1197. This week, guest host Valerie Fridland steps in for Mignon and talks to Jess Zafarris and Shannon Miller about their new book, "A Miscellany of Weird and Wonderful Facts for Curious Humans." They look at fossil words, eponyms, and the surprising origin of the word "electric." They also look at mountweazels, the medieval roots of modern romance, and why emoji has nothing to do with emotion.
1197. This week, guest host Valerie Fridland steps in for Mignon and talks to Jess Zafarris and Shannon Miller about their new book, "A Miscellany of Weird and Wonderful Facts for Curious Humans." They look at fossil words, eponyms, and the surprising origin of the word "electric." They also look at mountweazels, the medieval roots of modern romance, and why emoji has nothing to do with emotion.
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| HOST: Mignon Fogarty
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[Computer-generated transcript]
Mignon Fogarty: Hi, it's Mignon. Just a quick note. My mom died unexpectedly right before I was supposed to do this interview, but I didn't want Jess and Shannon to lose the chance to tell you about their wonderful book. So my good friend Valerie Fridland, whose work you've also heard on the show many times, generously stepped in to do the interview. This was the last interview of our spring season, so after this, we're already heading into eight weeks of airing some of the best bonus shows that the Grammarpaloozians got right away, and I'm going to really appreciate that little break this time. The Tuesday show will go on as usual because I was a little bit ahead on that. I can't thank Valerie, Jess, Shannon, and everyone at Quick and Dirty Tips enough for swinging into action to get you this episode. And thank you also to everyone who heard the news and sent messages on social media and through Grammarpalooza. It really meant a lot. And now, please do enjoy this conversation about a very fun book.
Valerie Fridland: I'm pleased to be joined on today's show by Jess Zafarris and Shannon Miller. Shannon is a writer, editor, and podcast host whose work has appeared in the AV Club, Adweek, IGN, and Campaign US. She has hosted several podcasts, including "Nerds of Prey," "Off Madison," and "Yeah, That's Probably an Ad"—I love that title—covering topics from pop culture to advertising psychology. Jess Zafarris is a writer, editor, and the author of several books on word origins, including "Once Upon a Word," "Words from Hell," and "Useless Etymology." Alongside Rob Watts, she co-hosts the popular podcast and YouTube channel "Words Unravelled." Her blog, uselessetymology.com, has been educating curious word lovers for more than a decade. We're here to talk about their new book, "A Miscellany of Weird and Wonderful Facts for Curious Humans Who Have Nothing Better to Do Than Read." And you know who you are. Jess and Shannon, welcome to the show.
Jess Zafarris: Thank you for having us on. And thank you very much for navigating that extensive title.
Shannon Miller: Yeah.
Valerie: I love it. You know, actually, let's start with that title because it kind of reminds me of some of those 18th-century pronunciation guides and grammar books that used to have, you know, three-page titles that I love. They were very, very descriptive, and this one has sort of that old-timey feel. Tell me what a miscellany is, exactly.
Jess: You know, you've got a point here. This title came from our publisher, right, Shannon? Like...
Shannon: Yeah.
Jess: They showed up in our lives with this idea, and we're like, "Would you like to write this? This is the title." And my immediate thought was, "Sure, that sounds awesome."
Shannon: And it's funny that you mention that it kind of reminds you of the old-timey sort of titles, because it kind of reminded me of like modern communication, and when you go on social media, especially with like younger social media users tend to express their thoughts in long, winding sentences to communicate excitement. So, it's like that one punctuationless stream of consciousness where it just communicates that you're just super emphatic or excited about something or anxious about something, which is usually just my baseline mode at all times. So, that's why it appealed to me, so it's kind of like that full circle, like everything old is new again.
Valerie: And that seems to be how it works in language all the time, right? Everything comes back. You know, what was once hip, like "pretty" as an adverbial intensifier in Shakespeare's day, now is "pretty" again. So, same thing with titles, I guess. And exciting...
