The creepy, dystopian, and weirdly wonderful TV series Severance offers a teachable moment in the form of a false etymology in a flaky self-help book by one of the characters. The book suggests that the word camaraderie derives from the type of a...
This week, a special treat: NPR Puzzlemaster Will Shortz stops by with a quiz about slang and anagrams.
What’s the right way to pronounce gyros? Have you ever heard of feeling poozley? Called something great a blinger? Use the expression one-off to mean a “one-time thing”?
An ophthalmologist in Arcata, California, is puzzled by the way some of his older patients refer to a single lens. Several of them call it a len, not a lens. This gives the hosts a chance to focus on what linguists call back-formations. This is part...
electro-wetting n.— «In other application fields, so-called liquid lenses have been known for some time. In these, the application of electrical voltages causes a shape change of the liquid lens and therefore a change in its focal length...
skeet-shooting n.— «A special technique, known as “skeet-shooting,” was developed by controllers to cancel out the high speed of the moon relative to Cassini and also help obtain ultra-sharp views as the spacecraft sped past...