“Nuke the fridge”? We kick off our series on contenders for 2008’s “Word of the Year” with a look at this new slang phrase.
Martha nominates another Word of the Year candidate: Joe the, as in “Joe the Plumber,” and subsequent variations on the “X the Y” formula arising from a certain drain-fixer’s quarter-hour of fame. This is part of a...
Marty in Denver wrote mooses in an email, but spell-check balked, and neither moose nor meese sounded right to him. Standard dictionaries and style guides give the plural as moose. It’s a zero plural, the same in singular and plural, like deer...
Pass the Gatorade! Martha and Grant work up a sweat in this episode as they tackle a sports quiz and lob vocabulary questions back and forth. They also settle a family dispute about the pronunciation of eco-friendly and unlock the etymology of...
Quiz Guy John Chaneski is a huge fan of comic books featuring superheroes like Superman and Spider-Man. Lo and behold, John claims he’s discovered a whole treasure trove of Heretofore Unnamed Superheroes, and invites us to guess their names...
The German word über has found a place in American English. A New Jersey man says he and his colleagues find it to be more versatile than a Swiss Army knife, as in, “He is uber in the middle of that situation,” “That was an uber...