I’m as old as my tongue and a little bit older than my teeth goes back to the 18th century. The quip appears in Jonathan Swift’s Polite Conversation, published around 1738, and in the 1811 slang dictionary Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. Gail...
What happens when a clock gets hungry? It goes back four seconds. Martha talks about how puns weren’t always considered “bad.” Cicero praised them as the wittiest kind of saying, and Shakespeare made plenty of them, for both...
Martha and Grant discuss why some puns work and others don’t. Martha recommends John Pollack’s observation in The Pun Also Rises describing how “for a split second, puns manage to hold open the elevator doors of language and...
A Syracuse woman wonders how bread and butter pickles got their name. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Bread and Butter Pickles” Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hi, this is Allison Parker from Syracuse, New York, and...