David from Kalamazoo, Michigan, is a former truck driver who remembers that his fellow users of CB radio tended to sound similar, no matter what part of the country they were from. Is there such a thing as an occupational accent? Many of those truck drivers sound like Jerry Reed from the 1977 movie “Smokey and the Bandit,” and C.W. McCall’s 1975 song “Convoy.” You can find lots of other samples of CB radio chatter on archive.org. People involved in the same enterprise, such as airline pilots and air-traffic controllers, will begin to develop similar patterns of speech. This is part of a complete episode.
If you start the phrase when in Rome… but don’t finish the sentence with do as the Romans do, or say birds of a feather… without adding flock together, you’re engaging in anapodoton, a term of rhetoric that refers to the...
There are many proposed origins for the exclamation of surprise, holy Toledo! But the most likely one involves not the city in Ohio, but instead Toledo, Spain, which has been a major religious center for centuries in the traditions of both Islam and...
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