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.
The saying “to boot” comes from an Old English word bot, meaning “advantage” or “remedy.” It’s related to the contemporary English words better and best, so if something’s “to boot,”...
The word fulsome has undergone some real semantic changes over the years. It used to mean “excessive, overly full” in a negative way, but it’s come to have positive connotations for some, who think it means “copious” or...
“Catch my fade,” meaning, “I’m going to beat you up,” takes from a 100-year-old usage of fade. To fade someone meant to punish, beat, or conquer another. This is part of a complete episode.
