We have books for language-lovers and recommendations for history buffs. • How did the word boondoggle come to denote a wasteful project? The answer involves the Boy Scouts, a baby, a craft project, and a city council meeting. • Instead of reversing...
Hannah from Shreveport, Louisiana, is curious about Cooter Brown, a name she’s often heard applied to someone behaving mischievously. Cooter Brown shows up in several expressions, including drunk as Cooter Brown, high as Cooter Brown, and fast...
Quiz Guy John Chaneski has a take-off word quiz. All the answers to this quiz involve removing the letter E from a word to form another word. For example, if the clue is “The man at the piano played the black keys with skinny, knobby...
A young woman wants a family-friendly way to describe a statement that’s fraudulent or bogus, but all the words she can think of sound old-fashioned. Is there a better term than malarkey, poppycock, or rubbish? Also, listeners step up to help...
Tunket is a euphemism for “hell,” as in, “Where in tunket did I put my car keys?” No one knows its origin or where your keys are. This is part of a complete episode.
A recent article in The New Yorker magazine about the late writer David Foster Wallace has Martha musing about Wallace’s stem-winding sentences, and the word stem-winder.