There’s an old children’s ditty that goes, “Mama had a baby and its head popped off,” which you sing while popping the top off of a dandelion or similar flower. This is part of a complete episode.
Would you rather live in a world with no adjectives … or no verbs — and why? Also, who in the world is that director Alan Smithee [SMITH-ee] who made decades’ of crummy films? Turns out that if a movie director has his work wrested away...
An East Tennessee caller wonders about the phrase “cutting a head shine,” meaning “pull off a caper” or “behave in a boisterous, comical manner.” Cutting a head shine derives from an alternate use of shine...
Writers and where they do their best creative work. A new book on Geoffrey Chaucer describes the dark, cramped, smelly room where he wrote his early work. Which raises the question: What kind of space do you need to produce your best writing...
A Forth Worth, Texas, listener who interviewed candidates for a head football coach position at a high school reports that out of eight interviewees, six of them used the phrase, “It’s not about the X’s and the O’s...
Why call it a doggy bag when it’s really for your husband? Grant and Martha talk about the language of leftovers and why we eat beef and not cow. And how old is the typical public-library patron? Plus, in Afghanistan, proverbs are part of...