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. The...
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 the icy moon at 64,000...
bull rope n.— «He said for years that he was at the funeral and that he photographed the boy. “I had a telephoto lens on my camera, and we were across the street behind what we called the ‘bull rope,’ that we had to stay there,” he said in an...