Welcome to another newsletter from "A Way with Words"! Where the heck have we been? Working on a brand-new season, that's where. It starts this coming weekend. That's right--brand-new episodes, chock full of languagey goodness...
If English isn’t your first language, there are lots of ways to learn it, such as memorizing Barack Obama’s speech to the 2004 Democratic Convention. Martha and Grant talk about some of the unusual ways foreigners are learning to speak English...
Stacy in Boulder, Colorado, heard neck of the woods as Nick of the woods. The phrase uses neck in an old topographical sense, a narrow or projecting part of a landscape, much like the neck of a bottle or violin. In 19th-century American use, a neck...
price walk n.— «What’s the difference between the black Volkswagen CC I drove on the launch event in Tennessee and the black Volkswagen CC that I just recently drove for week here at home? Not a heck of a lot, really, unless you’re looking at the...
There’s a frisson you get when you meet a word for the first time—feeling pleasantly stumped in between wondering, “What the heck does that mean?” and hurrying off to find out. Martha and Grant talk about some terms that had just that effect on...
Redmonton n.— «Because if the election is going to be decided in Battleground Calgary, why the heck did the Liberal leader spend three days door-knocking with candidates in and around Edmonton (better known as Redmonton)?» —“Taft banking on ‘new’...