When ol' Billy Stewart speaks, people listen.

Sometimes, they chuckle.

Sometimes, they wonder.

Sometimes, they cringe.

But, almost all the time, they listen.

Scout's honor.

Or how does that one go?

"'Boy Scout's honor,'" slotback Jock Sanders said, trying -- and failing -- to capture the signature phrase uttered often by the first-year West Virginia head coach. "And I don't get that. I wasn't a Boy Scout."

When Stewart says it, there are back-to-back scout's honors involved and various flashing of hand signs.

"'Boy Scout, Girl Scout,'" linebacker Mortty Ivy added, also trying -- and failing. When corrected, Ivy added: "... 'Boy Scout, Cub Scout?' It might be that, too."

Goshgollygee, is it ever.

The scout thing is just one of the many folksy, homespun, colloquial, even mispoken sayings and quotations offered regularly by the affable and amenable Stewart, 56, who has taken his postseason act on the road this week to Charlotte, N.C., for the Meineke Car Care Bowl against North Carolina Saturday.

Sometimes, his sayings are a mixture of his New Martinsville, W.Va., dialect and phrases gleaned by a learned man with too many address changes (14), too many years (34) and too many miles (9,463 just between jobs) stomping the football-coaching vineyards.

The New York Times likened him to Simpsons cartoon character Ned Flanders, a nice fellow with a religious bent. ESPN Radio 1250 in Pittsburgh routinely played Stewart news conference snippets with John Denver's "Thank God I'm a Country Boy" as background music. Others compared him to your favorite uncle ... or, when his team lost one-third of its games in his opening season, your least-favorite uncle.

Boston Red Sox types a decade ago dubbed then-manager Jimy Williams' way with words as Jimywocky. What should we call this: Stewspeak? Billylingo? Too Live Stew?

The man himself used this description when assessing South Florida before the regular-season finale earlier this month: "That's not coachspeak. That's truthspeak." Oh. Right.

Perhaps we should have gotten the Stewmessage last December, when he offered this nugget amid his first in person news briefing before the Fiesta Bowl: "We may not have any land to our left or any land to our right and water behind us, but this is not going to be the [doomed Crimean War] charge of the light brigade." The Mountaineers won.

A Stewsampling of others:

About the Pitt loss, he spoke of how the Mountaineers "just had a couple of inopportune penalties [that] broke our backs a little bit." Is there such a thing as opportune penalties? Is a little bit of a broken back akin to being slightly pregnant?

Noel Devine's 92-yard run to seal a victory against Syracuse was "blocked like it was manuscripted." So they threw the book at the Orange, huh? Or at least the rough draft?

Players weren't concussed, they were "dinged." Defensive lineman Pat Liebig's injury was redundant: "Darn if he didn't get his head dinged up."

Referring to underdogs arising to upset odds-on favorites, "Every week somebody's going to beat somebody they probably shouldn't, whether it's the spreadsheet or the papers." That same Auburn week, he talked about "message things here, message things there." Spreads and messageboards, perhaps?

Before Cincinnati, he was downright prescient when he spoke of West Virginia's return to the polls at No. 20: "That's where all our trouble started [in September]. That's the worst thing that can happen to Mountaineer football right now. I'd tell every pollster, 'Wait until Game 12 and then you can rank us.' We were ranked all right -- we were rank." His team lost that weekend and tumbled from the polls.

He personally appeared to revitalize the old saying "to make hay." He first invoked the phrase in September, causing some media types in the room to look at one another in bewilderment. Make hay? And the straw poll says: A variation of the "making hay while the sun shines" adage prompted 200,000-plus hits on a Google search of its usage between September-December 2008, and five of those times were by the Post-Gazette.

"I'm trying to be very careful what comes out of my mouth," he said in discussing a troubled Rutgers running game.

"I'm trying to be very articulate because I don't want anything on a poster board that has my name on it saying something in their locker room." Bulletin board, perhaps?

Punter/kicker Pat McAfee, for whom Stewart has served as his personal special teams coach for four years, holds dear another Stewism.

The coach, it seems, openly hopes his players don't grow up to grouse at a pub about how their lives turned out.

"He always says, 'Don't be a barstool guy,'" McAfee said. "He says that all the time.

"We were always walking around on eggshells with the old staff. It's so much more of a laid-back atmosphere around here now. It's almost like night or day."

That's what McAfee said. Boy Scout or Cub Scout's honor.