After our conversation about various names for a television remote control, a listener emailed to say that early remote controls produced an audible tone that activated the TV channel changer and volume, and whenever his dogs Lupe and Bubba stood up...
How and why do words from one language find their way into another? Vietnamese, for instance, includes lots of words borrowed or adapted from French. Such linguistic mixing often happens when languages brush up against each other and speakers reach...
Jameela in Charlotte, North Carolina, says her family refers to their television’s remote control as the clicker, but her friends insist on calling it the remote. These devices go by other names as well, including doofer, flicker, zapper, and...
Flight crews have a word for colleagues who check into a hotel, slam the door behind them, lock it shut, and don’t re-emerge until checkout time. They’re called slam-clickers. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Slam-Clickers” Grant...
cowboy clicker n.— «Watching television games doesn’t satisfy that hunger because my set doesn’t have what is known in coaching parlance as a “cowboy clicker”—a device that attaches to a VCR allowing plays to be run back and forth a million times...
