A bunch of English words actually take from the names of old places: peach comes from Persia, bungalow refers to a house “of the Bengal type,” and laconic refers to the region of Sparta famous as a place where people valued speech that was brief and...
If you thought cummerbunds served no purpose today, wait until you hear of their original use. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Original Use of Cummerbunds” Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hello, this is Hamida from San Antonio...
Joan in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, asks about hayna, a spoken regional term she grew up with in northeastern Pennsylvania. It’s used as a friendly tag question meaning something like isn’t it? or right? Hayna is an orally transmitted tag question with...
Mehran of San Antonio, who grew up in Iran, notes that in Farsi, khaki means earthy or down-to-earth. English got the word through British military use in South Asia. By the 1840s, soldiers in northern India or what is now Pakistan were wearing a...
In a previous episode, we wondered how U-turn might translate in different languages. One listener explains that in Hebrew, drivers make a horseshoe or a hoof-turn. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Hoof-Turns” Quite a while back we...
Good poetry is even better when you read it aloud. For his anthology, Essential Pleasures: A New Anthology of Poems to Read Aloud former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky selected works with just that in mind. Martha and Grant discuss a poem from the...
