"Grant shares some familiar proverbs that supposedly arose from African-American English. The book he mentions is Dictionary of American Proverbs, by Wolfgang Mieder."
Notwithstanding the word "supposedly" above, Grant and Martha were much too credulous about attributions of well-known phrases to African-American English. The first phrase cited was "his word is his bond." As I listened to the podcast of this broadcast, I immediately reacted to the claim that this phrase arose from African-American English. When I finished gardening and got back to my computer, it took literally seconds to find a reference to a very similar phrase in The Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs, with literary citations from Thomas Malory through Charles Dickens. I suspect at least some of the other quotations cited by Grant were equally spurious. Unfortunately, at least some of your listeners might remember this podcast and spread this misinformation.
Regardless of where the phrase "his word is his bond" originates, I was interested to hear your discussion of the related "word is born." It immediately seemed to me that this could be related to the Gospel of John, in which it is described "how the word has become flesh." In other words, in this gospel, Jesus is the word that is born, so it seems that word is born could have begun as a reference to Jesus.
I found the discussion about using a positive anymore very interesting. I'm from New England and have never heard anyone use it and could hardly believe they do! It got me to thinking, though. Whatever happened to the words "evermore" and "forevermore"? Although those words aren't used anymore, it seems to me they at least would make a grammatical improvement to these positive anymore constructions.
Maybe anymore I'll say evermore, from now on... Nah.
A 1605 CE use of a phrase very similar to "a man's word is his bond" was employed by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, to wit, "An honest man's word is as good as his bond." Part II, Book IV, ch. 34, Don Quixote de la Mancha. I doubt the implied claim the phrase was coined by a 1960's group.