Put That in Your Pipe and Smoke It (Rebroadcast) - 27 February 2012

<p>Which came first, orange the color or orange the fruit? And what's a busman's holiday? Martha and Grant talk about bumbershoots, brollies, nursery rhymes, and alternatives to the word "unicycle." Plus, an app-inspired quiz, favorite oxymorons, and the origin of "put that in your pipe and smoke it"! If the Google Books Corpus doesn't sound like fun, think again. And by the way, shouldn't more than one company be allowed to sell Monopoly? <br /><br />FULL DETAILS<br /> <br />You know those words whose meanings never seem to stick in your mind, no matter how many times you flip back to the dictionary? Martha wrestles with the term atavistic, meaning "the tendency to revert to ancestral characteristics." She now remembers it by the Latin root it shares with the Spanish word for "grandfather," abuelo. Grant, in turn, shares his revelation that upwards of actually means "more than," not "up to."<br /><br />A unicycle enthusiast wonders if his unicycle can be properly called a bike. To avoid the four-syllable mouthful, the unicycle community (yes, there is one) sometimes calls it a uni, but for the general public, the term "bike" works. Martha reveals that she once spent a summer teaching herself to ride a unicycle, and doesn't mind calling it a bike. Grant notes the general rule that once a word has left its etymological root, it can be used for whatever we need it for.<br /><br />http://www.unicyclist.com/forums/showthread.php?t=88860<br /><br />Rihanna's hit "Umbrella" may not have had the same ring if she'd referred to being "under my bumbershoot." Nonetheless, bumbershoot, bumberell, brolly and bumbersol, among others, are all playful alternatives to umbrella that even Mary Poppins would appreciate. Grant explains that bumbershoot, itself an American slang term, derives from the Latin umbra, meaning "shadow," and chute, as in "parachute." <br /><br />http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjXKk3AbgH8&feature=related<br /><br />http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-bum2.htm<br /><br />Twitter's 140-character format has mad