We all lead busy lives—so are speed reading courses a good idea? Plus, if you hear someone speaking with a British accent, do you tend to assume they’re somehow more intelligent? And some common English surnames tell us stories about life in the...
After you notice a certain word for the first time, chances are you’ll start seeing it all over the place. That’s known as the frequency illusion, coined by linguist Arnold Zwicky, and it happens because of confirmation bias. This is part of a...
You know how it is when you encounter a word and then suddenly you start noticing it everywhere? One that’s seemed to pop up is cray, or cray-cray, a slang variant of crazy. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Cray” There’s something...
Databases like the Google Books Corpus can also be used to follow text over time. For example, as the women’s suffrage movement grew around 1910, words relating to women’s rights grew in popularity and frequency of usage. This is part of a complete...
Greetings, all! In our most recent show, we talk about great words for Scrabble, plus "madcap" comedy, mondegreens, "No way, Jose!" "hubba hubba," and the name of that flourish underneath John Hancock's John Hancock...
coconut telegraph n.— «SSB networks are simply an organized meeting place on a particular radio frequency at an established time, where an unlimited number of boaters can meet and share the latest weather forecasts and local news. Nets are usually...