It’s 9 p.m. here on the West Coast. I’m just back from an educational forum featuring Michelle Rhee, who used to run the Washington D.C. schools. A lot of the talk was about students, and some of what I heard from other attendees was about “reaching” them.

Over the next couple of hours, until I’m too tired and the typos start becoming more than I can catch, I’m going to answer email from listeners to the radio show and I’m going to listen to voicemails they’ve left.

We get lots of emails and voicemails each episode. As our listenership increases (as it does daily), so does the communication from listeners. Right now we have more than 7400 saved voicemails (we only started saving them last year) and tens of thousands of saved emails. We search those — mine them, really — as we plan upcoming episodes.

I can answer a couple dozen emails an hour if I’m fast and don’t have to do any research. It’s impossible to respond personally to each one, but we try. It’s important that we talk with them and let them tell us what we need to know to be better at giving them what they want and need.

Those callers and emailers are just a small part of the hundreds of thousands of people who listen each week across the United States and around the world. Many of them are children and students. Families listen together on the way to and from church. Children listen in their classrooms as part of their classwork. English-learners of all ages around the world listen in droves — listening to English speech about English speech does double duty. We’re reaching them. We’re educating them. And we’re educating the adults who listen at work, in the car, while washing dishes, etc.

My radio partners Martha Barnette and Stefanie Levine and I set out an educational mission for A Way with Words when we took it over in 2007. In part, we wanted it to be about education, specifically lifelong learning. We also wanted it to be about changing the way people talk about language. There’s more to language than just being pissed off at things you don’t like in the speech of others. Lots more.

We try to do it on and off the air every week. That one hour of radio you hear (54 minutes, really) is backed by many hours of back-office work, station service, listener help, and more. The one hour is the end result of planning, producing, writing, editing, practice, bookkeeping, phone calls, emails, and more.

I explain all this so you’ll understand why, when we reach out into the community and ask for donations, we think it’s for a good cause.

Right now we’re looking at a 50% increase in the cost of distributing our program via the Public Radio Satellite System. It’s the main way public radio shows are distributed and to be there, in that system, is a must. It’s a hard, unavoidable cost.

So we need your help. Until 7 p.m. Pacific Standard Time on Thursday, December 15th, a foundation is offering matching funds for every dollar we’re able to get from you. Will you donate $100 today to help make the radio show possible? If you can’t do $100, please do what you can, but do it before the deadline.

Thank you.

Grant Barrett
grant@grantbarrett.com

Dinner time is a comedy/variety hour. It may include jokes, laps around the table, a puppet show from underneath the tablecloth, made up songs about bodily functions, putting new words to Darth Vader’s march, a trip to the bedroom to make a new puppet, a mid-dinner visit to the bathroom followed by his bare ass on parade as he cackles and refuses to hitch up his drawers, milk bubbles in his cup, role-playing as monster devouring a forest of broccoli or a population of green-pea villagers, attempts to get dessert without having to eat dinner, laments about being too tired to do anything you want him to do, rhyming games, making new knock-knock jokes, trying out new knock-knock jokes, telling classic knock-knock jokes with the intentionally wrong punchline, lying on the floor, sitting in one or both parents’ laps, fishing his hand around inside his mama’s drinking glass, whispering secrets and plots in a way that can be heard by everyone, switching seats, and, more often that should be the case, getting up from a full dinner plate, going to the fruit bowl on the counter, and getting himself a piece of fruit. When you ask him why he had to get the fruit, he looks at you with surprise and a bit of a disappointment at how dense you are. “Because I’m hungry.”

All of that is done with a verve and panache that suggest he’s part Lenny, Squiggy, Ace Ventura, Jerry Lewis, Three Stooges (or five), Abbott and Costello.

Or, really, it’s just that he’s a committed student of borschty, vaudevillian Muppet videos, which he’s watched for years. He’s a huge Muppet fan and also generally puppet-obsessed. I mean, this kid knows the names of the puppeteers from the original show. A lot of them. By sight and by name. Ask him who does Gonzo’s voice. He’ll know. Ask him which characters Steve Whitemire does, either when he was younger or now in the new film. Jerry Nelson? Dave Goelz? He’ll know. I suspect Jim Henson is the person who has come closest to making Guthrie understand what death is. Ah, you mean now someone else has to do Kermit’s voice?

For a long time Guthrie said Muppet puppeteer Steve Whitmire’s name as Steve Whitmore or Whitmark but Sarah, his mama, tells me Guthrie’s come around. I think Steve is of particular interest to Guthrie because Steve looks so young in the early pictures. Guthrie thinks of himself as a contemporary.

Guthrie has other speech production errors that make us smile. Those little mistakes that he isn’t quite aware of — or is aware of but refuses to correct. They show he’s learning and changing. Even though he has long stretches where you can talk with him about any old thing like he’s a stranger in the seat next to you on an airplane, the habitual mispronunciations show that he’s still just a four-year-old boy.

Lemolade for lemonade, which once generated the classic correcting line by Guthrie to his friend Etta, a year younger: “It’s not lemodade, it’s lemolade.” Lemolade is a favorite of his parents. It sounds kind of like limullade. We try really hard not to correct him when he says it. We want it to last as long as possible. When it’s gone, he’ll still be awesome but it’ll be like missing the old Muppet Show at the same time we’ve been enjoying the new Muppet videos and movie.

Team Rex for T Rex. We have repeated the correct version a thousand times. He just doesn’t hear “Tee.”

Monica butterfly instead of monarch butterfly.

Callipitter instead of caterpillar.

Princel instead of pretzel.

Wiff instead of with and at instead of that are common in young children, but they are a part of the larger pattern.

His speech is becoming more adult-like. He listens better, he self-corrects more, we read more chapter books to him (with bigger vocabulary, more complex ideas, and more structured dialogue), and he watches a higher class of shows.

We’ll miss those old words when they go, the same way we sometimes miss the period right after he learned to talk when just about all he would say was, “Dis? Dat?” as he pointed at things. “This? That?”

I love this particular bit:

“H. This much-abused letter in England seems to escape in America. Of course ostensibly hosstennsibly W is a mere grotesque recall to hoss, the word not being popular. The enclitic here, in this here, been here, etc., suffers various changes, as : h’yur,’yar ’yer yere H.”

(The W is the book’s shorthand way of referring to Charles F. Brown’s “Artemus Ward character.” The H refers to Bret Harte.)

Read more on Google Books

She took some powder for the muskets
and made some biscuits in a pan.
She put the biscuits on the fire.
Now my darling’s in Japan.

Chorus: Oh my darling, oh my darling,
Oh my darling, Clementine!
Thou art lost and gone forever
Dreadful sorry, Clementine

She took a charge down into the mine shaft
so that she could make it blow.
The fuse was fast and getting faster.
Oh, my darling, she was slow.

(chorus)

She took an axe and took a hatchet
and cut some lumber for the mine.
She was killed by timber last December
Oh, my darlin’ Clementine.

(chorus)

Chased the cattle from the garden
and up into the trees.
My darlin’ was made a bookmark
By a Holstein and falling leaves.

(chorus)

Found a rattle on the prairie.
She wrapped and tied it in a case.
She gave her boy the pretty present.
He got two fangs stuck in his face