The Hawaiian word aloha is both a greeting and a goodbye, as well as a profound acknowledgement of the oneness with all living things. Plus, what’s a lemur ball? A new book will leave you marveling over the mysteries of lemurs, wombats, and other...
A North Carolina listener is curious about his meemaw’s use of a term meaning “food” that he heard as either jasmine or jassum. A dialectal term with various spellings that include jassum, jasum, and jazm can mean “gravy,” “sauce,” or even “juice...
People might never know that quality jazz exists outside the city of Baton Rouge. Which may be true—but it’s also a pangram. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “A Quality Jazz Pangram” People might never know that quality jazz exists...
The adjective corny describes someone or something “unsophisticated” or “naive.” This sense of corny goes back at least as far as the 1920s. Seed catalogs of the time often contained bits of goofy jokes and broad humor described as corny. In...
When a musician is woodshedding a passage of music, they’re trying to master that part by repeatedly practicing it in private, as if having retreated to do so in a woodshed, away from others who might be bothered by it. This is part of a complete...
Michael from Jones, Michigan, says he was stationed on a U.S. Army base in Germany in the early 1960s. If there was a gust of cold wind, a fellow soldier would say the hawk’s out. This expression is largely associated with Chicago, Illinois, where...