Cria means a baby llama or alpaca. The English word comes from Spanish cría, related to criar, “to rear” or “to raise” a young animal. The four-letter word may seem merely like a useful Scrabble play, but it’s also the everyday term for those long...
An alcoholic who’s been sober for 29 years wonders if she’s overly sensitive to the terms non-alcoholic and alcohol-free being used with reference to food and drink. The problem is that alcoholic has more than one meaning. It can refer...
A professor who spent 25 years studying arthropods has some thoughts regarding our conversation about the phrase tight as a tick. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Technical Tick Tweak” You’re listening to A Way...
For a fantastic read about the history of taxonomy and the ways we use language to try to divide up and impose order on the world, check out Naming Nature: The Clash Between Instinct and Science (Bookshop|Amazon) by science writer Carol Kaesuk Yoon...
The tiny guppy, also called the millionfish or the rainbow fish, is named for amateur naturalist and Trinidad school superintendent Robert John Letchmere Guppy. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “How the Guppy Got its...
The word stenophagous means eating a limited variety of food. It derives from Greek stenos, meaning narrow, also found in stenography (literally, narrow writing) and stenosis, a medical term for abnormal narrowing. This is part of a complete episode...
