Spit Game - 29 June 2015

<p>This week on "A Way with Words": People in ancient times could be just as bawdy and colorful as we are today. To prove it, we found some graffiti written on the walls in the city of Pompeii, and found plenty of sex, arrogance and good old fashioned bathroom talk etched in stone. Plus, British rhyming slang makes its way to our televisions through police shows on PBS. And a dictionary for rock climbers gives us a fantastic word that anyone can use to describe a rough day. Also, spitting game, hornswoggling, two kinds of sloppy joes, peppy sad songs, and endearing names for grandma.<br /><br /><br />FULL DETAILS<br /><br />When Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 A.D., parts of the ancient city of Pompeii remained intact, including the graffiti written on its walls. Much of what was written, not unlike today's bathroom etchings, is naughty and boastful, with people like Celadus the Thracian claiming to be the one who "makes the girls moan."<br /><br />A Tallahassee, Florida, mother who texted her daughter in a hurry accidentally asked about the "baby woes," meaning "baby wipes," and came to the conclusion that we need a new phrase: read between the autocorrect.<br /><br />If you watch British police procedurals, you'll likely come across the term to grass someone, meaning "to inform on someone" or "to rat someone out." It’s a bit of British rhyming slang that originated with the 19th-century phrase to shop on someone. That gave us the noun shopper, which became grasshopper, and then got shortened to grass. <br /><br />A Japanese version of the idiom the grass is always greener translates to "the neighbor's flowers are red."<br /><br />The word hornswoggle, meaning "to embarrass" or "to swindle," is of unclear origin, but definitely seems of a piece with U.S. frontier slang from the 1830s and 1840s. <br /><br />Our Quiz Guy John Chaneski has a game called Dictum wherein he gives us a word, like contrary or emasculate, and we have to guess the closest bold-faced word that comes after it in the dictionary. Tougher than yo