Dude! We’re used to hearing the word “dude” applied to guys. But increasingly, young women use the word “dude” to address each other. Grant and Martha talk about linguistic research about the meaning and uses of...
Polyglots sometimes experience faulty language selection, accidentally reaching for words from a language different from the one they’re speaking. Listener Phoebe Liu of Seattle grew up speaking Chinese, then learned English, and studied...
How do you pronounce chicanery? Do you soften the a, as in Chicano? No! This term, meaning “trickery” or “disturbance of the peace,” is etymologically unrelated to Chicano. It is, however, a linguistic relative of the name of...
Where’d we get a word like skyscraper? Martha explains the image literally refers to scraping the sky, but first applied to the topmost sail on a ship, and later to tall horses, and high fly balls in baseball. There are similar ideas in other...
Howdy, all -- Lots of new episodes heading your way, starting this weekend! Meanwhile, our most recent broadcast features idiosyncratic Scrabble rules, 800-lb. gorillas, "tickety-boo," the slang term "legit," and...
Should you use enamored of or enamored with? Grant explains that while North Americans use both, enamored of is the more common of the two. In Great Britain, it’s enamored of, a construction similar to those in several Romance languages...