Pebble Picker (Rebroadcast) - 11 July 2016

<p>Right off the bat, it's easy to think of several everyday expressions that derive from America's pastime. Including right off the bat. The Dickson Baseball Dictionary catalogues not just those contributions but also more obscure terms like "pebble picker," and explains why a fastball is called a "Linda Ronstadt." Plus, as more transgender people are publicly recognized, there's a debate about which pronouns to use. And who in the world would give a one-star review on Amazon to … Herman Melville's Moby-Dick? Plus, the plural of hummus, tear the rag off the bush, to boot, synesthesia, paper stretchers, wet washes, and the verb to podcast.<br /> <br /> FULL DETAILS<br /> <br /> Right off the bat, you can probably name a long list of common idioms that come from baseball. For example, right off the bat. But how about some of the more obscure ones, like the Linda Ronstadt? In a nod to Ronstadt's song "Blue Bayou," her name is used in baseball to refer to a ball that blew by you. Paul Dickson has collected this and hundreds of other baseball terms in his comprehensive book, The Dickson Baseball Dictionary.<br /> <br /> The plural of hummus isn't easy to pin down, because although the word's ending looks like a Latin singular, it's actually Arabic.  For waiters and party hosts serving multiple plates of hummus, it's not wrong to say hummuses, but plates of hummus will do just fine.<br /> <br /> The Spanish idiom, arrimar el ascua a su sardina, literally means "to bring an ember to one's own sardine." It means "to look out for number one," the idea being that if a group is cooking sardines over a fire, and each person pulls out a coal to cook his own fish, then the whole fire will go out. So the idiom carries the sense not only of being selfish, but the effects of that selfishness on the larger community.<br /> <br /> Something excellent can be said to tear the rag off the bush, or take the rag, and it likely comes from old Western shooting competitions, where the winner would shoot a rag off a bush. The Oxford Englis