Top o' the mornin' to you! This week, crazy crossword clues, why Marines are called "Gyrenes," "jury-rigged" versus "jerry-rigged," the difference between "Duh!" and "No duh!,"...
Need to type something in Linear B or Mayan? Want to make Japanese emoticons? Now you can. Grant explains why the release of Unicode 6 has many typescript aficionados doing the happy dance. This is part of a complete episode.
On an earlier show, Martha mentioned the Middle Eastern detergent called Barf. Martha shares email from listeners who say that although the word spelled the same as English barf, the Farsi pronunciation is somewhat different. This is part of a...
What do you say if you have guests over and someone in your family has stray food left on the face? In some households, the secret warning is “there’s a gazelle on the lawn.” But why a gazelle? Also, this week: the term for a party...
We hope that when it comes to conversation about language, you haven’t been sufficiently suffonsified, because there’s lots to talk about in this week’s archive episode. For starters, there’s the way some pets take a while to...
Hi, all! In this week's archive episode, do you know the term "bike-shedding"? How about "tohubohu"? The former refers to being inappropriately focused on the minutiae of a project instead of the bigger picture (handy...