Jess: You know what's cool about this, too, is that miscellanies have been, although by many other names, basically in existence since the invention of books, because think about the amount of time and effort and resources that went into compiling books back in the day. In order to bind a large tome, it would necessarily have lots of things in it. Earlier copyists in the Middle Ages, for example, compiled miscellanies that had poetry, and prayers, and instructions, and saints' lives, and calendars, and astronomical tables, and charms, and manuscripts, and hymns, and everything in between. But then we also have examples of this dating back to ancient China as well, so this is by no means a European-centric thing. "Miscellanea" just means a medley; it means from "miscere," meaning to mix in Latin. And it was originally applied to like a heap of grain and veggies and meats and things, much like words like—what are some of the other words?—"hodgepodge" was also originally a word for a mixture of food, and a couple others along those lines. "Potpourri" was as well.
Valerie: Oh, I love it. I love it. And it all comes back to food, right? The most fundamental of things we need.
Jess: Of course, and it's a delicious sampling of all these things.
Valerie: Absolutely. And now that we're on that old-timey topic, one thing that you cover in your book is something you call fossil words. So tell me a little bit about those etymological dinosaurs because it had never occurred to me to think where "lamb," for example, in "on the lamb" comes from, although I have used that expression before.
Jess: So a fossil word, which I've written about before—they actually appear in two of my books so far, they're probably going to be in the next etymology one as well—but a fossil word is a word that mostly appears in the context of a phrase or idiom that is typically attached to other words. So like in the phrase "to and fro," we don't really use "fro" outside of that phrase, and it's a preposition and an adverb meaning "away" or "backward." And another common one that turns into an eggcorn frequently, a commonly misspelled term, is—or misused term is—"bated" in the phrase "bated breath." It's not fishing bait; it's related to the word "abate." But the word "bated" is not typically used in English unless it's attached to the word "bated breath," for example.
Valerie: Oh, I love it. Yeah, I actually am wondering how I have ever spelled "bated" for "bated breath." I'll have to go back and look now. Okay, so another word thats origin shocked me is the word "electric." Okay, I was amusing myself there. And also, I wonder how many cats it took to discover static electricity. So let's talk about the word "electric" a little bit.
Jess: Yeah, so this is fun and has a nice pop culture connection, I think, because we tend to think of amber as being connected to, what, like "Jurassic Park"? Which, you know, shout out, "Jurassic Park" on my t-shirt.
Valerie: I like it
Jess: But "electric," the root of "electric" means "amber." The word "electrum" was a Latin word, a Latinized version of the Greek "elektron," which meant "amber." And some of the earliest experiments with electricity involved rubbing a cat's wool on amber to see it generating, or to observe it generating, sparks and to have it stick to that amber. It was also thought to be magnetic for a while, because it attracted these other objects, and "electrics" were used in the same way—the word "electrics" was used kind of in the same way that the word "magnetics" or "elastics" was as well, before it was applied to kind of the modern idea of electricity.
Valerie: Don't you wonder how that gets started? You just decide to rub amber on your cat? You know, how do you think, "Today I'm going to discover something by rubbing this stone thing on my cat"? But I love that story. I would have never thought that, and it's so interesting how it's tied to magnetism. Okay, so let's switch topics, go back to food, because that's something always on my mind, and let's talk some tomatoes. So one thing that really surprised me in your book is that people used to be afraid to eat tomatoes, and that once people would eat them, they were a miracle cure.
Shannon: Yeah, so tomatoes were a part of the nightshade family. And so if you're unfamiliar with nightshade, that is a famously poisonous sort of string of berries. Not every berry within that family is poisonous, but when you don't know, you don't know. So it was like guilty by association for hundreds of years. We're unclear on how they tested that out in terms of who discovered, "Oh, these are cool, you can go ahead and eat these." But for 200 years, people stayed clear away from them. But then once it was discovered that—because this was around the 16th century—once it was discovered that they were okay, then, you know, people started experimenting, and it was eventually connected to essentially a cure-all for things like jaundice, major things like syphilis. People were eating these tomatoes and finding it to be this sort of like health balm. And once you kind of discover that there is any sort of health connection, kind of like today, how do you monetize? How do you get this out to the people and sort of make it this living? So it was, 19- I'm sorry, 1834, a physician, John Cook, started experimenting—or John Cook Bennett, my bad—started spreading the gospel about these tomatoes, and eventually it was put into powder form and placed into a swallowable pill. So you have these tomato pills that were being pushed as this cure-all for all ailments. And, you know, it's kind of like a game of telephone. Like first it starts like, "It cures jaundice," and then it's like, "It cures syphilis," and then it's like, "Cured my broken arm." It just goes on and on, and then this sort of popularity takes off, and much like today, it spawns copycats. So it started this tomato pill war amongst these manufacturers. And it's kind of reminiscent of the sort of food trends that we see today. Like remember the acai berry boom? All of a sudden everyone needed acai berry. I experienced that with avocados. Like it's just one of those things where all it takes is one little bit of discovery, and the science isn't even super strong that there was a connection. It was just like, "Yeah, I started eating this and felt better, so could be cool." And people just sort of went with it. So it's a really fascinating look at like how we experience food trends and how these things can take off with just a little bit of good marketing.
