What happens when a clock gets hungry? It goes back four seconds. Martha talks about how puns weren’t always considered “bad.” Cicero praised them as the wittiest kind of saying, and Shakespeare made plenty of them, for both...
“The Die is Cast” is the title of an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. A listener and his wife disagree about what kind of “die” is meant here. It’s not a reference to metallurgy– it’s a quotation...
Martha’s been reading the Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English again, and stumbled across a synonym for “fried chicken.” It’s preacher meat. This is part of a complete episode.
A listener remembers her mother used to say, “Your Monday is longer than your Tuesday.” This phrase offered a subtle way to notify someone that her slip was showing. Other expressions convey that warning as well, including “Monday...
Grant shares some fill-in-the-blank puzzles from a listener. For example, “There’s one w______ on a u________” and “There are 5 d________ in a z_________ c__________.” This is part of a complete episode.
Where’d we get a word like skyscraper? Martha explains the image literally refers to scraping the sky, but first applied to the topmost sail on a ship, and later to tall horses, and high fly balls in baseball. There are similar ideas in other...