One of the most powerful words you’ll ever hear — and one of the most poignant — isn’t in dictionaries yet. But it probably will be one day. The word is endling, and it means “the last surviving member of a species.” The...
Adriana from Miami, Florida, says she and her Cuban-American friends and family use the terms fulano, fulanito, and fulanito de tal as the Spanish equivalent of John Doe. These terms for “so and so” came into Spanish from Arabic fulan...
Olivia from Denver, Colorado, is musing about her use of the term good people, as in She’s good people. This phrase is what linguists call an extragrammatical idiom, meaning the phrase makes sense even though it’s not grammatically...
How do you pronounce the word won? Does it rhyme with sun or Juan? Some people, depending on their regional dialect, may hypercorrect their vowels and pronounce certain words in an unusual way. This is part of a complete episode.
Who is Boo-Boo the Fool? A listener wonders if this African-American character has any relation the Puerto Rican fool, Juan Bobo. Martha draws a connection to the Spanish term bobo, meaning “fool,” and its Latin root balbus, meaning...
south to south adj.—Gloss: arbitrary jargon used at the World Bank to indicate migration from one poor country to another. “South to north” indicates migration from a poor country to a rich one. «There are 74 million “south to...