What’s the difference, if any, between a caregiver and a caretaker? Generally in the United States, a caretaker is someone who tends property; a caregiver looks after a person. The term caregiver is far more recent. This is part of a complete...
An eighth-grade history teacher from Denton, Texas, is teaching about colonial America, and wonders if there’s a difference between the phrases to found a colony or establish a colony. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Found vs...
A caller with a 25-year-old parrot wonders: How much language do birds really understand? Plus, Knock-knock. Who’s there? Boo. Well… you can guess the rest. But there was a time when these goofy jokes were a brand-new craze sweeping the nation...
What’s the difference between butter beans, lima beans, and wax beans? The answer depends on where you live and what dialect you speak. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Butter Beans” Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hey, this is...
What’s the difference between cavalry and calvary? The first of these two refers to the group of soldiers on horseback and is a linguistic relative of such “horsey” words as caballero, the Spanish horse-riding gentleman, and cavalcade, originally a...
“If you come to a fork in the road… take it!” Baseball legend Yogi Berra was famous for such head-scratching observations. What most people don’t realize, though, is that the former Yankees star often wasn’t the first person to say them. As Berra...