Valerie: And how it seems so crazy now. You think, I mean, obviously we know ketchup isn't going to cure you of syphilis, but how that would take off and people would believe it and everybody jump on the tomato, you know, puree bandwagon. It also reminds me a little bit of how when my kids were little, and tomato was a—or ketchup was considered a vegetable at schools. Way slight of hand of, "Oh, we're going to make that perfect for everything." So ketchup's had a long history of being a cure-all.
Shannon: Exactly. And now you're experiencing it now, I mean probably not as ambiguous, but proteins and everything now. Like everyone is like that is the big, big marketing push. And now we obviously know that protein has incredible benefits, and you should have protein in your diet. But when you have protein bagels and protein candy bars and this really cool protein soda, it's just that. You take this thing, you realize a benefit, you realize a need, and then everyone just kind of runs with it. And yeah, it's deeply fascinating.
Jess: Fantastic.
Valerie: Yeah, it is. Well, I think we need some exercise after all this food. Let's move to soccer because in your book you talk about eponyms, and soccer is an eponym of sorts. But let's think because it's World Cup season, it just brought the eponym—brought soccer to my mind—but let's talk first about what an eponym is and then some of the really cool ones that people have no idea they say every day.
Jess: So an eponym is often used to describe a word that is named after a person, but an eponym can also be named after another thing, like brands that are named after other things. The brand Moxie, for example, is a soda brand that also gave us the word "moxie," as in, "You've got moxie, kid." But it's also named after rivers and lakes in Maine that come from Native American words for "flowing water" and things along those lines, or perhaps "dark water." But for soccer, it's named after an institution. "Soccer" is short for "association football." The early Football Association rules governed how clubs in England played soccer. ASOC, it was shortened to, association football was shortened to ASOC, which became "soccer." And it was particularly compared to Rugby Association rules, or rugby rules football, which was shortened to "rugger." So we had soccer and rugger. And then American schools picked up association rules football, which was then called soccer, and kept the name, and then adapted the rugby rules later to gridiron football, or American football as we call it now. Also, fun fact here: football isn't called football because you play with your feet; it is called football because you don't play on horseback. Wealthy classes played a lot of horseback sports in the day, and sports played on foot had a more common association with them, so it was called football because you played on foot. But that's also why, you know, we've got this handling in football and rugby, but we still call it football because you play on foot.
Valerie: Oh, that makes so much more sense now. Okay, so let's move to big words, and I'm not even going to try to pronounce many of them. But I think probably the one that people think of when they think of the longest word in English is that "antidisestablishmentarianism." And I remember that when I was a kid, you know, people spouting that off and thinking they were very impressive as a 5-year-old. But first, that's not true that that's the longest word in English according to your book. But there are some really interesting backstories behind some of these, and particularly that one and why it became so well known. So give us that backstory.
