Joan from Dallas, Texas, wants to know why some people are judgmental about people who speak with a glottal stop in such words as cattle, bottle, or even glottal itself. She noted a commenter on TikTok criticizing a Scottish woman for pronouncing water with a glottal stop, insisting that it’s ignorant, uneducated, and lazy. Joan says when her own mother attended a Brooklyn elementary school in the early 1930s, a speech teacher was brought in to force children like her not to speak with a glottal stop, lest they appear ignorant, uneducated, and lazy. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this kind of pronunciation. It’s simply associated with dialects that, through the pure happenstance of history and politics, tend to lack prestige. This is part of a complete episode.
What if, instead of being an inanimate object, a dictionary were alive? That’s the idea behind a lavishly illustrated new children’s book called The Dictionary Story (Bookshop|Amazon) by Oliver Jeffers and Sam Winston. This is part of a...
If someone’s got melon, it means they’re smart. The expression most likely arose because of the resemblance between a melon and a human head. Several other foods are associated with having brains, including a cabbage, a gourd, and even a...
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