Martha talks about the hoopoe, that colorful, clownish, extremely smelly bird—with a likely linguistic connection to defrauded hedge fund investors.
Fess up: do you have a pet name for your car? How about your computer? Martha and Grant discuss the urge to give nicknames to inanimate objects in our lives. Also, why do we speak of vetting a political candidate? And what in the world is a zoo...
We’re continuing our look at some of the words of the year of 2008 with words related to automobiles.
The death of Martha’s favorite cat Typo prompts her to reminisce about him, and about one of her favorite ailurophilic words, chatoyant.
Hockey mom, mavericky, snow machines, and—how could we forget that other memorable phrase from the 2008 presidential campaign?—lipstick on a pig. Some new and not-so-new terms leapt onto the national stage during Gov. Sarah Palin‘s run for the...
The year 2008 produced a new acronym: PUMA. Grant explains how PUMAs began prowling the political landscape.