Discussion Forum—A Way with Words, a fun radio show and podcast about language

There's another brand-new episode for you to catch up on, in which we talk about "sonker” (a kind of fruit cobbler), suss (is it British?), roly-polies (a bug which by any other name would still look like a tiny armadillo), and a big anniversary for "The Phantom Tollbooth."

Listen here:

https://waywordradio.org/auctioneers/

What is like to be closed off from new language for almost three decades? At the Virtual Linguist blog, Susan Purcell remarks on the experience of Monica Baldwin, who spent 27 years in a convent. When she re-entered the world, she found the language she heard remarkable, challenging, and sometimes incomprehensible.

Read Purcell's summary here:

http://wywd.us/sdaia5

Baldwin's 1949 book "I Leap Over the Wall" is fascinating and is itself a time capsule of the 1940s.

http://wywd.us/tRhwqp

Baldwin writes of her feelings and confusion about strange-sounding language:

"Reading the papers always made me feel particularly idiotic, especially the Observer and the Sunday Times. The writers of the book reviews and leading articles used cliches and allusions which were incomprehensible to me. I had never heard of The Unknown Soldier, Jazz, Isolationism, Lounge lizards, Lease-Lend..."

"As for their actual conversation, it was to me almost like a foreign language. Unfamiliar cliches. Amusing -- and sometimes rather startling -- comparisons. Lots of slang -- American and otherwise. ..."

"On the whole, I think their most breath-taking effects were achieved by the curious choice of adjectives and adverbs. I sat spell-bound. It was like nothing I had ever listened to before. Perhaps what startled me most was the constant recurrence of words which not even a man would have used before girls when I left school. 'Lousy," for instance, and 'mucky'; 'guts,' 'blasted,' 'bloody' and 'what-the-hell.'"

LANGUAGE NEWS

Legendary lexicographer Hugh Rawson tracks the names of revolutions and uprisings at the Cambridge University press dictionary blog.

http://wywd.us/rJJ1b8

Can "till" make a comeback, despite the centuries long rise of "until"? Jonathon Owen at the blog Arrant Pedantry investigates.

http://wywd.us/tbtQvZ

Battling linguistic beasts: The Linguist Llama and the Linguist Lion. Very wonky.

http://lingllama.tumblr.com/
http://wywd.us/rzQvcO

The power of intonation, Arnold Zwicky's commentary on a one-panel comic:

http://wywd.us/sNIUTf

BEHIND THE SCENES

The show now has its own Google+ page, just one more place you can meet other listeners. Jump in:

http://wywd.us/tpTpSe

Thanks for listening and reading!

Martha and Grant
Co-hosts of "A Way with Words"
https://waywordradio.org
words@waywordradio.org

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Support for "A Way with Words" comes from the Fifth Edition of The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. 10 Years in the Making with 10,000 New Words and Senses. Learn more at http://ahdictionary.com.

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