Sound of a Kiss - 17 March 2014

<p>This week on "A Way with Words": You're at a social gathering and meet someone you'd like to know better. What do you ask to get a real conversation going? Some people lead with "What do you do?," while others avoid talking about work entirely. Still others ask, "Where'd you go to high school?' Also, the fancy way linguists describe the sound of a kiss. And what does it really mean when someone "breaks bad"? Plus, alight and come in, rustle my jimmies, breaking bad, grammatical calques, mashtag potatoes, comprise vs. compose, bangs vs. fringe, virgas and virgules, and bad Bible jokes.<br /><br /> FULL DETAILS<br /><br />In the U.S., we say mwah for the kissing noise. In parts of South America, it's chuik. And for linguists, of course, it's a bilabial lingual ingressive click.<br /><br />Is pussyfooting, as in "treading lightly," an offensive term? <br /><br />Here's a widely applicable book review: The covers of this book are too far apart. It's attributed to Ambrose Bierce, although it's unlikely he actually came up with it. <br /><br />There should be no dilemma about the spelling of dilemma. It's not dilemna, and it's a mystery why so many people were taught that way.<br /><br />No need to ask your doctor about virga. That's just the term for "a diagonal streak of rain that evaporates before it hits the ground." It derives from the Latin for "rod," and is related to virgule, a fancy name for that punctuation mark otherwise known as a slash.<br /><br />Our Quiz-Man John Chaneski has a game about the Batman villains who didn't make the cut. All of their names end in -er, like The Matchmaker and The Firecracker.<br /><br />The term breaking bad means to raise hell, although if you weren't a Southerner, you might not have been aware that the rest of the country didn't know the phrase before Vince Gilligan, a Virginian, created the TV show by that name. <br /><br />Mashtags are potato snacks, pressed into the shapes of social media characters. Because marketers need a way to make junk food appeal to teens.<br />