During our online discussion about how being focused on one’s phone or camera can distract from fully participating in an experience, a listener brought up the term chimping. As we’ve noted before, chimping refers to fiddling with the buttons on a digital camera and checking the screen after taking a photograph, much like a chimpanzee fooling with whatever it finds on the ground. This is part of a complete episode.
The so-called “lifestyle influencer accent” you hear in videos on TikTok and YouTube, where someone speaks with rising tones at the end of sentences and phrases, suggesting that they’re about to say something important, is a form of what linguists...
Meg in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, gets why the state highway department encourages drivers to use their blinkers when changing lanes, but placing a digital sign at the Sagamore Bridge that reads Use Ya Blinkah is, well, a lexical bridge too far. Meg’s...
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