Hey, friends! This past weekend, we re-aired an episode you may have missed. Among other things, we talked anatomical eponyms in medicine, such as Achilles heel and fallopian tubes, which are being phased out; litotes, which use negatives to say...
Do you have a favorite letter? The sound or typeface varieties of a letter can really catch us. For more about the visual and emotional properties of various letters, check out Simon Garfield’s book about fonts, Just My Type. Grant also...
Did you miss our recent brand-new episode in which we talked about the game rock-paper-scissors, Band-Aids vs. plasters, Yiddish proverbs, jonesing, and more? Listen to it on our website or download the MP3. We aired a rebroadcast last weekend...
Why do spelling bees use such strange words — often foreign words that almost nobody uses? Like cymotrichous, stromuhr, Laodicean, guerdon, serrefine, and Ursprache? We answered that question in last week’s episode — it’s what happens...
There’s another brand-new episode for you to catch up on, in which we talk about “sonker” (a kind of fruit cobbler), suss (is it British?), roly-polies (a bug which by any other name would still look like a tiny armadillo), and a big...
You know that feeling you get when you say something you’ve known forever — slang, a catchphrase, a cultural reference — and the other person stares blankly? They have no idea what you’re referring to. Sometimes you feel old...