Andrew from Annandale, Virginia, asks about the origin of the word boondoggle. Why does it mean a wasteful project or plain old busywork, but also denotes a kind of leathercraft lanyard made at camp? This is part of a complete episode.
What’s the linguistic connection between pretend and pretension or pretentious? They all go back the Latin praetendere, meaning to put something forward. This is part of a complete episode.
Although in English we have the terms orphan, widow, and widower, our language lacks a one-word term that means “bereaved parent.” A few other languages have a word for this, including Hebrew sh’khol and Sanskrit vilomah. This is...
A Dallas, Texas, caller says his girlfriend from a rural part of his state has an unusual way of pronouncing certain words. Email sounds like EE-mill, toenail like TOW-nell, and tell-tale like TELL-tell. These sounds are the result of a well-known...
Awesome and awful may have the same root, but they’ve evolved opposite meanings. Awful goes back more than a thousand years, when it originally meant “full of awe” and later “causing dread.” Awesome showed up later and...
Snarky refers to someone or something “irritable,” “sharply critical,” or “ill-tempered.” It goes back to a 19th-century word meaning “to snort.” This is part of a complete episode.