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.
According to Gobsmacked: The British Invasion of American English (Bookshop|Amazon) by Ben Yagoda, the word smarmy, meaning “unctuous” or “ingratiating,” may come from a 19th-century magazine contest, in which readers sent in...
Mary Beth in Greenville, South Carolina, wonders: Why do we say four-oh-nine for the number 409 instead of four-zero-nine or four-aught-nine? What are the rules for saying either zero or oh or aught or ought to indicate that arithmetical symbol...
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