Hannah from Menominee, Michigan, grew up hearing her father invite people out for a drive with, Let’s go for a scud. He traces it to an inside joke about his 1976 Mercury Montego MX and the names of MX and Scud missiles, but scud is also an old verb...
A middle-schooler in Waukesha, Wisconsin, wonders why the word island contains the letter S, and why is it pronounced with a long I and no S sound? In Old English, this word for dry land surrounded by water was igland, coming from words that mean...
John in Williamsburg, Virginia, ponders whether English is the linguistic equivalent of the Borg, dominating and consuming all languages its path. There’s nothing inherent in English that makes it superior to or more likely to win out over...
Jill in Indianapolis, Indiana, wonders how to spell the one-syllable cheer that starts with Y. Is it yay or yea? Since the 1930s, yay has been used as a little celebratory word. The word yea is much older and used in formal texts to mean...
Some countries have strict laws about naming babies. New Zealand authorities, for example, denied a request to name some twins Fish and Chips. • Halley’s Comet seen centuries before English astronomer Edmund Halley ever spotted it...
A San Diego, California, man wonders about the meaning and distribution of the directional phrase over yonder. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Over Yonder” Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hi, how’s it going...
