Yvette, a biology professor in Bismarck, North Dakota, wonders why some words are more pleasurable to say than others. Among her favorites: ovoviviparous, which describes animals whose eggs hatch inside the mother’s body or shortly after being deposited, and the name of the smoky jungle frog, Leptodactylus pentadactylus. The natural rhythm within certain words often helps make them pleasing to say, as do alliteration, rhyming, and reduplication of letters or syllables. This is partly what makes tongue twisters fun to repeat. Try this one: Ted had said that Ed had edited it. This is part of a complete episode.
A member of the ski patrol at Vermont’s Sugarbush Resort shares some workplace slang. Boilerplate denotes hard-packed snow with a ruffled pattern that makes skis chatter, death cookies are random chunks that could cause an accident, and...
A resident of Michigan’s scenic Beaver Island shares the term, boodling, which the locals use to denote the social activity of leisurely wandering the island, often with cold fermented beverages. There have been various proposed etymologies...
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