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Episode 1634

Blue Dolphin

How can you kick the verbal habit of saying you know and um so many times in a sentence? For one thing, get comfortable with pauses. There’s no need to fill every silence during a conversation. Also, a doctor who treats patients in Appalachia...

Medical Misery, Pone, and Rising

A physician in Blowing Rock, North Carolina, shares some of the vocabulary of his patients from Appalachia. There, a misery is anything painful, such as a misery in my jaw if they have a painful tooth or a misery in my back if they have lumbar pain...

Episode 1625

Strong Coffee

During the late 19th and early 20th century, thousands of volunteers helped crowdsource the Oxford English Dictionary. This venerable reference work includes citations sent in by inventors, eccentrics, scientists and educators, an Arctic explorer —...

“They!” Exclamation

An Alabama listener says her grandmother would express astonishment with the phrase They! My goodness! This exclamation, which is common in her grandmother’s native Appalachia, is probably an R-less pronunciation of There! as in Look there...

Episode 1621

Gleam in Your Eye

A remarkable new documentary explores the world of amateur and professional mermaiding and the language bubbling up within it. Some mermaiding enthusiasts greet each other with a friendly “Shello!” Plus, an adoptee wonders what to call...

Aks for Ask in Appalachia

Linda in Blountville, Tennessee, wonders why many old-timers in her area pronounce the word ask to sound like aks with the S and K switched, sounding like the word “axe.” The pronunciation “axe” for ask has nothing to do with...