If you’re serious about writing a memoir, what topics should you include, and what can you leave out? And how honest can you really be about the other people in your life? Some of America’s leading memoirists wrote things they lived to...
Sorry, Californians—the word dude actually comes from New York City, and goes all the way back to the 1800s. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Birthplace of “Dude”” You’re listening to A Way with Words...
Paul from Milwaukee heard college women calling each other dude and wondered when that started. When young women use it with each other, it’s mainly in the vocative sense, a way to get attention at the start of a sentence, as in dude...
Dude! We’re used to hearing the word “dude” applied to guys. But increasingly, young women use the word “dude” to address each other. Grant and Martha talk about linguistic research about the meaning and uses of...
Puzzle Dude John Chaneski has a quiz about the unofficial terms for familiar things that have less familiar official names. “The Academy Awards of the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences,” for example, are unofficially...
Feel like having a little “hair of the dog”? Grant and Martha explain what dog hair has to do with hangover cures. And what do you call it when random objects form a recognizable image, like a cloud resembling a bunny, or the image of Elvis in...