Polyglot Problems - 1 July 2013

<p>This week on "A Way with Words": Say you're in line at the drugstore. Does it bother you if the cashier says, "Next guest"? In department stores and coffeeshops, does the term "guest" suggest real hospitality -- or just an annoying edict from corporate headquarters? <br /><br />And speaking of buzzwords, has your boss adopted the trendy term "cadence"?  Also: words made up to define emotions, like "intaxication." That's the euphoria you get when you receive your tax refund--that is, until you remember it was your money to begin with. Plus, wide-awake hats, cheap-john, the problems of polyglots, and the many meanings of dope.<br /><br /><br />FULL DETAILS<br /><br />Emotions can be hard to define. That's why there's The Emotionary, a collection of words made up specifically to capture emotions in a single word, like "intaxication" -- the euphoria of getting a tax refund--until you realize the money was yours to start with. <br /><br />Jeff from Cardiff-by-the-Sea, California, wants to know if he's wrong to say, I'm going over Martha's house, meaning "I'm going over to Martha's house." He's always left out the word to from that phrase. His wife argues that he's implying that he's going to fly over the person's house. The expression going over, as opposed to going over to, is a case of locative prepositional deletion, which occurs when we take out a preposition when talking about direction or destination. This particular version sometimes occurs in Massachusetts, where, as it happens, Jeff grew up.<br /><br />So you think you hate puns? Wait until you hear this item from a Singapore newspaper about a Japanese banking crisis. <br /><br />Every tub on its own bottom suggests that every person or entity in a group should be self-sufficient. This idiom, often abbreviated to ETOB, is common in academic speech to mean that each department or school should be responsible for raising its own funds. But the phrase goes back at least 400 years, when a tub meant the cask or barrel for wine. The metaphor of a tub on its own