly. You could tell that one a little good thing, Philip. I'm Chris Hansen from Dateline. Don't run. I just want to chat. She said she was going to get some lemonade. That's all I'm here for. Just wanted some Samoas.

Some tag alongs. That's good. I could never remember that one. I always remember Kingdom and then Genius and Species. It was always, yeah. I know all of them. I just don't know them in order. So, you know, we have two mnemonic for you to choose from.

Kanye, please come over for great sex. Or King Philip chases old fat Girl Scouts. Yeah. Equally disturbing. All very disturbing. It's good imagery. Not endorsed by either Kanye West or the girls' dads of America. Please don't sue us.

Or King Philip. Well, he's dead. He's a state. All right. Let's jump back. into our word topic. And I want to ask you with a spoon my own nitrilove. I mean, Dana has a whole bunch. We've seen from episode one. She introduced us to scrumping. What are some of other words you enjoy?

Cats and Jammer has to do with being hungover. It's like a- Well, wait, cats and jam. Yeah. Like the cats and jammer jails? Yeah. It has to do. Like are there cats and pajamas? Oh, that's a good image.

Cats and apostrophe jamas. So it's a good band name. No, all one word, right? It is a band name. Cats and jammer, yeah, one word. It's like cats, as in cats, and then jammer is like a loud howling noise. And it's basically an idiom for being hung over. like the cat

or can you use it in a sentence I woke up cats and jammer I woke up at a cats and jammer after partying with the mandelbrose last night What is in that fractal man that stuff was with cursing

so nerdy oh my god my favorite I have two favorite words and one of one was kind of boring but I really enjoyed the sounds of words that start starts with B and you.

So my two favorite words of all time, just because they sound funny, is a bungalow and budgie, as in the bird. Those are good. So a bungalow is, you know, a type of house and actually derived from India. And it was supposed to mean a kind of like a hovel or like a hut. But then it became like, oh, it sounds so exotic. Let's start naming with all the British, you know, presence in India. Like let's name our houses with large verandas, bungalows.

Right. And before it was Bengali, like a house that is in Bengali style. And so it's bungalow. Ah, I like that. Yeah. It does definitely sounds better than hut. Or hovel. Havel.

Unless you're calling a football play. Bungolo one. Bunggolo two. Dude, that's too long, man. We go back to hobble. Yeah, I mean, I also like certain words just because of the way they sound. And I remember in, you know, in school our vocabulary quiz as well. We learned out, lugubrious.

That's one of my favorite words. So learning lugubrious, which is just mournful or morose, and it was just like we had a little challenge among my friends to see if we could work that into sentences without people laughing, and of course you can. But so, yeah, lugubrious, I looked it up. The etymology is from Latin lugubris, from Lugar, meaning to mourn. It sounds like something you would describe a toothpaste. Yeah, it does.

I just, I love the words that have the G and the B, lugubrious. Stop being so lugubrious. Four to five dentists are mournful. What about you, Tyler? I'm going to bring to you, if you haven't heard it yet, this is Will Schwarz's favorite word. Will Schwarz being the crossword editor of the New York Times. And he always says this is his favorite word. I'm going to pass it on here.

The word is Eukalagon. That's U-C-A-L-E-O-N. And that was the name of an elder of Troy, whose house was set ablaze during the sacking of Troy. And now it means the ultra-useful term, a name. neighbor whose house is on fire. Oh, sure, sure, sure. Not his house has been set on fire. It's just on fire.

So that's more general. It's easier to use. The conflagration is sufficient. So it's the person. Yes. You're describing the person who's coming. It sounds like a bath gel. Ecaliga.

Ecaliga. Yeah, Ecalagon, take me away. I have a gross word. I found a very awesome word. Go on. It's changed my life. We like gross things. It's called snarge

That has to be a discharge of some kind He was the little character on Thundercats, right? Snarge. Snarf, snarf, snarf. You got a little snarge right here. So snarge is what happens when a plane and a bird come together And not so harmonious terms I trust. It's the bird smoothie part?

Oh, my God. Oh, dear. So I'm guessing, I'm just going to guess this word was named by pilots and not by the birds. Well, it was named by people who work in museums and, like, have to prepare the birds for display. Like, they just call it snarge. Everybody knows what it is, and they talk about. Snorch. Is it a portmanteau word?

Smoothie and. Nasty. Wait, no, what do you mean prepare for display? What is there left to display after a bird hits a plane? Oh, so the airplane. plane people got it from the museum people. And I think like when they're taxiderming, the birds, like, all the squishy stuff. The squishy stuff is snarge.

Snarge. Now does this include beaks or no? Those thrown clear. All of it. Snafoo and discharge, snarge. Oh, that's good. I like it. That is good.

I like that. Wow, that is pretty gross. So two episodes ago in our inventions show, we named Thomas Edison to be the A-Hole of the episode. and today we have another A-Hull of the episode and Colin, since you're a master of talking about A-Holes Thanks. Colin is very nice. I try to put a nice spin on everybody's story.

