A Chicago-area listener suggests that approaching to a yellow traffic light and deciding whether or not to go for it might be described as amberbivalence. It’s somewhat like that decision you face when coming toward what you know is a stale green...
The writer Richard Trench has a lovely quote that echoes Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous lines about language as fossil poetry: “Language is the amber in which a thousand precious thoughts have been safely embedded and preserved.” This is part of a...
Say you’ve been busy all semester throwing a Frisbee and drinking juice out of a funnel, and now it’s finals week. How are you going to study? Just get yourself a koofer! These old tests, which some universities keep around in their libraries, can...
Hot traffic talk! A caller is looking for a word for the point at which you have to reach in order to make it through a stoplight before it turns red.
Nominations for Word of the Year 2007
In this episode, Grant offers peek at some expressions he’s nominating for the American Dialect Society’s Word of the Year vote in January. Will it be “w00t,” “subprime,” or something else?