Seamus Heaney used "so" as the opening word of his translation of Beowulf (standing for the OE "hwaet" (whose meaning is still discussed) As for "e...

How funny to hear the calque "from home"! (I'm Polish). I would like to take issue, though, with Martha's pronunciation of "z domu" - "z" is pronounce...

Thanks for looking that up. I thought it could be "Noo Yawk tawk" (the series takes place in upstate NY, I think, or at least within driving distance ...

Grant Barrett said Sorry about that. We installed SSL for use on the donate page and it screwed the pooch. Hello Grant, There's still something w...

In Poland spelling is also tested in schools by means of dictations, with teacher reading the text aloud. Unlike in France, the texts are not meant to...

KseniaMultilingua said Hello there, I'm Russian and we too use the idiom 'it will get well before you marry'. Although in the Russian version it is '...

deacon8, the details you've dug up are fascinating. However, Oxford Dictionaries give the pronunciation of gill as a female ferret with soft "g" - Oxf...

As usual, I am catching up belatedly with new episodes. But the discussion of "ain't" brought to my mind Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities where L...

Nancy Pearl, a librarian who has her show on books at KUOW, once talked about the rule of 100. You deduce your current age from 100 and the result is ...

I am a little late in responding as it took me some time to catch up with your podcast and then I couldn't access your site for a week. But here's a c...

RE: morbid fascination Lit crit/philosophy people actually have a word for it: "abjection" as used by the French philosopher and psychoanalyst Juli...

There is a word in German for the state of excitement before journey: "Reisefieber", or literally "travel fever".