Grammar Moses: The workaday world of words

It's to be expected that in your given line of work you use words that - uttered outside the context of the workplace - cause people to look at you as if you were a resident of Saturn.

Mugs, refers, teasers, picas, flags, leading, folios, nameplates and jumplines are things you see in the newspaper every day, whether you know it or not. We have a language all our own. And that was before the advent of all of the web-industry companies with catchy, hip and entirely nonsensical names.

My column last week about "schwouldja" - while not a workplace term - prompted this response:

"It took me back to the summer of 1957," Bill Murray wrote. "I had just landed my first job as a part-time prop boy at a small-town TV station (in Indiantown, Michigan) and quickly had to learn - and respond to - the pseudo-word 'garntz.'

"The older guys on the studio crew (read: at least 25 years of age) used it to describe just about anything that they couldn't instantly put a familiar name to: 'It's probably in that pile of garntz over there' or 'Hey, kid, bring the rest of that garntz in from the prop room.

"At that same studio we also had a 'lighting stick,' which was a length of broomstick with an embedded bent nail. It was used to reach up to adjust the big (and very hot) scoop lights when you didn't want to break out a ladder for the job."

Aren't first jobs always adventures? I know I learned a lot of words - and not just the four-letter variety - at mine.

I didn't always work with words. In my youth, I was a chicken master.

My first boss - a Brown's Chicken franchisee in Arlington Heights - introduced me to "mop slop," that splatter of mop leavings up the side of the lobby wall left by a too-vigorous flick of the wrist from a careless and harried cleaning kid. He also characterized as "gam and funk" the amalgamation of flour, cornmeal, oil, egg, buttermilk, french fries, chicken blood and whatever else got dragged onto the floor and into the mop sink.

"Gam and funk" were inseparable twins.

Reader Scott Zapel wrote to me about another made-up word, though its spelling remains a mystery to him.

"At Carleton College in my youth, we had a word similar to 'schwouldja,' he wrote. "'Squeet' or 'skweat'? - it was only an oral word - meant 'Let's go eat.'

Eight is enough

Do you remember "octomom" Nadya Suleman, the Californian who gave birth to six boys and two girls in 2009?

Well, one might think by reading a recent obituary that she doesn't hold the world record for most kids from a single gestation.

Bobbie Briggs wrote to me, suggesting that any confusion could have been cleared up had a sentence been constructed differently. (I've changed the names to avoid offending the grievers.)

Here is the original: "He was the 13th of 16 children born to Johnny and Susie Smith on June 5, 1937."

The good people at the Guinness Book of World Records would be shocked to learn that someone gave birth to 16 kids in one day.

So, how do you fix it?

"He was born to Johnny and Susie Smith on June 5, 1937, the 13th of their 16 children.

Write carefully!

• Jim Baumann is vice president/managing editor of the Daily Herald. Write him at jbaumann@dailyherald.com. Put Grammar Moses in the subject line. You also can friend or follow Jim at facebook.com/baumannjim.