German filmmaker Werner Herzog is known for such documentaries as Grizzly Man and Fitzcarraldo. He’s also fascinated with what he calls “the limits of language,” as evident in his 1976 documentary how fast auctioneers can talk, How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck. In his new memoir, Every Man for Himself and God Against All (Bookshop|Amazon), Herzog describes his friendship with Oliver Sacks, the neurologist and author of Awakenings (Bookshop|Amazon) and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (Bookshop|Amazon), and includes a lovely passage about when he first spied Sacks reading the Oxford English Dictionary and knew they’d be fast friends. This is part of a complete episode.
More from this show
The cardboard cylinder left after the last sheet of toilet, tissue, or wrapping paper comes off the roll has inspired families to make up a lot of names for the tube or the sounds you can make with it. These include oh-ah, oh-ah, drit-drit, dah-dah...
A native Texan says his Canadian wife teases him about his use of hitten for a past participle, as in You have hitten every green light instead of You have hit every green light. Charles Mackay’s 1888 work, A Dictionary of Lowland Scotch, does...