Jess: Yes, we have longer words than "antidisestablishmentarianism." We have things like "pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis," and we have things like "hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia." Both of those words are silly coinages. One of them was coined by the National Puzzlers' League as a potential but fictional illness caused by volcano dust in your lungs, essentially. And then the other one is a very long word for the fear of very long words. But the unique thing about "antidisestablishmentarianism" is that it is a long word with a practical use outside of scientific and medical contexts. Like we have real, very long diseases, and look at the ingredients on say your pills, for example, or even, you know, your yogurt, and you will find very long words. But "antidisestablishmentarianism" was an actual word with an actual use, and it still remains one. But it dates back to—the actual meaning of "antidisestablishmentarianism" in 19th-century England was a reaction to 18th-century disestablishmentarianism, or the movement to have churches disestablish themselves from the establishment, which was the Church of England, and no longer allow it to continue as the default official church of the United Kingdom. And this was in many cases due to power dynamics, essentially. But you slap an "anti" in "disestablishmentarianism" and you have the position that churches should not be disestablished and should continue to receive government funding and be subject to its influence. Now, this wasn't—your average person did not have a reason to use that word until the 1950s, which is—this is one of my favorite stories from entertainment history. In an episode of "The $64,000 Question," which was a game show, there was a 12-year-old girl named Gloria Lockerman who successfully spelled "antidisestablishmentarianism," winning $8,000, which was a good chunk of money. She returned for "The $64,000 Challenge," which was the same show on a different night, and spelled the sentence, "The belligerent astigmatic anthropologist annihilated innumerable chrysanthemums," and she won a bunch of money for that, too. She eventually quit before she could potentially risk her winnings and lose. But she got a huge amount of public acclaim from this because she was Black and she was 12, and it was the 1950s, and she was adorable and wicked smart. And so she was quoted constantly; she was invited onto other popular talk shows. "Antidisestablishmentarianism" became known as this really long word that everyone knows, and they even made a joke about it on "The Honeymooners." She was invited to parades. The reason we may or may not know about her now, though, is that she was embroiled in this series of legally contentious moments around game shows where they found that in the 1950s game shows were running some scams and making it look more authentic than it was. And this was true on "The $64,000 Question," too. It came out that this also happened to Patty Duke, who played Helen Keller, as well. She was involved in those hearings as well, and both she and Gloria had to testify in front of the Senate. And it was found that they had been given a list of like 600 potential words that they might have to spell. But I still think that's really hard! So I don't think that that disqualifies them. But either way, because of the turmoil around this and the press around it, she kind of lived a more private life after that. And I ended up finding all of this by digging through old magazine issues of Jet magazine and then a couple pieces in the Chicago Tribune, which was kind of fun to dig around in.
Valerie: I bet. Oh, so fun. What a great backstory. And I'm also very impressed, Jess, that you can pronounce all those long words. Practice! I mean, that one I might be able to do, but those other ones, I wasn't even going to try it. So I wonder how many practices that took.
Jess: Really, the only reason I can do it is because I include this little segment in a talk that I have given at several bookstores and at South by Southwest, and I had to practice a bunch of times before I could get to the point where I could.
Valerie: Well, you got it down. I was impressed. Now, one word I actually have to admit I had not heard of till I read your book was a mountweazel and the like. And I'm so fascinated by this. Tell me more about mountweazels and what their purpose is.
Jess: Yes. So, in the 1975 edition of the New Columbia Encyclopedia, there is an entry about a person named Lillian Virginia Mountweazel, who is said to be a photographer who produced celebrated portraits of the South Sierra Miwok in 1964 and who was awarded government grants to make photo essays about New York City buses, Parisian cemeteries, and rural American mailboxes. And it said she was exhibited extensively, regularly, and published this collection called "Flags Up" about the mailboxes, and then she died at 31 in an explosion while she was on assignment for Combustibles magazine. Unfortunately, all of this is fake. All of this is made up. None of that is true, and it is because she is an example of a publisher hiding fake information within a legitimate work so that you can easily check to see if your text has been plagiarized or reproduced by those who seek to use that information without paying for it or citing it properly. These are also called fictitious entries or fake entries. There are other more entertaining and specific terms for them as well: nihil articles, which is like the Latin "nihil" and then the German "artikel," so it's a "nothing" article. Sadly, Mrs. Mountweazel never existed, but there are also a couple other examples of her name has now been applied to these, these nothing articles or these fictitious entries, so they're called mountweazels now. For example, in 2005, we learned that the New Oxford American Dictionary contained a mountweazel beginning with the letter E, and so word sleuths went on the hunt, and crossword puzzle editor Will Shortz correctly flagged "esquivalience" as the suspect term. The word, perhaps appropriately, was listed as meaning "the willful avoidance of one's official responsibilities," and it was introduced in the 2001 edition of the dictionary as a copyright trap by editor Christine Lindberg, who coined the fake word. But there are other ones, too. In the US in the 1970s, the Army surveyed soldiers about their preferred foods. And to filter out extraneous or unhelpful answers, they included "funistrada," "braised traik," and "buttered urmel" on lists of foods that soldiers could choose from. None of them are real, but "Urmal" is an Albanian men's name. But respondents to the survey still ranked all of those fictitious dishes over lima beans and eggplant.
