The folks at the baby-name app Nametrix crunched some data and found that certain names are disproportionately represented in different professions. The name Leonard, for example, happens to be particularly common among geologists, and Marthas are...
In Indiana, a dish-to-pass supper is another term for a pot-luck supper or a covered-dish supper. A related regional label is the pitch-in supper, where everyone contributes a dish. Checking Wikipedia’s potluck article for more synonyms turned up...
The British slang adjective squiffy first appeared in the 19th century and means drunk. A golden gut signals dependable business acumen, the kind of intuition that data can override. At Google, one story goes, 41 shades of blue were tested to see...
If you’re inappropriately focused on the minutiae of a project instead of the bigger picture, you’re said to be bike-shedding. Grant talks about that modern slang term and Martha discusses a word that goes way back in time, right back to...
Whether it’s bytes of data or intergalactic distances, humans are accumulating ever more massive amounts of data. But how do we use language to describe such mind-bogglingly huge numbers? There’s mega, as in mega-millions, and giga, as in gigabytes...
Is the word criteria singular or plural? This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Criteria” Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hello, this is Michelle Diekelman calling from Oceanside, California. Well, hello, Michelle. Welcome...
