A listener noticed fugacious on a sign at the Orchid House at the San Diego Zoo, where the botanical label refers to flowers that last only briefly, sometimes just a day. The adjective also describes anything passing quickly, including a sudden...
Beware of linguistic false friends, also known as false cognates. You wouldn’t want to say you’re feeling embarazada in Spanish, unless you want to say you’re pregnant. And don’t order the tuna in Spain unless you want to...
David, a lawyer from Cape Cod, Massachusetts, subscribes to the Lexis Legal News Brief, and wonders about the connection between lex meaning “law,” and the lex which refers to “words.” While lexis refers to the total stock of...
A few weeks ago, a listener was looking for a term to describe the copy of The Emperor’s New Clothes that he’d read many times as a child. In this picture book, the naughty bits were always cleverly covered up. Thinking he wanted a synonym for “fig...
The Google Books Corpus from Mark Davies at Brigham Young University tags words in Google Books with their parts of speech, so you can search how words really combine. For example, suitcase often follows battered, making battered suitcase a cliché...
Martha and Grant discuss why some puns work and others don’t. Martha recommends John Pollack’s observation in The Pun Also Rises describing how “for a split second, puns manage to hold open the elevator doors of language and...