Grant has compiled his ninth annual words-of-the-year piece for The New York Times Sunday Review section. Among these gems is the verb doxing, as in documenting someone’s life and share it on the web. What were your picks for the words of 2012...
Because Grant still can’t get enough schoolyard rhymes, he shares one this week that goes: Three six nine / the goose drank wine / the monkey chewed tobacco on the streetcar line. Are you a lifer when it comes to children’s rhymes? This...
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...
Grant has collected some modern onomatopoeia for the technological age. Try untz, for the beat in dance music, or wub, for the common dubstep sound. Pew pew! works for lasers and beep for a computer’s beep is a modern classic. This is part of...
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.