Valerie: Oh, well, I can understand that. I'm not a huge eggplant fan. I would probably go for the fake food, too.
Jess: The funistrada, that's now the name of an actual restaurant in Michigan after the fake food.
Valerie: Oh, I love it. That's hysterical.
Valerie: You know, this sort of reminds me of how professors have been sticking in kind of coded secret messages in their instructions to students to catch them using AI.
Jess: Smart!
Valerie: You'll do it in invisible or tiny font, and it says like, "Insert a line about this." And so the students don't see it, but they copy and paste into AI, and then the AI generates an answer, which of course they don't read over, that has that specific clue that the professor put in the instructions that are not visible to the student, and it comes out as proof that they were using AI. So that happened at the very beginning, I think students have caught on to that, but this sort of reminds me of that process of the way to catch people who are plagiarizing in some form or fashion.
Jess: Fantastic.
Valerie: So, okay. Now, brains really like patterns, and I think this is probably why we like parallelism in writing. But how does it also explain why we see the man in the moon?
Jess: So this is called pareidolia. Your brain is a pattern seeker. Our brains want to see faces when we are in basically any environment so that we can, supposedly so that we can identify either predators or prey and find our way around our environments. The word means—it's from the Greek "para," meaning "beside" or "instead of," and "eidolon," meaning "image" or "form." It's related via "eidos" to words like "asteroid," which means "star-shaped," and "humanoid," which means "human-shaped," and "factoid," which means "fact-shaped." And originally it was a word for fake news, essentially, fake facts instead of fun facts. But there was a psychiatrist named Karl Ludwig Kahlbaum—I hope I got that right—who introduced the term "pareidolia" in 1866. And he said it was essentially synonymous with terms like "changing hallucination" or "partial hallucination" and the perception of secondary images. So we tend to see, when we see a rough surface, we look for eyes and a nose and a mouth. This is called a fusiform shape, which means "spindle-shaped," supposedly because there is a brain structure called the fusiform gyrus in our brains that is widest in the middle and tapers at the end, so it's shaped like a spindle, and it helps recognize faces, essentially. And it's also why we're really good at recognizing the difference between human faces.
Shannon: Is that why we always see things in potatoes? Like when people are like, "I saw this face in a potato," or, "I saw Elvis in a potato chip"?
Jess: Jesus in toast!
Valerie: Yeah, or cloud formations, right? The way we see... That's so fascinating because we do do that. I mean, when I see a rock formation, I'm almost like, "Oh, look at that craggily nose." So now I have a word for it, probably one I can't pronounce, but I still have the word. And that reminds me of something you did mention in your book that you just talked about is this difference between a fact and a factoid. And who knew that "factoid," which we think of as sort of a small fact today, was actually the old form of fake news?
Jess: Uh-huh. Norman Mailer coined it in a novelistic biography of Marilyn Monroe as a word for a fact that sounds plausible but isn't, and it caught on as a word for a fun fact, which is a little ironic.
Valerie: Right!
Jess: It's been suggested that we use "factlet" instead of "factoid" for fun facts.
Valerie: Oh, that's so much cuter, "factlet." A tiny little fact. Okay, so anybody who's been out there dating knows that it can be kind of emotionally draining and daunting. But they probably don't know how lucky they are they didn't live as a knight in the medieval period where toxic romance was really the name of the day. So tell me why we still love a good love story about unrequited love and how this goes back to this toxic period of love and romance in the medieval period.
