Lord Love a Duck - 30 June 2014

<p>This week on "A Way with Words": Someone should write a love letter to a new book called "Letters of Note." It's a splendid collection of all kinds of correspondence through the ages: Elvis Presley fans writing to the president, children making suggestions to famous cartoonists, a scientist's poignant love letter to his late wife. Then there's correspondence in the digital age: Grant and Martha talk about how to emphasize something in an email, and when it helps to use emoticons. Also, the fabric called blue jean is much, much older than you might think. Plus, Lord love a duck, man in the moon, bacon and eggs vs. eggs and bacon, white-liver widows, and a vinegar-and-ketchup sauce called julep.<br /><br />FULL DETAILS<br /><br />Letters of Note, a book based on the website of the same name, is a collection of funny, moving, and insightful letters from both famous people and nobodies.<br /><br />Which comes first in this favorite breakfast combo: bacon and eggs, or eggs and bacon? Neither are totally idiomatic, but bacon and eggs is most common.<br /><br />Emphasizing one word over another, especially in written correspondence, makes a huge difference in the meaning of a sentence. And if all caps or italics don't do the trick in an email, consider using an emoticon.<br /><br />Since Adobe released the photo-editing program Photoshop in 1988, to photoshop has become a common verb, which got shortened to just shop. Now people are using the hashtag lazyshop, where you just describe the changes you would have made to a photo if you'd actually had the energy to photoshop it.<br /><br />Our Quiz Guy John Chaneski has a name game for famous folks who could use a different surname because of their trade.<br /><br />The term white-livered, like lily-livered, can describe someone timid.  But an old folk tradition, once common in the South, associates having a white liver or white spots on one's liver with an insatiable sexual appetite.  The terms white-livered widow, or white- livered widder refers to a woman who has a se