Enthusiastic book recommendations! Martha’s savoring the biography of Alexander von Humboldt, the 19th-century explorer, polymath, and naturalist who revolutionized our understanding of nature and predicted the effects of human activity on climate...
Science journalist Laura Spinney’s new book Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global (Bookshop|Amazon) shows how lots of languages as diverse as Hindi, Italian, and English all stem from a single prehistoric ancestral tongue. A basic word for the...
It’s Book Recommendation Time! Martha’s makes an enthusiastic case for The Invention of Nature: Alexander Von Humboldt’s New World (Bookshop|Amazon). It’s historian Andrea Wulf’s biography of the polymath, adventurer, and naturalist whose fame...
Megan from Seal Beach, California, adores her red-headed daughter, but now that Megan’s remarried, she and her family are mulling the phrase I’m going to beat you like a red-headed stepchild. Other versions include a red-haired stepchild or red...
After noting how similar the word genre sounds to his own first name, Quiz Guy John Chaneski crafted a quiz that involves replacing the letters gen- with John- to form an entirely new word. For example, he says, from now on when you talk about a...
Which of the following three factors has the biggest influence on a person’s accent? Is it your geographic location, your family, or the media? This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Accent Influences” Hello, you have A Way with Words...