In American English, khaki has come to connote “business casual,” but it comes from the Farsi word for “earthy.” In the 1840s, the British picked it up in the north of India as a descriptor for their sturdy soldiers’ pants that matched the color of...
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...
Martha shares listener email about linguistic “false friends,” those perplexing words in other languages that look like English words, but mean something completely different. A case in point is the detergent popular in the Middle East called...
Westoxification n. the financial, cultural, or military reliance on the West by non-Western societies. Editorial Note: The term probably originated in Iran, where in Farsi it is gharbzadegi. Jalal Al-e Ahmad is sometimes credited with coining or...
