Following our conversation about fossicking for gemstones, a listener in Melbourne, Australia, points out that where he’s from, emu is slang for a person who picks up discarded tickets at a racetrack, hoping to find an accidentally discarded winner, bending over in the manner of Australia’s largest native bird searching for food. In the United States, these ticket scavengers are called stoopers. 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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