Shannon: Oh my goodness. Andreas Capellanus, man, he was really peddling some interesting stuff. So this is like a 12th-century concept. It was considered the world's first codified dating system or dating ideology. And he wrote this sort of manual called "De Amore," where basically, our understanding of love is like finding "the one," finding your person. Back in medieval times, courtly love was all about suffering and longing. The point was to never find your person. In fact, achieving your romantic objective was considered a great shame. So for like knights, their thing was like you have to long after a married woman because longing after this unattainable goal is going to keep you on the right side of right, right? Like if you are hoping to win the affection of this taken woman, it's going to keep you motivated to be the best version of yourself. Where it gets toxic is—I mean, that in and of itself is pretty toxic on its own—but when he was saying things like jealousy and suspicion only strengthen the ties between your love and beloved, it's like, "Whoa, what do you mean?" But to them it's the biggest sign that this person may have affection towards you back. So Lancelot is the biggest example of this, his affections for Queen Guinevere. And this is the biggest example of this. Now, in 2026, we're like, "No, none of that is correct. Please don't follow that." But we still see evidence of this. We still see it in the one-sided love, the unrequited love, loving from a distance, and we see it through our movies and our romance books. A lot of it powers our romance genre, which I love. I am devoted to the romance genre. But a lot of those concepts are borrowed from, or you can sort of trace back to, this ideology. And there was a use for it. It wasn't just to teach men to be toxic. It was mainly something to give the middle son purpose. So like your firstborn got land, got a title, they inherited all this stuff. Nothing went to the second son, so this was like their chance at honor. And that was like its major basically like its major selling point was like this gave the middle son, who originally didn't have any purpose, something to look at, to look forward to, which also feels really sad.
Valerie: It is sad. Yes, those spares really have it rough.
Shannon: The middle child always. The Jans really get it rough every single time. So yeah, it's interesting to see this, especially when you look at period pieces of entertainment, like it all kind of bears this DNA a little bit.
Valerie: I think a lot of modern romance has this, too.
Shannon: 1000%
Valerie: You know, this sort of this aching longing that's never fulfilled that kind of drives a lot of plots of every romance movie you've ever seen.
Shannon: Correct.
Valerie: Nowadays, I think you have a few more where they actually do find each other in the end, but there are so many sad movies. I just I was thinking of a classic "Love Story," right? Of that the person dying. That's even the absolute unrequited love. So I yeah, I feel like this thread really still runs deeply in a lot of modern romance.
Jess: Lancelot has a ton of those, right?
Shannon: Yeah, a thousand. And like one of my favorite movies, "In the Mood for Love." Like it's all about that sort of distance and loving across that distance. So it's there. I mean, none of us are really immune to it, I don't think, because it's so interwoven in how we understand romance and things from the romance genre. And to its credit, from a narrative standpoint, it produces a lot of really juicy drama. Like meeting the person, you know, on the first day and deciding, "This is my person," and then having like a thousand amazing dates and then you get married and have kids doesn't make necessarily for an interesting book. Lovely for them! But it doesn't make for an interesting story. So even as we talk about it, we're just like, "Woof, like please don't follow that advice." It's still sort of an undercurrent of how we understand the romance genre and how we're entertained by it.
Valerie: And speaking of emotions, one other thing that really surprised me is to learn that emoji has nothing to do with emotion and isn't related to emoticon.
Jess: It's yeah, it's this wonderfully serendipitous, but you know, to some degree intentional overlap. So the emoji comes from two Japanese words meaning "picture" and "character," and neither of them has anything to do with the notion of emotions. "Emoji" was coined in Japanese in 1999 by Shigetaka Kurita, who was an employee of a major tech company. Meanwhile, the English word "emoticon" is a portmanteau of "emot" and "icon," and it's actually older than the word "emoji" by about five years. And the words developed completely independently, but "emoji" probably caught on in the US as the more popular alternative after emojis were added to the iPhone, in part because it already sounded similar and familiar. But it was a happy coincidence that it sounded familiar and similar. So, certainly pushed by tech companies into acceptance because it sounded so perfect for what it is. But other than that, it's a coincidence.
Valerie: So let's move back to Hollywood because we can never get enough of that, and let's talk pseudonyms, because you have some really fun ones in the book. Can we go over some pseudonyms that you found entertaining?
