Sharing a secret language. Did you ever speak in gibberish with a childhood pal, adding extra syllables to words so the adults couldn’t understand what you were saying? Such wordplay isn’t just for kids—and it’s not just limited to...
Gibberish and its variants aren’t just for goofy teens in the wayback of the station wagon. As Jessica Weiss notes in Schwa Fire, the online magazine about language, people all over the world speak various forms of it. Her article features...
Eddie from Petoskey, Michigan, learned double-talk from his mother, who picked it up from girlfriends in the 1950s or early 1960s. In his family’s version, ib is inserted around each syllable: for a word like cat, it follows the initial consonant...
What do pigs have to do with piggyback rides? We get a lesson from a listener in the fine art of speaking gibberish. What’s the correct way to pronounce pecan? The French have the Academie Française, but what authority do we have for the...
Hey, look: there are three brand-new episodes to tell you about! Each includes a few rounds of devious word puzzles cooked up by our quiz guy John Chaneski, as well as: Last weekend, “Secret Gibberish”: piggyback gibberish the...
Martha and Grant share listeners’ emails about language changes in the mouths of train conductors and military drill instructors. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Train Conductor Language” You’re listening...