Martha Barnette

And that's a vestige of Scots and Irish immigration.

because you'll hear this in eastern Ohio, western Pennsylvania, and it's a kind of linguistic fossil.

It's not as if English is inadequate in expressing ideas.

I mean, you can use a lot of words to express an idea, more or less.

But, you know, you think about a Portuguese word like saudade, which means a kind of homesickness.

But it's got all these layers of meaning that we don't have in English.

And I think that I have a certain envy about that word because it just it connotes so much more than I think you can say in English with just the word homesickness.

But I suspect that Portuguese speakers probably have the same feeling about English.

You know, English is this rich, rich vocabulary.

I like to say that if all the languages gave a party

English would be the one going around and looking at everybody's plate and saying, are you going to eat that?

Because it picks up, picks up words from all over the world.

You're exactly right, Mike.

And this is a perpetual problem.

I mean, everybody I've talked to about this question is frustrated.

You know, it's really hard to come up with that right word because paramour doesn't really do it.

There's an old word, lemon, L-E-M-A-N.

which means a lover but you know it's hard to impose a word like that that doesn't arise naturally for people because that one's old and obsolete and I'm not aware of a word like that I mean it's the same thing with senior citizen that's a question that comes up all the time you know is there a better word for being an older person I still haven't settled on what I want to

Call myself at that point.

Yeah, yeah.