Jess: Yes. So, I'd say the biggest one is probably Alan Smithee, who was the official Directors Guild of America's pseudonym for directors who wanted to disown a film. And it was used from like the '60s to the 2000s. There was this big—I'd say the first major case that's usually cited was "Death of a Gunfighter" from 1969 when director Robert Totten started making the film, but the star, Richard Widmark, was unhappy and he was replaced by Don Siegel. And then when the film was finished, neither Totten nor Siegel wanted credit for it, so they created this fictional credit. They thought about doing Al Smith, but it sounded too common and like it already belonged to real people, so it became Smith, and then Smithee, and then Alan. Originally in the New York Times, "Death of a Gunfighter"'s Alan Smithee, the real director, was considered to be a great director, and Roger Ebert also reviewed the director without realizing it was a pseudonym. But then it became more popular and widely known as a pseudonym, especially in instances like David Lynch's "Dune," which he disavowed the TV version of "Dune" for some alterations that were made to it. And so the directing credit is listed as Alan Smithee, and then the screenwriting credit is listed as Judas Booth, which is Judas and then John Wilkes Booth.
Valerie: Oh, I love it. I'm gonna have to look at director credits more often now. I guess what this means is I don't look at them enough, but I've never seen that.
Shannon: It's funny like you could never really get away with that now, just because the content boom makes it virtually impossible. You can be like an Alan Smithee and like sort of exist back then because, you know, there was no risk of being invited to a thousand film panels or colleges wanting to bring you in or like a content creator wanting to connect with you. And now it's like you really can't hide in plain sight anymore just by the virtue of how media works now. I think that that's the most fascinating thing, but also it being connected to "Dune" and now it's like this big property connected to Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya is hilarious to me.
Valerie: Oh, I know. The number of remakes of "Dune" is pretty astounding.
Jess: Yeah.
Valerie: Especially for something that had a director who wanted to disown it at one point. Correct. Okay, let's talk Jeopardy! because you can never get enough Jeopardy!, and the show has had two Jeopardy! champions as guests on Grammar Girl. It's Glenn Fleishman and John Overholt have been guests. Can you tell me about the origin of the game show and its theme song, though, because that's a really fascinating story.
Jess: You got it. So, the English word "jeopardy" means "a divided game." It's from the old French "jeu parti," which means "a divided game." A contest with evenly balanced sides and therefore it has an uncertain outcome, so that's where we get the idea of something hanging in jeopardy or essentially having an uncertain outcome. You might be in danger, something bad might happen. So, the name of the game show debuted on NBC in 1964 and it was created by Merv Griffin. His wife, Julann, also played a role in creating the concept. She suggested reversing the standard quiz format because in the 1950s quiz shows, as we've talked about, were quite big and quite scandalous. So, her concept was to give the contestants the answers and require them to respond in the form of a question, as they do now. The original example was: the answer is 5,280, and the correct question is, "How many feet are in a mile?" But now it's shifted a little bit in its format so that it's, you know, "Who is," "What is," etc. So Griffin initially called the game "What's the Question?", but NBC executive Ed Vane said it didn't have enough jeopardies; it needed higher stakes. So, that inspired the title and the money-wagering element that became the sort of hallmark of the show. So Merv and Julann also created the final Jeopardy! theme music, the do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do. Did I do that right?
Shannon: You did.
Jess: Excellent.
Valerie: What is the question?
Jess: Exactly. But it's officially titled "Think," and it began as this little lullaby called "A Time for Tony," which Merv wrote for their son, Tony, which is adorable.
Shannon: I love that.
Valerie: I love that it's tied to a lullaby. That's great. What a fun story. Before we head off, I want to make sure listeners know where to find you. Where can they find you online?
Shannon: Well, I'm on Threads mostly these days, so it's shannonl_miller. That's the big one. That's pretty much where you find me everywhere.
Jess: I am at @jesszafarris on TikTok, which is my largest platform. You can also find me on "Words Unravelled," which is an etymology podcast that I host with Rob Watts, or Rob Words, from the YouTube channel Rob Words. And then I am also on basically Substack and my blog and Instagram as Useless Etymology, which is also the name of one of my books.
Valerie: Oh, well, that's a handy little way to find you, right? Name it all the same. I love it. Well, I know people are going to love the book and also try to find you, so I wish you the best of luck with this one, and it has been such a pleasure to talk to you today. Thank you again for coming on the show.
Shannon: This was a blast.
Jess: Thank you, Valerie.
Shannon: Thank you for having us.