In How to Kill a Language: Power, Resistance, and the Race to Save Our Words (Bookshop|Amazon), British journalist Sophia Smith-Galer writes about linguicide, the erasure or suppression of a language. This loss may be brutally overt—the result of...
How and why do words from one language find their way into another? Vietnamese, for instance, includes many words borrowed or adapted from French, a vestige of colonialism. For example, the Vietnamese word for “train station,” ga, comes...
Acclaimed Jamaican poet Safiya Sinclair’s sumptuous memoir, How to Say Babylon (Bookshop|Amazon) tells the story of her struggle to break free from a rigid Rastafarian upbringing, and how her discovery of poetry, both memorizing it and writing...
Widdershins, also spelled withershins, means “counterclockwise,” and can also refer to someone or something that’s off or backwards. Another word for “the opposite of widdershins,” by the way, is deasil. This is part of...
If you thought cummerbunds served no purpose today, wait until you hear of their original use. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Original Use of Cummerbunds” Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hello, this is Hamida from...