You're very neutral about it. We're the ones who are overreacting. He's like, oh, he just happened to, like, kill all the people in the village. That can happen to anybody. As you do. We've all done that. So who's our A-Hull of the episode? Well, you know, so I want to talk about Noah Webster

because it seemed very appropriate for a word episode. So, you know, we all know Webster, certainly from Webster's Dictionary. His name is, and now that we marry him Webster Dictionary, big part of our lives. Kind of a jerk. He, you know, he was a very driven, passionate man. He was active really in a period after we were really trying to forge like an American identity. So that was like his main goal was like America deserves its own identity, its own language, and really trying to separate from British.

And, you know, there were a lot of other people like, like that, like, you know, Mark Twain and Benjamin Franklin. I mean, there were a lot of, you know, it was an admirable goal, but he was just kind of a jerk. I have this quote here from the wonderful Bill Bryson again. I'll just start off with this quote. Noah Webster was by all accounts a severe, correct, humorless, religious, temperate, temperate, temperate, temperate, temperate, humorless people. A provincial school teacher and not very successful lawyer, he was short, pale, smug, and boastful. So that's not a lot of bad words all struck. That seems to be sort of the general tone of what people have to say about him. Yeah, I mean, he was, he was not a nice guy. He definitely believed that English spelling had to be shortened and simplified for America. Before he came along, probably the most famous dictionary was Samuel Johnson's, British, Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of English.

But, yeah, there's no doubt that the Webster Dictionary was by far biggest thing to come along in American. spelling and school teaching. You know, there had been a lot of spelling books before that, but he came out with his originally in 1788. You know, one of the problems is that he appears to have just stolen liberally from other people. And he would just copy things wholesale and put them into his spelling book under, you know, this is my creation. You know, he claimed... Some people. Like what? He claimed to invent the word demoralize. He claimed to invent appreciation and ascertainable, which... Lively words. Great words, but they all seem to be in the language for hundreds of years before.

he came along is the problem. He apparently... Almost like a charlatan. He's like fooling all the... I think he just... He really was into self-aggrandizement. He was just a jerk. He said he could speak 23 languages, but apparently he couldn't...

He made up 14 of them. Some of them. Websterian. Websteris. Yeah, you know, I mean, one of the things, you know, that he really tried to do is simplify spelling and pronunciations, which was good in a way. He wanted to... Standardization.

Standardization. He was one of the first proponents of taking out the U, you know, in a lot of the previous and British spelling words, right? Yeah. Color, flavor, you know, favor, things like that, which I think was a good decision. But, you know, he also was responsible for taking out the eye. So we say aluminum in America.

British speakers will say aluminum. And it's not just pronounced differently. They spell it differently. They spell it with an eye. And it makes a lot more sense. think about potassium, barium, beryum,

aluminum, it's a lot more consistent. That's so random that he chose that one thing. He didn't like it. He didn't like it.

And so, you know... I love foil. I'm going to take the eye out. I'm going to keep all these other eyes. That would be fall. Oh, the aluminum fall. You know what? You get bored.

You find artistry where you can. B-O-U-R-D, of course. Yeah. Well, not if you're watching. He had some really strange pronunciations he proposed. He said that we should pronounce deaf, deef, nature as nadir, beauty. Ralph Nature. I know this will make, I know this will make Karen laughed. He said

beauty should be pronounced booty. For volume was volume. And he insisted that what we call Greenwich and Thames be pronounced exactly as they're written. Greenwich and Thames. Yes. Makes it easier to read. He was quirky. You know, again, like the whole rule we have about splitting infinitives, you know, to boldly go, things like that, you know, that there's supposedly, you're not allowed to say that. You know, he was one of the proponents against that just because he didn't like it. There's no rule for it, but his reasoning was you can't do it in Latin, so you can't do it in English. Oh, there is no rule? There is no rule.

You can split infinitives all to your heart's content. People save you when you do it. Yeah, yeah. I'm going to split the hell of some infinites later. He was a big proponent of rules for the same. sake of rules because he liked them. He just sounds like kind of a... I mean, I wouldn't say he's an awful person, but he sounds kind of miserable.

I wouldn't say he was necessarily in a hole, but he was persnickety, for sure. Sounds like he might be on the spectrum. Yeah, you know, you might be right. If you look up persnickity in the dictionary. It's got his own picture there. That would be awesome. You should own it. He was an agitator.

He wanted to get Congress to pass a law requiring simplified spelling to be the rule, that if you violated laws of simplified spelling, you could be. thrown in jail or subject to fine. Where do you draw the line? I mean, maybe he would like text speak now too, like pull out the vowels. Well, it's the thing. It's like he was awfully inconsistent in some ways. He was, as I say, he was a really religious guy.

He wrote his own, his own censored version of the Bible. Censored version. But they all did. Jefferson did too, right? So in Webster's version of the Bible, Onan doesn't spill his seed. He frustrates his purpose. That is the best euphemism. What are you doing in there, Jimmy?

