A young woman in Las Cruces, New Mexico, is conflicted after a professor writes a glowing recommendation for her that also describes her as sassy. Isn’t sassy a gendered term that should be avoided? And if so, how should she handle the...
Robert Macfarlane’s book Landmarks, a collection of dialect terms for features of the natural landscape, includes zwen, the sound of partridges taking off, and zawn, a wave-smashed chasm in a cliff. This is part of a complete episode.
The term nitnoy (sometimes spelled nit-noi) means a little bit, and most likely derives from a Thai term that means the same thing. This is part of a complete episode.
The German idiom Ich glaub mein Schwein pfeift is used to express tremendous surprise. Literally, it means, “I think my pig is whistling!” This is part of a complete episode.
In dogsledding, the exclamations gee and haw are used for left and right respectively. A woman in Fairbanks, Alaska, uses those terms when training her dogs for the Iditarod and wonders about their origin. (As promised, here are her pups.) This is...
Quiz Guy John Chaneski’s punny puzzle involves words that end in -ish. For example, something that’s somewhat like a mark used to identify livestock might be what word that ends in -ish? This is part of a complete episode.