Jill, who recently moved from Chicago, Illinois, to Indianapolis, Indiana, is bothered when restaurant servers say things like, “What would we like to order?” “Are we ready for the check?” and “Would we like dessert?” She says it doesn’t sound right...
In 1985, four young members of the Klezmer Conservatory Band traveled to the Soviet Union as tourists and met with refuseniks, most of them Jewish, who had applied to leave and were harassed, denied work, or wrongfully imprisoned. To encode vital...
Lee from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, remembers her Danish grandmother breaking up a loud argument between Lee’s mother and aunt by telling the twins, you sound like fishwives! To yell like a fishwife or to quarrel like a fishwife means to shout or...
A Fredericksburg, Virginia, man who once taught in the Aleut community of St. George Island, Alaska, asks about calidor, the local term for an unheated entryway or mudroom that buffers the house from Arctic weather. Calidor has an unusually well...
Karina from Maryville, Missouri, disagrees with her mom about whether bowl and bull sound the same. Karina hears them as the same sound, while her mom hears a clear difference. It’s an example of a vowel merger, or sound shift, that occurs in...
Quiz Guy John Chaneski gathers clues to words that contain æ, the ligature called ash that can appear in such words as Cæsar. For example, what’s a dessert historically served after church services? This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of...
