Alex in Amarillo, Texas, says he often hears speakers dropping the sound of the first r in the word forward, sounding like foward or fuhward. It’s what linguists call dissimilation, where, when duplicate consonants are not far apart in a single...
Bianca in San Diego, California, has heard family theories tying far out to surfers offshore, the Beach Boys, or 1960s psychedelia. The evidence points instead to jazz slang: by the 1920s, musicians and fans were using out of this world for music...
Postalgia is a possible new coinage for the sorrowful, time-shifted awareness Alice in Tampa describes when she hears an old podcast interview with someone who has since died, while knowing the speaker had no idea what was coming. Words like...
Yeah, no often does two jobs in conversation: yeah acknowledges that something was heard or partly accepted, while no disagrees with the substance. Mark in York, Pennsylvania, hears it mainly in speech, a pattern also noted in varieties of English...
Do you still take your leftovers in a doggy bag? The term used to refer to a bone or shank the chef would give a guest to take home to their dog. Nowadays, there’s no shame in keeping your leftovers, and that parcel goes by other names, like...