Sara in Camden, New Jersey, wants a word for those people who are more than acquaintances, but not quite friends. She calls them friendlies, but wonders if there’s a better term. Fracquaintance, maybe? The Danish band Mew has an album called...
The French word for “enamel” is émail, with an acute accent on the e. To avoid confusion, the French use courriel or simply le mail to denote those electronic missives. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Email...
The first-ever “Word by Word” awards were presented by A Way With Words co-hosts Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett as part of a sold-out celebration at the San Diego Natural History Museum. To celebrate its tenth year of independent production...
There’s a new kind of hamburger menu that involves pixels, not pickles. It’s that little stack of horizontal lines in the corner of a webpage that you click to see more options. You might use a hamburger menu while webrooming–that...
After we talked in an earlier episode about what Martha calls anyway friends–those friends you pick right up with after not speaking for a long time–a listener sent in this quip: Friends are like fish, they’re fresh when you catch...
There should be a word for the kind of friend you can go without seeing for years, then reconnect with as though no time has gone by. Martha calls those her “Anyway” friends, because they just pick right up with...