A listener shares her grandfather’s funny saying. It’s a series of logical statements, but when pronounced very quickly it can sound like some sort of Latin incantation: In mud eels are / In clay none are / In pine tar is / In oak none is. In The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (Bookshop|Amazon), folklorists Iona and Peter Opie show that there are lots of versions of this saying — including one in a medical manuscript from 500 years ago! Two other lines that sometimes accompany this saying are Goat eat ivy / Mare eat oats, the inspiration for the 1940s novelty song “Mairzy Doats.”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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