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Episode 1532

Off the Turnip Truck

It’s hard to imagine now, but there was a time when people disagreed over the best word to use when answering the phone. Alexander Graham Bell suggested answering with ahoy! but Thomas Edison was partial to hello! A fascinating new book about...

Ahoy vs. Hello

It’s hard to imagine now, but there was a time when people disagreed over the best word to use when answering the telephone. Alexander Graham Bell, for example, advocated answering with  Ahoy!, while Thomas Edison argued for Hello. As...

Telephone Greetings

What do you say when you answer the telephone? On the NPR science blog, “Krulwich Wonders,” Robert Krulwich notes that hello did not become a standard greeting until the Edison Company recommended the word as a proper phone greeting...

chuck-and-duck

chuck-and-duck  n.— «The Edison Sault power plant is an imposing, quarter-mile-long, turn-of-the-last-century stone structure built along the river that features nearly 40 turbine outflow chutes where salmon congregate on their upstream...

boat

boat  n.— «Edison Senat learned how to speak English in five months. The 26-year-old Haiti native didn’t want to be tagged as “boat,” a derogatory term referring to immigrants. So he made it a point to speak it as often as he...

dipstick survey

dipstick survey  n.— «In a dipstick survey conducted by BT, English came out tops with 80 per cent non-English speakers listening to English and 20 per cent non-Hindi speakers listening to Hindi.» —“What’s our lingo?” by...

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