Grant and his son have been loving the magazines Click, Cricket, and Ladybug. The poems, stories, and pictures are fantastic, and you don’t get the sense that it’s didactic or trying to force any lessons or morals. If you’re fond...
Is it correct to say “I have no ideal” instead of “no idea”? In Kentucky, this use of ideal is common across education and socioeconomic lines. Flustrated, a variant of frustrated that connotes more anger and confusion, is also common in the...
Untz or oonce reprsents the thump of a dance beat; wub gives dubstep’s wobbling bass a little mouth-made machinery. Modern onomatopoeia—sound-imitating words from the era of computers, electronic music, and ray guns—also includes beep for a computer...
In an earlier episode, Martha and Grant discussed what to call a person who doesn’t eat fish. A listener calls with another suggestion: pescatrarian, from the Latin word that means “fish.” This is part of a complete episode...
A caller in Hamburg, Germany, wants to know where we got the term laundry list. Grant explains that it derives from a time when people of a certain class sent their laundry out to be cleaned. It’s usually associated with a collection of things...
Why are some book titles so incredibly long? A caller complains about book-title inflation, usually consisting of a shorter title followed by a colon and a longer subtitle that seems to sound important and ends with the words “and What To Do...