Welcome to another A Way with Words newsletter! With any luck, our A Way with Words email messages don’t end up in your spam folder. But did you ever wonder why junk mail is called spam in the first place? There’s a funny story behind this term, and...
Many of us struggled with the Old English poem “Beowulf” in high school. But what if you could actually hear “Beowulf” in the English of today? There’s a new translation by Maria Dahvana Headley that uses contemporary...
Daniel in Wilmington, North Carolina, notes that in English, we literally break the fast in the morning, the source of the English word breakfast. In the same way, the Spanish word for “breakfast,” desayuno, comes from desayunar, meaning...
Stories From The Onion In this week’s episode, Martha and Grant discuss not-to-be-believed articles about language from the satirical newspaper The Onion, including one headlined “Underfunded Schools Forced to Cut Past Tense from...
bed-and-breakfasting n.— «Another tactic, if an investor thinks a company is fundamentally sound but wants to crystallise the loss, is to sell in June and buy the same stock back in July, a practice known as bed-and-breakfasting and...
brekko n. breakfast. Editorial Note: This is a newer version of an old form: brekker or brekkers in the U.K. and brekkie in Australia. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
