Marco from San Diego, California, is curious about why sportscasters speak of a player who put English on a ball. The expression appears to have begun with British players of billiards and snooker, who first figured out how to give a ball some extra...
Quiz Guy John Chaneski’s brain teaser involves mixed-up body parts. For example, suppose he says, “Listen you, stop bothering me or I’m going to give you a toe sandwich!” What part of one’s anatomy did he really mean...
The idiom “two heads are better than one” doesn’t exist in quite the same form in Spanish, but there is a variation that translates to, “four eyes are better than two.” In Hungarian, there’s a phrase that’s...
When it comes to tattoos, passages of text are an increasingly popular alternative to images. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Text Tattoos” You’re listening to A Way with Words, a show about language and how we...
Polyglots sometimes experience faulty language selection, accidentally reaching for words from a language different from the one they’re speaking. Listener Phoebe Liu of Seattle grew up speaking Chinese, then learned English, and studied...
We usually brandish a weapon, or some object we can wave about. But the definition of brandish can be stretched to include more figurative types of weapons or objects (e.g. seductive body parts). This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of...