I'm frustrating my purpose. Go away. If you frustrate your purpose, you're going. What's another one? I guess in this Bible, he also referred to testicles as peculiar members. Oh. And he apparently removed every mention of the female reproducter. process. Women didn't have wombs, nothing. He just made no mention. They're Barbie dolls.

It's like, don't even worry about it. He definitely did a lot for the language, despite being kind of prickly. And, you know, I think that the greatest irony of it all is that he wasn't really smart enough to make any money off of it. He sold, he didn't make the royalties. He sold the rights to his, to his dictionary outright. And so, you know, what we call the Merriam Webster today has nothing to do with him whatsoever. Like the businessmen, they bought, they essentially bought his name rights from, from his, uh, from his, uh, grand. nephew, I believe, a descendant of his. Should have gotten a biz dev guy.

Merriam is rolling in it. So he didn't have a collaborator at all. He did not have a collaborator. He certainly did have collaborators and people that he stole from. I mean, it's kind of telling. That's not really collaborating. Quote unquote, collaborating. Special thanks, too.

They don't know they're collaborating. But certainly, no, lots of editors and co-authors. So, yeah. Man, all right. It's the end of the show. We have a one more final quiz segment and kind of in the spirit of everything. This quiz, well, the skill of translation is a very difficult task. So it's not just getting the words right. You know, a lot

of times it's you need the localization to get the context right. Nonetheless, nothing makes us giggle more than oddly, not badly, oddly translated things. And so here I have a movie title translation quiz. Oh, I like this. And you have to identify the American or English movie by their strange literal translation from another country and another language. You'll be able to figure it out, like the deuce. So it's not all out of left field. All right, let's start with something easy. Buzz in.

This is from Argentina, and it's Vaseline. Vaseline. Oh. Is it Greece? It is Greece. It is Greece. Called Vaseline, starring

John Travolta and Olivia Newton John. And Vaseline. I want to see if they made it in that weird grease font, you know, like if I had to spell out Vaseline. The product placement must have cost a fortune. So I guess grease lightning would be Vaseline lightning. Go Vaseline lighting. Yeah.

Lose that stanch in there. All right. This one is from Mexico. It's called Pigs and diamonds. Pigs in diamonds? Pigs and diamonds. And diamonds. Mexico.

It's a British film. Oh. Colin? Uh, uh, lockstock and two smoking barrels? Close, but no. Oh, the other one. Tyler. Would it be Snatch then?

The other one, right? Oh, hence the expression, as greedy as a pig. Pigs, because pigs also ate corpses in that movie. It's explained in detail in the film. All right. This one is from Israel, and it's the eighth passenger three. Sounds like a map problem. Colin.

Passenger 57? No. three denotes the number of movie in a franchise oh the eighth passenger three what is seven passengers or eight passengers is it like one of the horror movies maybe it counts as horror final destination incorrect it is aliens three I guess the eight passenger would be the alien yeah okay this one is from Italy Please do not touch the old women. Tyler. Cacoon?

Incorrect. It's a musical. It is the producers. Oh. I guess name of Mel Brooks. Right. I would have said. Okay.

And let's do. From Japan. I'm drunk and you're a prostitute to be anything Pretty woman Incorrect Colin Leaving Las Vegas

Correct Which A lot of these So charming It's very matter of fact It is It's very direct Much like a pretty woman was

I'm rich and you're a prostitute And the last one Is a little bit hard to figure out But I'm sure you guys will get there It's in Chinese It's excitement 1995. Excitement,

one of the top movies on IMDB. I think we need more hints. It is, I'm just going to say it. It is Shawshank Redemption. Oh, what? I was going to say that. I was going to say that too.

Make that sense. So, I mean, the funny thing is this one I left for last because I grew up knowing this. I grew up with Excitement 995 thinking that's a name. Think back on it. It is really hard to localize

Shawshank Redemption into Chinese. I guess you can do like break away from prison or some sort of that. But like it's just I think they're trying to market the movie as kind of like an epic and less of a You just see it. Don't even worry about it.

It's exciting. It's exciting it came out this year. It's got sand and Morgan Freeman. Go see it. It's got poop. Lots of lots of poop. All right. And that is the last question. That is our show. Thank you guys for joining me today. Thank you, Tyler.

Oh, Tyler. What a joy. What a joy. Expert. And thank you guys, the listeners, for listening. I hope, hopefully now you have some good ammo for solving that next crossword puzzle in the newspaper. And we're on iTunes and we're on Zoom Marketplace. And we're also on our site, which is good job, brain.com.

So thank you, everybody. Bye. Thanks. Bye. Spend less time staying in the know about all things gaming and more time actually watching and playing what you want with the IGN Daily Update podcast. All you need is a few minutes to hear the latest from IGN on the of video games, movies, and television with news, previews, and reviews. So listen and subscribe

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