An enjoyable aspect of writing a column is talking to and learning from people. Often, as I once did with the term “church key,” I ask people younger than I (and that includes the masses) what certain words mean to them.

Usually, they can divine the meaning but seldom can explain why. For example, my three grandchildren, ages 7 through 14, know the expression to “sound like a broken record,” but they aren’t able to explain that a broken record skips, and the needle (“whatever that is, grandpa”) gets stuck in the groove (whatever groove is) and keeps repeating.

Those of us alive in the pre-CD and I-Pod generation probably still use the term. When the husband accuses the wife of sounding like a broken record, it’s because of her incessancy in reminding him to take out the trash. But when the wife applies the expression to her mate, it’s because he is emphasizing a point, not being repetitious at all.

Phonograph records in those days were brittle. My dad once brought home a four-record album of The Nutcracker Suite. He shopped at the Music Album, downtown. The album weighed as much as a small horse and provided about 20 minutes of music.

Before my birth, I have been told, when phonograph records ran at 78 rpm and contained grooves that accommodated a needle as thick as a garden hose, my mom flirted with pre-natal symphonic practices.

She had read that playing classical music while carrying a baby (inside, not in her arms) likely would nurture an appreciation of fine music in the fetus.

But as Mom was several months along, she took a tumble while carrying a Mozart album and me, cracking all the records. However, I don’t believe that mishap affected me … affected me … affected me.

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Recent columns have yielded some interesting aspects of language. Here are some:

Karyl Lyne, a prolific e-mail forwarder, spends much time receiving and passing on announcements of public interest. One of them, submitted to her, contained an announcement of a political precinct meeting.

Alas, spell-checkers on computers sometimes let us down. The person sending the announcement to Karyl came up with a “prescient meeting.” Now that’s something entirely different. “Prescient” involves knowledge of things about to happen. But don’t these precinct meetings usually lack surprises anyway? Aren’t the names of the finalists generally a foregone conclusion? Maybe prescient is the correct term after all.

Nick Flores, formerly of Las Vegas and now living in Dallas, commented on my reference to “ponte truchas,” an expression we use to mean “watch out.”

Nick, a 1975 graduate of Highlands University, has spent time in Puerto Rico and South America. What does the trout expression mean to anyone not from northern New Mexico? Nick says he’s passed the term on to his grandchildren, along with “sapo,” an unexpected, lucky occurrence, such as sinking a three-pointer or having the Dallas Cowboys complete a pass.

And Jessie Farrington, a former dean at Highlands, says she’d not been familiar with “truchas.” Farrington, now living in Indiana, said around the time she read the truchas piece she received a phone call from an acquaintance in Lubbock.

She wrote, “I asked him if he knew the expression ‘ponte truchas’ and he immediately laughed and said ‘Look out.’ He went on to say that when he was a student at Highlands they usually shortened it to just “truchas.’”

Ben Moffett, a frequent contributor to the Work of Art blog, wrote, “My Spanish-speaking buddy in junior high taught me ‘truchas’ as a stand-alone word for ‘careful’ but in the sense of a soft threat, as in ‘watch it,’ maybe on the basketball court as the result of a hard foul. This was in the 1950s, Albuquerque South Valley.” Another word he remembers from that era was caramada (for buddy) — I wondered why it wasn’t ‘camarada.’”

I’ve heard “camarada” many times. But did anyone ever flip the key letters? Sorry, but “caramada” just doesn’t cut it. Maybe the caramadas/camaradas in the South Valley simply talk funny.

Regarding a column on Grand Avenue in the ‘50s, my sort-of neighbor Grover Durham questioned my use of “yew-ee” (pronounced you we) to mean a U-turn. He says that to newcomers to this community, the process really should be a “Las Vegas left-left turn.”

There’s merit to that. But it also makes one wonder whether people in the south call it a “y’all turn.” Using that logic, we might inquire whether a member of the ovine species makes a ewe-turn or whether a British carpenter/lathe-man makes a yew turn.