Dan from San Diego asks about sass in don’t sass me, a line he heard on Two and a Half Men. Sass is a dialect pronunciation of sauce, which developed a figurative sense of sting, bite, or zest added to speech, much as a sauce adds flavor to food...
A caller who lived in the Bay Area during the 1960s remembers using the word loosecap to describe someone who’s “not playing with a full deck.” He wonders if he and his friends are the only ones to use it, as in, “Don’t be such a loosecap!” This is...
Greg Pliska has a quiz about chemical names that should exist but don’t. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Word Quiz: Fake Chemical Elements from Words Ending in -ium” You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Martha Barnette. And...
It’s the wacky title of a new book by language enthusiast Elizabeth Little which has Martha and Grant talking about whether Coca-Cola and Chevy ran into cultural translation problems when selling products abroad. Did the Chevy Nova really sell...